The Conservative Case for George Soros

Not so strange bedfellows after all.

Karl Marx described the disintegrative effects of capitalism in one vivid phrase: “All that is solid melts into air.” 

Before they became brainless boosters for donors, conservative intellectuals, like the late Canadian Tory philosopher George Grant, agreed with Marx on this point. A world centered on consumption and production cannot sustain intangible, unquantifiable, “permanent things”; it can only commodify and degrade and dispel them.

“When everything is made relative to profit-making, all traditions of virtue are dissolved, including that aspect of virtue known as love of country,” Grant wrote. “That is why liberalism is the perfect ideology for capitalism.” Marx would agree. But where he saw a step toward the disillusionment that would spark revolution, Grant saw a crime against man.

In our time, hedge fund billionaire and bête noire of nationalists George Soros has more in common with Marx than Grant. The two share a very similar vision of an “open society” in contrast to Grant’s “love of country”—the universal versus the particular. And though its representatives occasionally condemn him by name, conservative orthodoxy is more or less in agreement with Soros on many important points.