OPEN SORES:

The Soros Threat (James K. Glassman, January/February 2004, American Enterprise)

In early November, Soros and a partner donated $5 million to the liberal, anti-Bush MoveOn.org. He also gave $10 million to a similar organization, America Coming Together, which aims to mobilize voters in 17 battleground states. And he has promised $3 million to the Center for American Progress, a new Democratic think tank started by former Clinton aide John Podesta.

Soros has always fancied himself an intellectual as well as a moneymaker, and he wants desperately to be taken seriously. His first attempt came in 1997 with a weird, discursive article in the Atlantic Monthly called "The Capitalist Threat." He argued that "the spread of market values into all areas of life" is now the main threat to "open and democratic society."

The man-bites-dog nature of the anticapitalist article from the capitalist mogul brought it attention, but it was so appallingly stupid that it provoked the ire of even the typically mild-mannered, centrist journalist Robert Samuelson of Newsweek. He called Soros "a crackpot" and his essay "gibberish" akin to the "Unabomber's manifesto in its sweeping, unsupported, and disconnected generalizations."

Now Soros is back in the Atlantic with a piece called "The Bubble of American Supremacy." Here the problem is not so much incoherence as hysteria: "The Bush administration proceeded to exploit the terrorist attack for its own purposes," he writes of the 9/11 terrorist murder of innocents. "It fostered the fear that has gripped the country…and it used the war on terrorism to execute an agenda of American supremacy."

What does Soros propose? Not military action, but "preventive action of a constructive and affirmative nature. Increased foreign aid or better or fairer trade rules," and, of course, "international cooperation."

All of this would be harmless if Soros didn't have billions to spend and the intention to manipulate our politics with them. In the past, it was enough for him to lavish money on leftish causes like drug legalization through the Soros Foundations Network. But a more strident, ideological tone has now become evident.

It does at least provide some clarity when the Democrats hop in bed with someone who is openly opposed to capitalism and American supremacy.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 19, 2003 9:49 AM