Unlike Gates, whose philanthropy focuses mostly on ameliorative projects such as eradicating malaria, Soros truly wants to transform national and international politics and society. Whether or not his vision can survive the wave of antisemitic, Islamophobic and xenophobic rightwing nationalism ascendant in the US and Europe remains to be seen. What is certain is that Soros will spend the remainder of his life attempting to make sure it does. [...]
But it was more than a lack of political will that constrained the west during this moment. In the era of “shock therapy”, western capital did flock to eastern Europe – but this capital was invested mostly in private industry, as opposed to democratic institutions or grassroots community-building, which helped the kleptocrats and anti-democrats seize and maintain power. Soros had identified a key problem but was unable to appreciate how the very logic of capitalism, which stressed profit above all, would necessarily undermine his democratic project. He remained too wedded to the system he had conquered. [...]
Soros argued that the history of the post-cold war world, as well as his personal experiences as one of international finance’s most successful traders, demonstrated that unregulated global capitalism undermined open society in three distinct ways. First, because capital could move anywhere to avoid taxation, western nations were deprived of the finances they needed to provide citizens with public goods. Second, because international lenders were not subject to much regulation, they often engaged in “unsound lending practices” that threatened financial stability. Finally, because these realities increased domestic and international inequality, Soros feared they would encourage people to commit unspecified “acts of desperation” that could damage the global system’s viability. [...]
The George W Bush administration’s militarist response to the attacks of September 11 compelled Soros to shift his attention from economics to politics. Everything about the Bush administration’s ideology was anathema to Soros. As Soros declared in his 2004 The Bubble of American Supremacy, Bush and his coterie embraced “a crude form of social Darwinism” that assumed that “life is a struggle for survival, and we must rely mainly on the use of force to survive”. Whereas before September 11, “the excesses of [this] false ideology were kept within bounds by the normal functioning of our democracy”, after it Bush “deliberately fostered the fear that has gripped the country” to silence opposition and win support for a counterproductive policy of militaristic unilateralism. To Soros, assertions such as “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” eerily echoed the rhetoric of the Nazis and Soviets, which he hoped to have left behind in Europe. Soros worried, wisely, that Bush would lead the nation into “a permanent state of war” characterised by foreign intervention and domestic oppression. The president was thus not only a threat to world peace, but also to the very idea of open society. [...]
Bush’s victory convinced Soros that the US would survive as an open society only if Americans began to acknowledge “that the truth matters”; otherwise, they would continue to support the war on terror and its concomitant horrors. How Soros could change American minds, though, remained unclear.
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