The Cult of Soros

HAS THE Democratic Party become a cult? And is leftwing billionaire George Soros its guru? The chorus of hosannas with which leftwing bloggers now greet Mr. Soros’ silliest utterances — and the faithfulness with which Democratic leaders repeat them — suggests that the answer to both questions is yes.

Take the current Democratic mantra that, if there are terrorists in the world, George Bush has created them. This is a familiar Soros-ism. As he has done many times before, Soros decried Bush’s characterization of the current global conflict as a “war on terror” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “A Self-Defeating War” (8/15). According to Soros “a misleading figure of speech applied literally has unleashed a real war fought on several fronts — Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia — a war that has killed thousands of innocent civilians and enraged millions around the world….we can escape it only if we Americans repudiate the war on terror as a false metaphor.”

In normal times and coming from an ordinary mortal, these would be regarded as the comments of a crackpot. After all, the Islamic jihad was on the march — and killing Americans — for twenty years before George Bush employed the metaphor. Back in 1979, the streets of Teheran were already filled with a million frenzied Muslims chanting “Death to America,” and the 9/11 attacks were themselves hardly in response to anything that the American president had said.

But because this judgment is the considered wisdom of a megalomaniac billionaire whose network controls the purse strings of the Democratic Party, this is now the foreign policy of the liberal opposition. When George Soros speaks, the left listens.

In a review of Soros’ new book The Age of Fallibility, blogger Jane Hamsher hails him as a latter-day Socrates. Hamsher is the blogger who created a minor scandal by posting a doctored photograph of Joseph Lieberman in blackface on the Huffington Post website. She writes, “Challenging a ‘false metaphor’ such as the ‘war on terror’ is so threatening to everything the power structure of the Bush administration has been erected upon that to do so will certainly draw down the full force of the right-wing bullies… Mr. Soros has done the heavy lifting and dragged the topic into the national debate…”

Blogger Matt Stoller of MyDD concurs. “[This is] the first time a major figure took on the framework of the war on terror, and called it a false metaphor. I think he’s right… The war on terror just doesn’t exist any more than a child’s imaginary friend exists.”

Like Hamsher, Matt Stoller was a leading player in the anti-Lieberman blogswarm. A long-time Democrat operative, Stoller formerly ran the Corzine Connection blog for Jon Corzine’s gubernatorial campaign in New Jersey. Today Stoller co-directs BlogPAC, a political action committee for leftist bloggers founded by Markos Moulitsas Zuñiga of Daily Kos.

Their connection to the anti-Lieberman campaign is, as the Marxists like to say, no accident. The Lieberman ouster — and Soros’s role in it — signify the emergence of a new phenomenon in America’s political life: the Shadow Party.

During the 2004 election cycle, Soros put together a network of organizations through which he gained effective control of the Democratic Party’s campaign apparatus — and thus of the Democratic Party itself — in a silent coup whose ramifications are still unfolding.

Soros’s coup was ten years in the making. Since 1994, he had worked with a network of leftwing foundations to fund a $140-million-dollar lobbying drive in favor of “campaign finance reform.” The campaign succeeded in passing the McCain-Feingold Act, which, by outlawing “soft-money” donations, in effect de-funded the Democratic Party. As a result of the Act, the Democratic Party could no longer collect the multi-million-dollar donations from labor unions which were its lifeblood.

Soros stepped in with the Shadow Party to collect the donations instead.

Having driven the Democratic Party to the brink of bankruptcy, Soros then offered to save it. In effect, he privatized the Party, by setting up a network of privately-owned, non-profit groups which would raise the big campaign contributions the Party was now forbidden to raise itself.

In a new book, which describes Soros’s achievement, we call this network the Shadow Party, because it acts as a mirror image or shadow of the real Democratic Party. During the 2004 election cycle, the Shadow Party raised more than $300 million for the Democrat cause — but spent the money itself. This allowed it to shape the politics of the Democratic campaign and control the party’s future. Joe Lieberman now understands what that means.

Cross-posted from FrontPageMagazine.com 08.25.06