The Hungarian-born American investor and financier George Soros was one of the main characters in a book I recently wrote with Todd Pittinsky, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy.
We defined lust as a “psychological drive that produces intense wanting, even desperately needing to obtain an object or to secure a circumstance. When the object has been obtained, or the circumstance secured, there is relief, but only briefly, temporarily.” Lust is, in other words, like an addiction, it is never ending. Leaders who lust for legacy specifically “long, effectively lifelong, to leave an imprint that is permanent.”
Which has been the case with George Soros. For whatever combination of subjective (personal/psychological) and objective (contextual/situational) reasons, all his adult life he has wanted, more than anything else, to leave his mark on history. First, European history and politics, second American history and politics. To this end he has funneled vast amounts of his vast fortune to various liberal causes, abroad and more recently, at home.
Soros is a Jew who as a boy barely escaped the Nazis. So it was especially sad to see right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban target Soros less even for his liberal ideas than for his being a Jew. In his 2018 campaign for reelection Orban campaigned as if Soros was his opponent. Orban promoted the “anti-Semitic imagery of powerful Jewish financiers scheming to control the world,” and had “thousands of posters” plastered all over Budapest picturing a ”grinning Soros with the slogan, ‘Let’s not allow Soros to have the last laugh.’” *
For an American though it is one thing to see Soros targeted in Hungary for being a Jew. It is quite another to see him targeted in the United States for being a Jew! The first is bad, the second is worse. Has my beloved country come to this? Well, yes. It has.
In the last two days:
- We learned that the 18-year-old arrested for the mass shooting in Buffalo posted a long manifesto in which, among other things, he attacked “elitists and globalists,” spewed virulent anti-Semitism, and singled out Soros for his “funding of the radical left.”
- We learned that the Republican candidate for secretary of state in Minnesota graphically depicted (in a video) the Jewish Democratic incumbent, along with a Jewish elections lawyer, as puppets on strings manipulated by, you guessed it, again a grinning George Soros.
At age 91 Soros is toward the end of his long life, a life generally very well lived. He has been endlessly passionate about making the world a better place, and endlessly generous in his willingness to put his money where his mouth is. In the main, Soros has been a good leader, not a bad one. He does not deserve to be stigmatized, victimized, by that old trope, the terminally greedy, endlessly money-hungry Jew. But, then, no one does.
My beloved country? Cry, My Beloved Country.
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*Leaders Who Lust, p. 202.