George Soros: Global Bogeyman, Reluctant Philanthropist, and the Last Cosmopolitan Standing
George Soros: The Last Cosmopolitan Villain Standing
By “Dave’s Foreign Desk,” somewhere between Budapest and a hedge fund
If you drew a Venn diagram containing every populist firebrand from Brasília to Belgrade, the only common overlap bigger than “blame the IMF” is “blame George Soros.” The 93-year-old philanthropist has achieved the rare distinction of being denounced simultaneously by Viktor Orbán as a “globalist puppet-master,” by Donald Trump as the financier of “caravans,” and by Xi Jinping’s state media as the secret sponsor of Hong Kong’s umbrella-wielding youth. When three continents’ worth of autocrats synchronize their talking points, you know either the apocalypse is nigh or the buffet at Davos was really that bad.
Yet step outside the fever swamps and Soros is less an evil genius than a walking Rorschach test: to Western liberals he is the sugar-daddy of civil society; to emerging-market finance ministers he is the man who once “broke the Bank of England” and, by extension, their own currencies’ backs; to the Kremlin he is—depending on the week—either a Nazi collaborator or a Zionist conspirator, a contradiction that doesn’t appear to trouble the same propaganda mill that brought you “Ukraine is run by gay super-soldiers.”
The numbers, stripped of hysteria, are almost disappointingly mundane. The Open Society Foundations (OSF) have dispensed roughly $18 billion since 1984—think of it as three Elon Musk vanity purchases, or half a FIFA World Cup in graft. The cash has flowed to everyone from Roma schoolchildren in Slovakia to paralegals documenting war crimes in South Sudan. OSF even funded the translation of Hannah Arendt into Kurdish, proving you can fight ISIS with footnotes.
But scale is precisely what makes Soros loom so large in our current paranoiac age. In a world where nation-states outsource everything from sewage systems to surveillance tech, the sight of a private citizen building courtrooms instead of rockets feels positively medieval—like a Medici with better tax lawyers. The backlash is therefore not about what Soros funds (which is often small beer) but about who still believes in the quaint notion that borders should be porous enough for ideas, if not for people.
Europe offers the clekest case study. When Orbán erected billboards showing Soros as the octopus strangling Hungary, Brussels issued a strongly worded press release and then quietly renewed the Union’s structural funds to Budapest. Nothing says “never again” like continued agricultural subsidies. Meanwhile, Polish nationalists burn Soros in effigy on Constitution Day, apparently convinced that a Jewish nonagenarian is the gravest threat to Catholic Poland since the last Teutonic Knight called it quits.
Across the Atlantic, Soros has become the go-to explanation for every American electoral hiccup. Lose a sheriff’s race in rural Oregon? Soros cash. City council introduces bike lanes? Definitely Soros. It’s a conspiracy theory so elastic it could moonlight as shapewear. The irony, of course, is that U.S. campaign finance law now allows anonymous super-PACs to outspend OSF 50-to-1, but those donors lack a face and a thick Hungarian accent, so the pitchforks stay in the garage.
Then there’s the Global South, where Soros the currency speculator still haunts finance ministries like Banquo’s ghost. In 1992 he shorted sterling and made a billion dollars in a day; in 1997 he warned that Asian “crony capitalism” would implode and was promptly blamed for making it happen. Today, Jakarta’s new generation of fintech bros wear “Soros Was Right” T-shirts ironically, which passes for progress in the dialectics of late capitalism.
What does it all mean? Simply that Soros has become the final cosmopolitan of our age, a walking straw-man for every anxiety globalization produces but refuses to solve. When supply chains snap and pandemics hop borders, it’s oddly comforting to blame a single 93-year-old rather than admit the system itself is held together with Zoom calls and wishful thinking. The tragedy is that the OSF’s actual work—funding boring stuff like forensic accountants and election monitors—has never been more necessary, yet never more easily caricatured as sedition with a side of quinoa.
In the end, Soros will die, the conspiracy theories will migrate to the next billionaire with a conscience, and historians will note that the late 20th century produced precisely one financier who preferred courthouses to casinos. By then, of course, we’ll have larger villains to fry—assuming the planet hasn’t already done it for us.
