Kelly McParland: A quick inventory of the billionaires running U.S. politics

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In the bitter, vitriolic, hyper-partisan atmosphere that is consuming U.S. politics, George Soros has been accorded the role of the good billionaire by those who approve of his generous funding for the causes he supports.

He spends heavily on his beliefs, and has for years, both in the U.S. and Europe, where he was born 88 years ago. His Open Society Foundations has given away $14 billion in grants over the decades to causes covering the gamut of “progressive” ideals. He says he’s quietly shifted $18 billion to its kitty in recent years. The Atlantic magazine identified him as “the most generous financial supporter of pro-democracy organizations around the world.”

He’s paid a heavy price for his generosity, becoming a lightning rod for droves of conspiracy theorists who accuse him of everything from paying women to lodge fake abuse claims against right-wingers, to acting as the brains behind Colin Kaepernick’s NFL protest. One internet crusade accused him of seeking to “bring down the United States” by funding black hate groups. His attackers have been energized anew by the nomination of Supreme Court justice Brent Kavanaugh, and the killing of 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

As a Jew, Soros attracts criticism that can slide easily towards anti-Semitism. A guest on the Lou Dobbs show on Fox Business News claimed the migrant caravan heading towards the U.S. border through Mexico was funded by the “Soros-occupied State Department,” for which he was banned from future appearances on the show. Soros was also among recipients of the pipe bombs sent to a group of high-profile Democrats and left-wingers, allegedly by a Florida-based fanatic.

Many of his campaigns put him in the political spotlight. During the Kavanaugh hearings, the Wall Street Journal ran a column detailing the extent to which groups protesting his nomination — including some of the most vociferous demonstrations — were tied to Soros. “At least 20 of the largest groups that led the Saturday anti-Kavanaugh protests have been Open Society grantees,” it noted.

Soros’s enemies make it easy to sympathize with him. If you dislike Donald Trump — who charged that Kavanaugh demonstrators were “professional protesters … paid for by Soros and others” — you’re probably going to like Soros. And why not? His personal story is an inspiring one, leaving Hungary as a teenager and working his way through school in London while working as a railway porter and waiter before moving to the U.S. to make his fortune (in part by betting heavily against the British pound).

Soros’s enemies make it easy to sympathize with him

But he’s also representative of the unnerving impact big money has on U.S. politics at the highest level. Soros is one of numerous billionaires who use their vast wealth to push their causes and crusades. If he’s the favourite of left-wingers, there are any number on the opposite side of the spectrum feeding untold billions into efforts to refashion the country according to their own tastes. For years the Koch brothers have enraged Democrats as much as Soros has obsessed the right. In June, The New York Times ran an article accusing the brothers of systematically working to defeat transit projects across the country in order to support their investments in auto and petrochemical industries. Though the demonization of the Kochs has been complicated by their dislike of Trump, who dismissed them as “a total joke in Republican circles,” conspiracists continue to fill the internet with talk of their plot to infiltrate the corridors of government and seize power for “the owner class.”

As presidential candidates, Mitt Romney and Trump both paid court to Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who contributed $200 million to recent Republican campaigns. Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel kicked $250,000 into Trump’s campaign and delivered a rousing speech in his support. On the Democrat side, Jeff Bezos, the richest of them all, has turned his Washington Post into a 24/7 attack dog directed at the Trump White House. Michael Bloomberg, who has been a Republican, Democrat and Independent, is now considering a run for the presidency, having re-registered as Democrat as a tactical move.

It’s all legal and above-board, but it leaves U.S. politics resembling a medieval battlefield in which a network of privileged aristocrats — kings, queens, dukes and an earl or two — deploy armies of substitutes to do battle on their behalf. They pour in the money and someone else angrily confronts the senator in the congressional elevator. Perhaps the ultimate irony is that the causes they fund often operate under the rubric of “grassroots” democracy, even though the signs are paid for and the troops marshalled with help from an office high in some corporate tower.

None of these men — women are noticeably absent — is good or evil on their own merits, despite what friends or opponents may say. They are simply wealthy individuals with the means to ensure their interests are kept before the public in a way the rest of us never could. Money is known to be a corrupting influence. Theirs may or may not be, but it is heightening and intensifying divisions that could benefit from less fuel and more moderation at the moment.

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