Values conservatives once claimed to believe in
Nick Cohen looks at the hatred of the nationalist right for George Soros.
During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump ruled that Americans protesting against him were “professional” agitators. Roger Stone, who has worked for the filthy wing of the right since Nixon’s day, followed up by announcing he had discovered the agitators were “paid for” by none other than Soros.
Now it is commonplace for right-wing Americans to say that only Soros’s corrupt influence can explain why their fellow citizens take to the streets. A typically sly report in the Washington Times said one in three Trump voters believed Soros paid protesters to join the women’s march on Trump’s inauguration day.
One in three Trump voters believe a panoply of absurd things. Most of them appear to believe it’s possible to live in a small Appalachian town and have a wide range of job opportunities, in defiance of the obvious fact that small towns by definition don’t have a wide range of job opportunities, because they’re small towns. But hey, this is Murrika, people can believe whatever they like, and you’re not allowed to tell them they’re wrong.
It’s not just Putin who goes for Soros. Macedonia’s former autocratic prime minister, Nikola Gruevski, has called for a “de-Sorosisation” of society, as the country’s right uses every trick it can think of, including the threat of street violence by “patriotic associations”, to stop the opposition taking power.
In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s self-proclaimed illiberal democracy is threatening the Soros-funded Central European University. Its president, the former Canadian Liberal party leader and former Observer columnist Michael Ignatieff, is bewildered. He protests that he is running a university, not an opposition political party that might take Orbán’s power away.
I could go on. Romania’s socialist elite imitates Trump and claims Soros pays citizens to take to the streets to demonstrate against corruption. The supposedly reputable financial analysts at Zero Hedge claim Soros “singlehandedly created the European refugee crisis”. Steve Bannon’s Breitbart says Soros’s funding of Black Lives Matter was part of an agenda to swing the US presidential election. The European far right claims he is trying to destroy Christian white Europe by importing Muslim refugees.
Why all this? Nationalism, aka xenophobia.
Billionaires shouldn’t be able to give money to politicians, Nick says, but the demonization of Soros isn’t about that.
Soros is the recipient of a hatred far beyond normal partisan rancour. The satanic influence attributed to the man who escaped the Holocaust as a child and resolved after the fall of the Berlin Wall to use his wealth to stop xenophobia returning to Europe isn’t normal. Not remotely so. It is one of the most striking signs of the crisis in conservatism, which is threatening free societies across what we used to call “the west”.
Most of Soros’s charitable efforts are not devoted to funding politicians, but values conservatives once claimed to believe in: transparency, free elections, free speech and a free press. Instead of upholding them, the dominant faction on the right has turned to a nationalism that treats opposition as treason. To learn about its antecedents, listen to the antisemitic echoes of the Nazi and communist eras in the vilification of Soros. They are so loud they deafen.
Orbán says he is against “the globalists and liberals, the power brokers sitting in their palaces with ivory towers” and “the swarm of media locusts”. Behind them all stands the “transnational empire of George Soros, with its international heavy artillery and huge sums of money”. March against Orbán in Budapest or Trump in Washington, DC, and you are a hireling of Soros’s cosmopolitan conspiracy.
Nope; just a cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitanism is a good thing, and xenophobia is a bad one.
How are you planning to spend your Soros bucks, Ophelia? ;-)
Looks like they’ve finally found their Emmanuel Goldstein
I’m fascinated by this particular type of conspiracy theory: the one that doesn’t even make sense.
The claim is that those hundreds of thousands of protestors don’t genuinely oppose Donald Trump, they are only there because George Soros paid them to be there.
Yet there is no concrete evidence of this. Not a single one of those hundreds of thousands has come forward with a check, wire transfer record, secret video of someone handing them Soros cash. Not one, even though conservative news organizations would pay dearly for such evidence. James O’Keefe and his other clownish emulators, who routinely show up at Planned Parenthood clinics to try to catch an employee saying something embarrassing, somehow can’t infiltrate an operation that consists of hundreds of thousands of people who — BY DEFINITION — have no particular loyalty to the cause or incentive to cover it up.
“Cosmopolitan” is (again, or always) a code for “Jewish”.
It is really “just” the opposite of nationalistic. Hence the rage.
I’d totally join a cosmopolitan conspiracy. We could conspire to learn new languages, conspire to hang with people who grew up tens of thousands of kilometres from where we did, conspire to share food that seems occasionally bizarre and unnerving, conspire to share music and literature from places and times and in languages wildly remote, conspire to get along and learn from each other…
All very sinister. Fear us. This very hour we’re meeting in secret (it’s a conspiracy, so this is mandatory, but cosmopolitan, so there are many passwords), and arguing in twelve languages where to get the best fair trade coffee.
Så, var köper du ditt kaffe? ;-)
Nel Бриджьед, au Glebe.
:D
…I feel a bit like I’ve failed at cosmopolitanism; prolly kinda a parochial choice, that. Still, that’s what makes these meetings fun. And, still, highly recommended ;)
I think that it’s projection. I think that many right-wingers are sensitive about being considered to be in the pay of the economic elite. Especially oligarchs like Charles and David Koch, Sheldon Adelson, and Robert Mercer.
So they are reduced to claiming that liberals are in the pay of oligarchs, and the only one they can think of is George Soros.