The Soros Noise Machine

OVER THE April 16/17 weekend according to The Hill George Soros led his progressive billionaire friends in an important strategy meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona. The idea was to lay out the strategy for funding a progressive policy machine to go head-to-head with the notorious Right Wing Noise Machine, and develop progressive policy ideas, initiatives, and leadership schools just like the conservative policy shops.

Should conservatives be afraid, or very afraid? Or, like The American Thinker, just irritated?

George Soros first got involved in politics back in the 1990s when he built foundations in Eastern Europe and Russia to push his vision of a post communist society. He was associated with Jeffrey Sachs and his less-than-stellar shock therapy for Poland and Russia. But Soros did not seem to be interested in helping built a bourgeois society from the tribal ruins of communism. He wanted the peoples of the old Soviet Empire to vault in one leap to a post-modern, post-authoritarian, post-religious world, the world dreamed about by our own American liberal friends.

The Open Society Institutes and foundations that Soros funds worldwide are committed not so much to economic openness as economic shock therapy and a left-wing social agenda. He supports abortion in Eastern Europe, needle exchange programs for drug users, and gay activism worldwide, but particularly in Eastern Europe, according to “George Soros, Postmodern Villain” by Srdja Trifkovic in Chronicles. In education, Soros foundations have promoted a move from “authoritarian” models to more progressive education bases on “partnership” between teachers and students. Soros is also eager to combat racism in Eastern Europe, and has developed a suite of western style anti-discrimination programs to combat victimization of Romani, the gypsies.

What Soros seems to want, according to Trifkovic, is to “destroy the remaining bastions of the family, sovereign nationhood, and Christian Faith east of the Trieste-Stettin line.” (West of the old Iron Curtain, he feels, things are “going his way anyway.”) In other words, from the perspective of conservatives, he is attempting to destroy the very institutions that did the heavy lifting in moving Western Europe from the old feudal, clannish world to the Anglospheric ideal of self-government under law. He has bought into the left-wing view that family, nation, and Christianity are oppressions and superstitions blocking the breakout into the new age of universal creativity and community.

It is entirely appropriate, therefore, that he played a prominent role in the campaign to defeat President Bush in 2004, “a matter of life and death.” If he thinks that the way to his Open Society is through abortion, needle exchange, and gay activism, then he and the Democratic Party are a match made in non-judgmental heaven.

As Soros and the Democrats try to rush the American people towards their progressive nirvana, they might wonder whether their plans will really deliver the goods. There are those that judge their bossy, top-down social transformation to be implementing social regression rather than social advance. They do not see a creative world community but self-governing citizens reduced to the status of Mark Steyn’s “wrinkled teenagers” who get to decide what cars and DVDs they get to buy, but in the important areas of life: education and work, life and death, are governed by a progressive one-size-fits-all.

Maybe they will find that the American people just don’t want to listen to their message. The American people were receptive to the progressive message in the depths of the Great Depression, when they were scared out of their wits by an economy in free fall, and they responded a generation later in the heights of 1960s drug-induced ecstasy. But people free from fear amy prefer self-government to dependency and subjection. Americans just may not want to listen to the Soros Noise Machine.

Self-government is a concept that presumes that people have a right to control their lives, to muddle along in their little platoons without listening overmuch to resplendent generals, brilliant general staff officers, and international currency speculators. Self-government means an elite willing to let people create their own society in their own way, one that can resist the temptation to bulldoze people around like social landfill.

When Pope Gregory’s man went to England to bring Christianity to the heathen Anglo-Saxons in 597 he found a land ruled by kings that earned their crowns with wars of plunder and systems of dependency and clientage. Perhaps in 2097 a future African pope will be moved to send missionaries to a post-Soros Europe to rescue its elites from their cult of predatory sexuality and its masses from their dependency on the welfare state. Perhaps he will succeed in converting them once more to the love of God and the virtue of self-government.

We can only hope that he will not need to send his missionaries to a post-Soros America.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

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