Click for Main Weblog

   
The Weblog at The View from the Core - Wed. 03/10/04 07:19:35 AM
   
   

A Look at One of the World's Great Hypocrites

Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode CCXIX

The filthy-beyond-filthy rich anti-capitalist capitalist. (Emphasis and quoted ellipses and brackets in original.)

+ + + + +

"I have made rejection of the Bush doctrine the central project of my life," announced George Soros in January. "I am determined to do what I can," he added, to assure that President Bush is not re-elected.

Coming from someone else, such statements might be written off as delusional, but Mr. Soros is a man with a record of achieving outsized goals. A financier who began with a stake of a few thousand dollars, he traded and speculated his way to a fortune of many billions, making him one of the world's richest men. Then he turned to philanthropy, an enterprise he undertook with so much largesse and so much panache that he quickly won a place for himself alongside the likes of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller in the pantheon of legendary donors.

Mr. Soros has declared his intent to devote similar energy and single-mindedness to his new "project." Campaign-finance regulations may place stringent limits on donations to candidates — and now, with the McCain-Feingold law, to political parties as well — but they still allow unlimited donations to so-called independent political committees (though the Federal Election Commission is mulling new regulations on these groups, also known as 527s). According to reports last November, Mr. Soros had already pledged $18 million to three liberal anti-Bush groups of this kind, announcing that "If necessary, I would give more." As he sees it, "America, under Bush, is a danger to the world. And I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is."

This impassioned crusade may come as a surprise to some. Mr. Soros's fame rests not on his political commitments, after all, but on his achievements as "the world's greatest money manager" (a title bestowed on him by Institutional Investor magazine) and as the open-handed benefactor of the nations of the former Soviet bloc. As it turns out, however, there are other sides to the eccentric figure who has now decided to make his formidable presence felt in our electoral politics....

At some point in the late 1990s, after years of devoting himself to the former Communist world, Mr. Soros decided that his attention was required in America. His first major venture into domestic issues was in support of the campaign to decriminalize drugs. He credits the poet Allen Ginsberg, an apostle of sexual and chemical liberation whom he befriended in the 1980s, with having alerted him to the injustice of American drug laws. Aryeh Neier, president of the Open Society Institute, and a man sometimes described as Mr. Soros's "secretary of state," has explained the allegedly malicious intent behind our current drug laws in these loaded terms: "Criminalization is a strategy that buys into the notion that if you lock up enough young black males — for whatever reason — you will promote public safety." In line with such thinking, Mr. Soros has not only made possible various state ballot initiatives to legalize "medical" marijuana, but he has advocated such "reforms" as "making heroin and certain other illicit drugs available on prescription to registered drug addicts."

No less outré have been Mr. Soros's many pronouncements since the late 1990's on the state of the American and global economies. "Capitalism is coming apart at the seams," he declared at the time of the Asian financial debacle. Decrying the rise of what he called "laissez-faire ideology," Mr. Soros painted a picture at once apocalyptic and unoriginal:

There has been an ongoing conflict between market values and other, more traditional value systems.... As the market mechanism has extended its sway, the fiction that people act on the basis of a given set of nonmarket values has become progressively more difficult to maintain. Advertising, marketing, even packaging aim at shaping people's preferences rather than, as laissez-faire theory holds, merely responding to them. Unsure of what they stand for, people increasingly rely on money as the criterion of value.... The cult of success has replaced a belief in principles. Society has lost its anchor.

And what remedies did Mr. Soros suggest? As a first step, the creation of an international central bank; in the long run, nothing less than a transformation of how the world itself is governed. "To stabilize and regulate a truly global economy," he wrote, "we need some global system of political decision-making." Though it was neither "feasible nor desirable" to "abolish the existence of states," Mr. Soros conceded, nevertheless "the sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international law and international institutions."

Two years later, with Asia's woes abating rather than spreading as he had forecast they would, Soros admitted to having "some egg on my face." But even as he acknowledged the error of his diagnosis, he clung fast to his far-reaching prescription. A world of globalized economics, he insisted, required something akin to globalized government.

Given this set of predilections, it is not hard to see how Soros would have been driven to paroxysms of frustration by the notoriously "unilateralist" Bush administration and the war in Iraq. As he explains in his new book, "The Bubble of American Supremacy," the United States has now fallen into "the hands of a group of extremists" whom he identifies as "neoconservatives" or "social Darwinists" and who espouse an "ideology of American supremacy." The only element missing from the "master plan" they hatched well before arriving in office in 2001 was a suitable pretext for action. For them, according to Mr. Soros, the attacks of 9/11 were therefore a godsend. "Communism used to serve as the enemy; now terrorism can fill the role."

As an alternative to the arrogance of American supremacy secured by means of military power, Mr. Soros proposes the "Soros doctrine." Through the good agency of the United Nations and our own foreign-aid efforts, he writes, we need to answer our enemies not with force of arms but with "preventive action of a constructive nature." ....

Cold as he is toward the Jewish people, Mr. Soros is not much warmer toward his adopted country. "I had never quite become an American," he once said. Now he complains that today's America "is not the America I chose as my home," as if, by turning conservative and electing George W. Bush as President, the country has failed to live up to him.

The egotism of the remark is revealing. Mr. Soros has admitted to having "carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood, which I felt I had to control, otherwise they might get me in trouble." Having made his mark, he now seems to give them free rein. He told one interviewer that he had "godlike, messianic ideas," and another that he sometimes thought of himself as "superhuman." To still a third he explained that his "goal is to become the conscience of the world."

This self-imagined messiah has now come to save the world from the America of George W. Bush and its war against terrorism. He is convinced that this is an unjustified war, contrived in response to events (the attacks of 9/11) that "should have been treated as crimes against humanity... requir[ing] police work, not military action." To say the least, it is a strange idea, and an even stranger role, for one who owes not only his immense fortune but also his freedom and even his life to America, and in particular to its willingness to confront those who have committed crimes against humanity with enough military force to defeat and stop them.

Mr. Muravchik is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of "Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism." This article appears in the March issue of Commentary.

+ + + + +

See also George Soros, Call Your Office.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 03/10/04 07:19:35 AM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode.

   

The Blog from the Core © 2002-2008 E. L. Core. All rights reserved.