Gara LaMarche

HOW DID GEORGE SOROS BECOME A major figure in US politics and the target of the far right’s nativist and anti-Semitic rage? The story goes back nearly twenty years.

On Tuesday, November 2, 2004, a steady stream of guests poured into George Soros’s elegant Fifth Avenue apartment: financiers and executives, philanthropists and labor leaders, writers and actors, politicians and pundits. As canapes and drinks were passed around, most guests hovered around television sets tuned to CNN’s coverage of the US presidential election. The mood in the room early in the evening was almost giddy; all day long, leaks of exit poll data seemed to indicate that the Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry, would oust President George W. Bush from the Oval Office after a single term.

Of course that didn’t happen, and as the night wore on, the mood turned glum. But that it came close to happening at all had much to do with the man hosting the party. During the previous two years, George Soros had invested heavily in Democratic politics, becoming one of the first “megadonors” after the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms drove large contributions from political parties into so-called independent expenditures. With an initial $20 million pledge, Soros organized other wealthy progressives to join him in creating America Coming Together, a massive, independent, direct-voter-contact operation. At the same time, he helped launch other institutions that would endure well past the 2004 contest, changing the shape of progressive politics and laying the groundwork for the Democrats to win a majority in Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008. Over the years, Soros would play an important role in the rise of a new generation of political talent, from Barack Obama and Stacey Abrams to a host of progressive prosecutors around the country who are transforming criminal justice policy by rethinking the “tough on crime” approach that has been the predominant mind-set since the 1970s.

It’s a remarkable story, all the more so because Soros does not particularly like politics and thinks that fortunes like his should not give the men, women, and families who hold them outsized weight in policy and government. Indeed, through the work of his foundation, Soros has been one of the most prominent funders working to reduce the impact of money on politics. It’s one of the many ironies and contradictions about a man long active in finance, global state-craft, and philanthropy, who was first drawn somewhat reluctantly to meaningful political engagement primarily by his concern about the Bush administration’s policies (particularly the war on terror and its assaults on civil liberties and human rights), but who stuck with it to become one of the biggest forces in US progressive politics in the twenty-first century.

GEORGE SOROS HAD not been one of those rich people obsessed with politics. He was regularly approached for political contributions and occasionally gave them, usually to Democrats, including a $100,000 gift to the Democratic National Committee as early as 1992. But if pushed to describe his politics, Soros might have called himself a Rockefeller Republican, in the tradition of Nelson Rockefeller, the longtime governor of New York who was a leader of the liberal wing of the Republican Party in the 1950s and 1960s. As many as a dozen US senators still fit that description into the late 1970s.

To the extent Soros had a public image, at least to an informed public, it was as a wizard of shrewd investments—particularly after he “broke” the Bank of England in 1992—and, with his role in the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, as a promoter of democracy in formerly totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. Through the growth and boldness of his US philanthropy, which took on drug policy, immigrants’ rights, and mass incarceration, Soros soon became controversial among Republicans before ultimately serving, in a gross distortion of his actual views, as a poster child for the radical left. But he has had continued cordial and productive dealings with George Pataki, the Republican governor of New York and a fellow person of Hungarian ancestry. Also around that time, Soros was invited to join a dinner in Washington with six US senators—three Republicans and three Democrats—who met once a month for a home-cooked meal and had a practice of inviting a guest to join them for conversation. Though Soros was disappointed by the dinner-table discussion—all the senators wanted to do was ask him about the markets, while Soros preferred to talk philosophy and global affairs—he was treated with respect.

At that time Soros’s political giving was not particularly notable and almost completely reactive, as much political giving is. He gave because someone asked, or because a friend or colleague was hosting a fundraiser. While he sometimes consulted his children—his son Robert had a strong interest in New York State politics, and his son Jonathan was a regular host of candidate fundraisers—he had no political adviser or strategy.

This began to change when Hamilton Fish V, the scion of an old New York political family—his father and grandfather had served in Congress as Republicans, and Fish had run unsuccessfully for Congress as a Democrat—was hired in 1999 as a consultant to organize Soros’s political contributions. Fish began to group requests from US House and Senate candidates into categories, like “toss-up” and “long shot,” and attempted to align Soros’s giving with his issue interests as manifested by his foundation’s priorities, like immigration, criminal justice, and reproductive rights. For incumbents, he looked at voting records, and challengers were asked to fill out a questionnaire.

That’s not rocket science, but it made Soros’s giving a bit more focused. According to Fish, Soros appreciated the guidance but was largely uninterested in the horse-race aspect of politics. He did not see the work as “game-changing.”

When Morton Halperin, a former State Department official and chief lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, went to work for Soros in 2002 to build a larger DC policy presence, Soros bought out some of his time to advise on political contributions, and in addition to aligning them with Soros’s substantive interests, Halperin involved Soros a bit more in legislative leadership battles, like the contest between Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer for who would become Democratic leader in the US House. Soros quietly aided Pelosi, forging a long-lasting partnership. In the early 2000s, as Soros became increasingly exercised about the administration of George W. Bush—telling Halperin that “Bush is going to destroy the country, we have to do something about it”—and as he grew interested in learning how right-wing donors influenced elections, he turned to Halperin to take some initial steps in exploring a larger political role.

And at the same time, Soros was exploring how to have an impact in a more direct way—by supporting ballot initiatives to reform state drug laws.

WHEN SOROS TURNED his philanthropic attention to the United States in the mid-1990s, after a decade of focusing primarily on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, he started with two issues that epitomized for him American failures of open society, each representing a taboo in public discussion and academic research and practice. One, strongly influenced by his experiences with the death of his parents, was the Project on Death in America, devoted to improving care at the end of life, particularly pain relief. The other, originally called the Lindesmith Center (after the late Alfred Lindesmith, a prominent scholar of addiction), was a think tank devoted to drug policy, a field where ever since the Nixon-era and Reagan-era wars on drugs it was virtually impossible to obtain funding for any research that did not reflect the dominant prohibitionist view. The center originally had no articulated policy agenda, and Soros was careful to say he did not have definite views about drug legalization. But it soon became a critical center for research, discussion, and debate.

To lead the Lindesmith Center, Soros hired Ethan Nadelmann, a Princeton University scholar who had written extensively on drug policy. An energetic evangelist for a different approach to drugs who formed alliances with libertarians and conservatives as well as progressives, Nadelmann came to enjoy Soros’s confidence and soon began to suggest ways that Soros could fund efforts to chip away at weak links in the war on drugs.

The opening wedge was the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. There was significant evidence that the active chemicals in marijuana have a positive effect in stemming anxiety, controlling nausea, and relieving pain. A number of patients around the country had become aware of this and were using marijuana to deal with one or more of these symptoms—often from cancer or its treatments, multiple sclerosis, or Alzheimer’s disease—but they ran the risk of arrest and prosecution, as did those helping them, and obtaining marijuana illegally was not always easy. If a state removed penalties for the use of marijuana for healing, it would not only help patients but also open up thinking about the other injustices and inconsistencies of drug prohibition.

Twenty-five state constitutions authorized the use of ballot initiatives or referenda to enact or repeal laws. This approach to legislating required the first step of collecting a significant number of voter signatures to place the measure on the ballot—as a practical matter, considerably more than the law required, in order to withstand the inevitable legal challenges—and in some cases a supermajority vote was required in order for a new law to pass. The rules varied considerably from state to state.

Until the late 1990s ballot initiatives were used most regularly in California, and almost always to advance policies favored by the right, such as two that were voted on in 1978: Proposition 13, which limited property taxes and made it more difficult to raise them in the future, and the so-called Briggs Initiative, which sought to bar gays and lesbians from teaching in schools. Proposition 13 won and the Briggs Initiative failed, but experiences like these had left some liberals skeptical about the popular democracy that ballot initiatives facilitated; in any case, they had rarely made use of these mechanisms.

Despite this, Nadelmann saw this path as a way to break through the political logjam that had so many officeholders cowed by fears of being seen as “soft” on drugs. Whether voters were ready for full marijuana decriminalization—Nadelmann’s ultimate goal, but one Soros was far from ready for in 1995—they might be persuaded that denying pain relief was unnecessarily harsh. Nadelmann consulted with Bill Zimmerman, a California strategist knowledgeable about initiative campaigns, and Chuck Blitz, a Santa Barbara philanthropist. They engaged the pollster Celinda Lake to assess public opinion and determined that such a measure could pass if they got it on the ballot for the 1996 election. Zimmerman estimated the campaign would cost about $3.5 million.

When Nadelmann laid out the strategy to Soros, he didn’t reject it, but he was reluctant to act without funding partners. Soros had recently met Peter B. Lewis, the chairman of the Cleveland-based Progressive Insurance Company, who had himself relied on marijuana for pain relief and who was strongly interested. Nadelmann practiced shuttle diplomacy between the two men, who were just getting to know each other. Soon thereafter, a third donor came into the mix: George Zimmer, the founder of the Men’s Wearhouse chain, whom Nadelmann had met at the World Economic Forum in Davos. By early 1996 the three men had agreed to work together and finance the initiative campaign—by that time it had a number, Proposition 215—with Soros providing an initial donation of $500,000.

A fourth donor, John Sperling, preferred to focus on his home state of Arizona. A former union organizer who had made his fortune through the for-profit University of Phoenix, Sperling was backing a treatment versus incarceration initiative in Arizona that year.

In November the California initiative passed with a 55 percent majority, and the Arizona measure with an even larger margin, 65 percent, with both campaigns tapping into unusual political coalitions and alliances that scrambled the standard right-left divides. In Arizona, for instance, former senator and 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater served as the campaign’s chairman.

The success of the two initiatives caught public attention and ushered in a wave of attacks from voices like New York Times columnist A. M. Rosenthal and former secretary of health, education and welfare Joseph Califano, who headed a Columbia University center for the study of addiction and called Soros “the Daddy Warbucks of drug legalization.”¹ The media connected the dots, and Soros, whose US philanthropy was just getting started and who had always had a low political profile, was suddenly thrust into the spotlight, accused as a stealth drug legalizer. This was the first manifestation of what in time would become a right-wing obsession with demonizing Soros.

At the same time, Nadelmann and his allies were encouraged by the strong political showing and scanned the country for other opportunities where there would be public support to chip away at the war on drugs, such as favoring treatment over incarceration or reforming asset-forfeiture laws. Drawing up a campaign budget of about $9 million for the multistate effort, Nadelmann approached Soros for additional support, and he agreed to put up a third of the money if Peter Lewis and John Sperling would do the same. According to Nadelmann, Lewis and Sperling said yes within twenty-four hours of being asked. All six ballot measures passed, with an additional three related measures enacted into law by the voters in Arizona.

In 2000, the three men—who had only met twice as a group as they spent a total of $30 million together—teamed up for a broader drug initiative in California, Proposition 36, which mandated that eligible nonviolent drug offenders be sent to treatment programs instead of to jail or prison. It passed with 61 percent of the vote. In the same year, however, medicinal marijuana ballot measures were defeated in Massachusetts, Colorado, and Nevada, ushering in a bad patch for the direct-democracy approach. Two years later, in the post-9/11 climate of fear and insecurity, medical marijuana campaigns also lost in Ohio and Michigan.

This period, largely preceding George Soros’s entry into national politics on a wider scale, proved to be a harbinger of several tendencies that would mark Soros’s political work. First, he relied heavily on experts—in this case, Nadelmann and the team around him—for advice on the most strategic opportunities. He took a strong interest but never micromanaged. Second, as in his philanthropy, while he did not seek controversy, he did not shy from it, either. Third, he liked having partners, leveraging his donations with those of others and at times agreeing to be leveraged by them.

These ballot initiatives changed the law, and consequently millions of lives. They also shook up the public debate over drug policy and incarceration, creating a climate for more political boldness and attracting a new generation of activists who saw criminal justice policy as a set of injustices in dire need of reckoning. In many ways, at least in the United States, this may be the greatest legacy of Soros’s political and philanthropic involvement.

AS THE NEW century dawned, Soros had not been particularly alarmed by the prospect of a George W. Bush presidency, because Bush had run on a platform of “compassionate conservatism.” Indeed, one of Bush’s key education advisers in Texas, Uri Treisman, had also worked closely with Soros’s foundation, helping to evaluate the considerable investment the foundation had made in the Mississippi-based Algebra Project, founded by the civil rights activist Robert Parris Moses.

Despite his involvement in state ballot initiatives on drug policy, Soros remained largely unengaged with candidates and political parties, but at his urging the Open Society Foundations had been quite active in funding research and advocacy in support of campaign finance reform. The foundations supported groups like the Brennan Center for Justice and Public Campaign, a new effort to promote the public financing of elections, in which Soros joined forces with the Schumann Foundation, of which Bill Moyers was president. And in 2002 Congress passed the McCain-Feingold law, named after its two Senate sponsors; it was the first piece of significant campaign finance reform legislation since the post-Watergate reforms in 1974. McCain-Feingold regulated the flow of “soft money” into party committees, seeking to limit the power of corporations, unions, and wealthy donors in the political process.

Even as he decried the influence of money on politics, Soros remained aware that any reform of the system would inevitably be “gamed,” as money would always find a way. Indeed, that’s what happened with McCain-Feingold: large donations from institutions like businesses and labor (accepting for a moment the false equation of the two, since labor donations represent the small-dollar dues of working people) did not cease but were channeled into “independent” and even less adequately regulated vehicles. This accelerated even more after the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which equated corporate spending with speech and removed all limitations on it.

One of the many ironies about Soros’s engagement in politics is that the unintended consequence of a reform he backed was to open up new avenues for his role in the political process. As Mark Schmitt, a former aide to Senator Bill Bradley who was hired by the Open Society Foundations to advise on money in politics and other democracy reforms, put it, before McCain-Feingold, donors were “passive investors” in established party committees. But afterward, they could “take command” of alternative fundraising vehicles and “actively move the chess pieces.”

SOROS IS AT his core a globalist, and in the first term of the George W. Bush administration, he concluded that US leadership had become a “threat to the world order.” Soros opposed the war in Iraq and deplored the falsehoods and misrepresentations that the administration promoted in order to manipulate the country into war, but his deepest objection was sparked by Bush’s declaration of a “war on terror” after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Soros agreed that the terrorist attacks were despicable and had to be dealt with, but the incursions on human rights and civil liberties undertaken in the name of the war on terror were unforgivable and would be hard to roll back. These included the roundups of Muslims and South Asians across America for questioning, as if ethnicity and religion were themselves a cause for suspicion; the rash passage of the Patriot Act, which expanded the definition of support for terrorism and expanded government surveillance powers; the indefinite detention of suspects at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp; and the practice of torture by US agents there as well as at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Of particular concern to Soros was Bush’s view that in the war against terror, “either you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists”²—effectively equating dissent with treason. Such was the climate of intimidation and fear in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks that it was hard to obtain public agreement even on an anodyne statement declaring that dissent is patriotic, as Soros learned to his dismay when an effort to collect the signatures of prominent Americans—writers, university and foundation presidents, religious leaders, and others—for such a declaration failed to attract a critical mass. Soros ended up signing it himself with his US foundation board leadership and taking out an ad in the New York Times.

For all those reasons, as Soros wrote in The Age of Fallibility, he concluded that “nothing else I could do would benefit the world as much as helping to limit President Bush to one term.”³

With this goal in mind, Soros engaged two consultants, Tom Novick and Mark Steitz, to solicit their separate views on how increased spending in the 2004 election cycle could be put to best use. (It was not unusual for Soros to ask two people to take on the same task, as a hedge and to keep control.) Novick and Steitz came up with similar recommendations: They proposed a grassroots mobilization effort starting in key battleground states and expanding to other states that might be put into play. They also identified opportunities for the critical period in the late spring and early summer, following the conclusion of the Democratic primary season, when the presumptive nominee would likely be out of money until public financing funds were released after the Democratic convention.

At the same time, and independent of Soros’s inquiries, a number of political strategists working with large advocacy institutions and labor unions had been thinking along similar lines. The prime mover in these efforts was Gina Glantz, a top aide to Andrew Stern, the new president of the Service Employees International Union, and a former campaign manager for Walter Mondale in 1984 and campaign manager for Bill Bradley’s 2000 challenge to Al Gore for the Democratic presidential nomination. Glantz was struck that a number of the friends she had made in politics and labor did not seem to know one another, so she invited a group of them to a dinner in the spring of 2003. Her guests included Ellen Malcolm, the founder and president of Emily’s List, which worked to elect pro-choice female Democratic candidates; Harold Ickes, a former Clinton administration deputy chief of staff; SEIU president Andy Stern; Steve Rosenthal, the former political director for the AFL-CIO; and Carl Pope, the president of the Sierra Club.

Although each of these individuals and their affiliated organizations were powerful political players, they’d never worked closely together on an election. Having studied the provisions of the new McCain-Feingold law, Glantz and Malcolm suggested that they could come together as an independent political organization under Section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code, observing its prohibitions against directly advocating the election or defeat of a particular candidate and steering clear of any collaboration with the candidates or political parties. Over coffee, after the proposal for joint activity had been discussed for a while, Glantz remembers Carl Pope picking up a sugar packet and tossing it into the center of the table, declaring, “I’m in.” Soon the others were as well.

No one in this group had met George Soros, but they had heard that he was interested in backing a plan to beat Bush, so they made contact.

By all accounts the pivotal event was a gathering in July 2003 at Soros’s summer home in the Hamptons. Malcolm, Pope, Ickes, and Rosenthal were invited for the weekend to lay out their plan, and Soros, eager to have partners in any effort that would emerge, invited Peter Lewis, his collaborator on drug policy ballot initiatives, and a number of other progressive political donors. These included Rob Glaser, a former Microsoft executive active in the support of progressive media (including Air America, the short-lived liberal radio network); Anne Bartley, a former Clinton aide and stepdaughter of the former Arkansas governor Winthrop Rockefeller; Patricia Bauman, a longtime leader of civic engagement efforts in the philanthropic world; Rob McKay, an heir to the Taco Bell fortune and later board chair of the Democracy Alliance; and Dorothy and Lewis Cullman, New York philanthropists and political donors.

Over the course of an afternoon, the political strategists made their pitch for an independent political organization, America Coming Together (ACT), that would make sophisticated use of new data techniques to identify possible supporters, hire field organizers in key states, knock on doors in the early months to register voters, and follow up as the election neared to make sure they turned out to vote. A parallel effort, the Media Fund, would create hard-hitting ad content, separate from the communications for the eventual candidate. They then retired to a nearby motel for the evening while the donors met among themselves.

When the strategists returned the next morning, Soros told them that he and Peter Lewis were willing to put in $10 million each, and he asked Steve Rosenthal to call Andy Stern to encourage SEIU to put in $20 million, though he was concerned that the effort not be perceived as a labor union initiative that he’d just tagged onto. Ellen Malcolm, screwing up her courage, suggested to Soros that if he wanted to avoid that impression, he should give the same amount he was asking SEIU to put up, $20 million. Soros said yes, as did Lewis. The other donors at the gathering, many of whom lacked the capacity for an eight-figure donation, pledged $3 million among them. Malcolm, an experienced fundraiser, was flabbergasted at what had been accomplished in a weekend, recalling, “It was more than Emily’s List had ever raised to that point.”

Steve Rosenthal was hired to run ACT, and Harold Ickes oversaw fundraising and the operations of the Media Fund.

In the 2004 election cycle, ACT raised $146 million and put on an impressive show of “boots on the ground” that hadn’t been seen in many years. ACT employed forty-five thousand paid canvassers in battleground states, with eighty-six offices, four thousand staff, and twenty-five thousand volunteers. On the media side, a typical example was a health-care ad that ran in seventeen states. It never mentioned John Kerry, but as a woman on screen lamented her mounting health-care bills, an off-screen narrator intoned, “Health-care costs are soaring. Under President Bush, millions more Americans are uninsured. And those who have coverage are paying more out of pocket.”

Along with ACT and the Media Fund, Soros was an early backer that year of another advocacy organization, America Votes, a national collaboration of issue organizations working together at the state and national level to increase voter turnout and support progressive policy initiatives. Headed originally by Cecile Richards, an experienced organizer from Texas (where her mother, Ann Richards, had been governor) who had worked as an aide to Nancy Pelosi and later became president of Planned Parenthood, America Votes for the first time brought together in coalition labor, civil rights, environmental, religious, and other organizations unused to working together and seeing beyond their particular issues or constituencies. Some of the groups had significant electoral capacity, some relied on America Votes to provide it, but all coordinated their strategies through the coalition.

Soros’s other significant electoral contribution in 2004 was a donation of $2.5 million to MoveOn.org, the progressive membership organization that came into being during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton (from which it had urged Congress and the country to “move on”) and had most recently grown substantially as a hub of popular opposition to the Iraq war. Soros paired his contribution with one of equal size by Peter Lewis, with the funds set aside to match small-dollar donors to the organization.

After the 2004 election, Rosenthal and the other ACT leaders were eager to continue it as a permanent organization, since despite falling short of victory, it had built capacity on the ground across the country. Keeping it going at a modest level in off years, and ramping up to full capacity in election years, would break the boom-and-bust cycle of civic engagement that had bedeviled progressives for decades. But while Soros had been relatively pleased with the work he supported, he and Lewis decided against continuing their financial support.

As the columnist Thomas Edsall observed in The Washington Post, “By all measures but one, ACT and the Media Fund were a great success, helping to turn out record numbers of new voters. But that one measure was the one that counted,” since Bush was reelected and Republicans made gains in both the House and the Senate.⁴ That measure—the bottom line of victory—was obviously important, and the nation faced two more years of consolidated Republican rule. But it was far from the only measure of ACT’s impact. In Carl Pope’s view, echoed by many others, Soros’s role in supporting a collaboration among progressive groups that had rarely worked together before “catalyzed the creation of a multi-issue left.” Gina Glantz believed that while Soros fell short of victory, he “created a class of organizers in the states who have gone on to be the backbone of the progressive movement” and of many subsequent victories. She credited Soros and his fellow donors with “fostering a culture of innovation” and even, given the enormous scale of the effort, making it possible for field organizers to be better paid. Patrick Gaspard, an ACT official who later served as Barack Obama’s White House political director, US ambassador to South Africa, and president of Soros’s Open Society Foundations, pointed out that everywhere ACT was on the ground, John Kerry overperformed at the polls relative to other states. Mark Steitz, one of the two consultants whose opinion Soros solicited early on in his effort to defeat Bush, observed that the tools ACT developed in 2004 played a substantial role in Barack Obama’s victory four years later.

WHILE SOROS DECIDED against continuing his support of ACT after the 2004 presidential election, he did not lose interest in building a stronger political infrastructure for the center left. Indeed, his sense of strengths and weaknesses in the ecosystem of progressive organizations was deepened by his 2004 experience.

A number of efforts had been made in the past to persuade Soros to counter the right, but because Soros had always resisted political labels and did not approach his philanthropy in ideological terms, he’d always been resistant. In the late 1990s, for instance, Bill Moyers came to an Open Society board dinner at Soros’s house in Bedford, New York, armed with a recent report from the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) called Moving a Public Policy Agenda: The Strategic Philanthropy of Conservative Foundations.⁵ The report argued that progressive donors should follow the example set by the conservative movement, particularly its corporate base, in the years following the enactment of Lyndon Johnson’s popular Great Society programs. The corporate lawyer Lewis F. Powell, a future Supreme Court justice, laid out the stakes in a now legendary 1971 memo to the US Chamber of Commerce, arguing that business had been complacent in the undermining of capitalism on college campuses and in the media, and that conservative US foundations ought to invest in new conservative institutions to turn this picture around. The Bradley, Scaife, and Olin foundations took up this challenge and funded conservative think tanks, media, and leadership programs, most notably the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, the latter of which promoted conservative and “originalist” jurisprudence in opposition to the “rights revolution” that had emerged from the Warren Court’s rulings in the 1960s. By the early 2000s, progressives could see that conservative ideas and policies dominated the terms of American political debate, even when center-left Democrats like Carter and Clinton made it to the White House.

Moyers went away empty-handed from that dinner at Soros’s home, but he may have made an impression. Soros was eager to continue working with Peter Lewis and Andy Stern, and the three donors began to explore what they could do together, joined by the California philanthropists and bankers Marion and Herbert Sandler, who relied on advice from John Podesta, the former Clinton White House chief of staff and the head of the Center for American Progress, a new progressive think tank. Under discussion was the creation of a $300 million fund that would identify and finance coordinated investments in progressive infrastructure.

In time, though, the quartet of donors could not agree on a common plan, but Soros, Lewis, and Stern soon grew interested in another, broader collaboration that was taking shape, this one spearheaded by a former Commerce Department official named Rob Stein. Stein had spent some months pulling together data on the scale of right-wing institutions in media, ideas, law, leadership training, and civic engagement, and displayed it side by side with what he could find that was comparable on the progressive side. Not surprisingly, as with the NCRP report a few years earlier, it showed progressives badly outgunned.

Soros’s son Jonathan had attended one of Stein’s presentations and was impressed. He encouraged his father to attend a confidential breakfast at the office of Alan Patricof, a New York Democratic donor, and Soros attended, along with Peter Lewis. They were impressed by the data, but even more by what Stein proposed to do with it: create an alliance—a kind of donor “club”—composed of people who would agree in advance to underwrite the investments in building new organizations and strengthening existing ones. As Stein made his presentation to groups of donors around the country—in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Washington, and elsewhere—interest built, and by early 2005 he and his colleagues were ready to convene all the interested donors in one place.

At a posh resort outside Scottsdale, Arizona, about fifty donors and a handful of their advisers assembled in April 2005. Stein gave opening remarks; Soros was interviewed by Bill Moyers; the donors got to know one another; the results of further research were presented; and a series of high-tech instant polls took the attendees’ temperature on a variety of issues and approaches. Some, long frustrated with the Democratic Party and its various arms, were eager to cut to the chase, and at one point the voice of the actor and director Rob Reiner boomed from the back of the room: “Where’s the strategy?”

That would have to wait for a second meeting in the fall, by which time the group—now called the Democracy Alliance—had arrived at a business model and a strategy. From the second weekend gathering emerged decisions to collectively commit roughly $30 million to relatively new groups like the Center for American Progress; Media Matters for America, which tracked right-wing talk radio, Fox News, and similar outlets to expose bigotry, falsehoods, and hypocrisy; and the American Constitution Society, which proposed to do for progressive jurisprudence and academic and judicial leadership development what the Federalist Society had achieved on the right.

The next year, with Soros in the lead, the Alliance would invest heavily in building capacity for the progressive movement. Central to this effort was Catalist, a data warehouse for voter information. The science and practice of using various kinds of data to predict voter behavior was developing substantially in these years, following the advances made by George W. Bush’s top political adviser Karl Rove, who identified niche audiences—like NASCAR fans or Cracker Barrel customers—that correlated heavily with conservative political sympathies. Progressives were eager to catch up and avoid squandering their ad spending or door knocking on voters who would never vote for a Democrat. Catalist was set up as a nonprofit organization separate from the Democratic Party, as a movement resource and utility that would be available only for civic engagement efforts.

The members of the Democracy Alliance paid a stiff entry fee along with annual dues of $30,000, and they pledged to give at least $200,000 a year to causes recommended by the Alliance’s staff and board. (According to Rob Stein, Peter Lewis had offered to guarantee the entire operating budget, but Stein turned him down, believing that it would harm the new organization to be overly reliant on any one donor.) While over the years the Alliance would become a significant force in progressive politics, two decisions made at the outset—both of which Soros strongly urged—could be said to have limited its impact, relative to what emerged as its counterpart on the right, the network funded and led by the Koch brothers. The first was not to create a pooled fund, from which a central strategy could be funded as needed, but to leave the question of which organizations to support to individual donor option, as long as they met the $200,000 minimum and funded groups on the recommended list. This made funding somewhat more of a popularity contest, with an edge to charismatic leaders who were good at schmoozing the donors, a skill that was not always correlated with impact. The second was to keep the size of the Alliance’s staff fairly small, which limited its capacity for research, assessment, and evaluation. Soros and some of the other donors felt that sufficient capacity existed within their own organizations and that the Alliance did not need to duplicate it.

Nevertheless, the Alliance, which in time grew to more than one hundred members, including a number of labor unions along with the high-net-worth donors, has steered more than a billion dollars to progressive groups in its first sixteen years. As part of this effort, the Alliance also helped existing anchors of the progressive infrastructure like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Brennan Center for Justice, and the Center for Community Change, which had been primarily dependent on foundations, diversify their support with significant contributions by individual donors.

Soros remained active in the Democracy Alliance, and always had an employee represent him on the organization’s board. According to Rob Stein, quite apart from his financial contributions, Soros “validated” the Democracy Alliance. He participated regularly, though he was by far the richest and most generous of the donors, and many other members joined or stayed in the Alliance because they wanted to be around him.

More broadly, Stein believes, “Soros has been a North Star for the development of a more confident progressive capacity. He gave us the gift of imagination—of hope in ourselves.”

AS SOROS BECAME more involved in US politics, he began to take more of an interest in emerging leaders with political talent, as he had done for decades in other parts of the world, building working relationships with many heads of state, key ministers, and leaders of intergovernmental organizations.

According to Michael Vachon, Soros’s one-person political staff since 2001, Barack Obama was one of the first politicians in whom Soros took an interest. Soros first met him in Chicago in 2003 (during a trip barnstorming and fundraising for ACT), when Obama, then an Illinois state senator, was thinking of running for the US Senate. The two men had breakfast at the Four Seasons Hotel, where Soros expressed his admiration for Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father, and afterward Vachon, who had joined Soros at the breakfast, remarked, “I think we may have met the first Black president.” For his part, Soros thought that the fact that Obama had spent part of his childhood abroad augured well for his global consciousness.

Soros went on to hold the first big New York fundraiser for Obama’s senate campaign, with Vernon Jordan as the featured speaker, and he and his family members hosted additional fundraisers over the next year.

In December 2006, with Obama now in the US Senate and contemplating a presidential run in 2008, Obama came to see Soros at his office in New York. By then he had published a second book, less autobiographical and more policy-focused, called The Audacity of Hope.

“Your first book was really good,” Soros told Obama after they were seated in his office. “The second one is a bit empty.” Yet Soros was enthusiastic about the prospect of Obama’s candidacy and agreed to back him. By this time Soros was a significant Democratic donor and was known to have a good relationship with Senator Hillary Clinton, Obama’s principal opponent for the nomination, and so Soros’s endorsement made news and was widely viewed as a big boost for Obama. (While an admirer of Hillary Clinton, whom he worked with on poverty and women’s rights issues in Haiti, Soros had not been a fan of Bill Clinton, believing he had wasted opportunities to rebuild democracy in the former Soviet sphere after the collapse of communism and seeing him as a transactional political operator.)

Before agreeing to make his preference publicly known, Soros called Hillary Clinton to deliver the news himself, arguing that it would strengthen the ultimate nominee to have a vigorous primary process. “Thank you for telling me,” she responded. “I look forward to your support in the general election.”

Despite, or perhaps especially because of, his early and ardent backing of Obama’s candidacy, Soros was extremely disappointed by Obama’s presidency. According to his son Alex, he had expected to play the kind of role for Obama that Bernard Baruch, an earlier financier and statesman, had played for both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt—a kind of outside adviser on economics and global relations.

An early sign that this was not to be was Obama’s failure to take Soros’s advice on how to deal with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. As Soros put it in a 2011 essay, “I published a series of articles in the Financial Times but got little response from the Obama administration. I had many more discussions with Larry Summers before he became the President’s economic adviser than after. My greatest disappointment is that I was unable to establish any kind of personal contact with Obama himself.”⁶

More was at stake for Soros than just access, since he was a man accustomed to being sought out by a steady stream of heads of state when they came to New York each year for the UN General Assembly. He feared the policy choices Obama and his team were making would not make maximum use of the crisis. As he and the economist Rob Johnson later wrote in an article titled “A Better Bailout Was Possible”: “We believe a critical opportunity was missed when the balance of the burden of adjustment was tilted heavily in favor of creditors relative to debtors in the response to the crisis and that this contributed to the prolonged stagnation that followed the crisis.”⁷ Soros had urged Summers to inject equity into fragile banks and write down mortgages to help the economy recover, but Summers rejected the advice out of fear that it would mean nationalizing banks.

While giving Obama some credit for managing an extremely difficult economic situation, Soros also felt the way the president handled it, both in terms of the public relations of the administration’s actions and Obama’s tendency to accommodate the Republicans, were politically costly. He wrote: “The electorate showed no appreciation of Obama for moderating the recession because it was not aware of what he had done. By avoiding conflict Obama handed the initiative to the opposition, and the opposition had no incentive to cooperate. The Republican propaganda machine was able to convince people that the financial crisis was due to government failure, not market failure.”⁸

Soros was unable to arrange a meeting with the president until September 2010, when Obama was in New York for the annual UN General Assembly meeting. The administration was eager to keep Soros on board and spending on behalf of Democratic candidates in the critical midterm elections that year. The meeting did not go well. Each proud man misread the other, Soros arriving with a list of actions he thought Obama should take and Obama irked that Soros thought he had not already considered these actions. The two men only met in person once more.

Guided by Vachon’s eye and by the recommendations of his foundation officials, Soros has arguably had more influence at the state and local level. He was an early patron of two young Black political stars who came within a hairsbreadth of becoming governors of their states, Andrew Gillum of Florida and Stacey Abrams of Georgia.

Gillum, elected at age twenty-three to the Tallahassee City Commission, first came to Soros’s attention in 2002 through his foundation’s support of the Young Elected Leaders project of People for the American Way. Stacey Abrams’s longstanding effort to register Black voters through her New Georgia Project, long a favorite of Soros, so successfully expanded the electorate in the state that it voted Democratic in the 2020 presidential election, for the first time in almost thirty years, and in January 2021 elected two Democrats to the US Senate, creating a Democratic majority for the first time in ten years and providing a critical margin for President Joe Biden’s governing agenda. Many believe that Abrams lost her gubernatorial bid in 2018 only because of widespread voter suppression (overseen by her opponent Brian Kemp, then Georgia’s secretary of state); when she formed a new organization, Fair Fight, to protect and expand voting rights in Georgia and across the country, Soros was an early and generous backer.

Soros has also dabbled a bit in New York City politics, as an early backer of what first seemed like a longshot candidacy by Bill de Blasio, who was elected to the first of two terms as mayor in 2013. In the 2021 mayoral race, his family lent support to Maya Wiley, a first-time candidate who had once worked for Soros’s foundation as a racial equity specialist and an adviser on criminal justice programs in South Africa.

GEORGE SOROS BECAME involved significantly in US politics when he saw George W. Bush as threatening the international order, as a means to protect the values he’d spent billions of dollars trying to advance through his foundation. So it makes sense that he would come around to using the tools of politics to take on one of his signature issues: criminal justice reform.

From the very earliest days of Soros’s US philanthropy, he put a strong focus on the criminal justice system as one of the starkest manifestations of the shortcomings of open society in America: mass incarceration, long before that was a widely used term of art sparking a social movement; policing abuses; indigent defense; and the death penalty. In his philanthropy and through parallel lobbying efforts from his Open Society Policy Center, Soros funded hundreds of fellowships for writers and activists. One of the first went to Michelle Alexander, a scholar who used the support to write The New Jim Crow, which galvanized a generation of activists. Another went to Vanita Gupta, a young lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund who took on a case of rampant prosecutorial abuse in Tulia, Texas, where half the town’s Black population was rounded up in a drug sting operation. Gupta went on to head the Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department under President Obama and returned to government as associate attorney general under President Biden. Many other grants went to formerly imprisoned persons and their family members, an early recognition that those most affected by the justice system should be in the vanguard of efforts to reform it. It is increasingly hard to find the leader of a criminal justice reform effort working today at the state or federal level who has not been the beneficiary of a Soros Justice Fellowship.

Soros and Open Society were at times the leading funder of the movement to ban stop-and-frisk policing, and have underwritten much of the considerable progress in rolling back the death penalty, which had long seemed intractable, by shifting the focus of reform to questions of innocence and error. In the twenty years or so since Soros took on the issue, executions have declined to their lowest point in decades (despite an appalling spate of federal executions in the last days of the Trump administration), and public support for capital punishment has sunk below 50 percent.

One element of the decline in executions is that many fewer prosecutors seek to impose the death penalty, particularly in traditional high-execution states like Texas and Florida. Veteran prosecutors have begun to realize, apart from the moral considerations, that the death penalty is expensive and time-consuming without any proven impact on public safety. But it’s also the case that in many jurisdictions, the prosecutors in place are new ones, a striking set of changes in which Soros’s political giving has played a key role.

There are 2,300 elected prosecutors in the United States. Most are men, most are white, and most have enjoyed effective lifetime tenure, often cruising to reelection every four years without opposition. (In the nearly eighty years from 1942 to 2021, only five men served as Manhattan district attorney, and two of them, Frank Hogan and Robert Morgenthau, held the office for a combined sixty-seven years; Henry Wade, whose name is attached to the landmark abortion rights case, was district attorney in Dallas for thirty-six years.) The shape of criminal justice in their jurisdictions—who is tried and how they are sentenced—is powerfully determined by prosecutors.

In 2004, around the time that Soros became active on the national political scene, he was persuaded by Ethan Nadelmann to make a foray, backed by the Working Families Party, into a prosecutor’s race in Albany County, the seat of New York’s state government. David Soares, a Black immigrant from Cape Verde, challenged and beat the incumbent, pulling off a stunning political upset after a campaign based primarily on opposition to the draconian Rockefeller drug laws.

Soros didn’t engage in another district attorney race for a number of years, but in 2015 he created a pilot project to oust prosecutors in Mississippi and Louisiana. The initiative, which became the Justice and Public Safety PAC, has since helped to elect more than thirty new prosecutors, with wins far outnumbering losses. Led by Whitney Tymas, an African American woman and former Virginia prosecutor who started her career as a public defender in West Harlem, Justice and Public Safety did not just sit back and wait for candidates to approach it for assistance. Aided by research from the political consulting firm BerlinRosen, it undertook analyses of which communities were most in need of a shift in prosecutorial priorities, conducted messaging research, identified and recruited promising candidates (most of them women and men of color), and created winning campaign plans using television, radio, digital advertising, mail, and field operations.

The payoff has been enormous, not only in victories, but in the changes these prosecutors have made once in office. Scott Colom, the African American prosecutor for four Mississippi counties, was able in just a year to double the number of defendants diverted to alternative sentencing programs. In Chicago, Kim Foxx enacted significant bail reforms. James Stewart, the Caddo Parish attorney in Louisiana, advocated for unanimous jury verdicts to strengthen defendants’ rights. Aramis Ayala, the state attorney for the Ninth Judicial Circuit in Florida, vowed not to seek the death penalty. Stephanie Morales, the commonwealth attorney in Portsmouth, Virginia, dropped most misdemeanor marijuana cases. John Creuzot, the Dallas County district attorney, successfully pressed for the conviction of a police officer who shot an innocent Black man. Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, the commonwealth attorney for Arlington County, Virginia, stopped prosecuting low-level marijuana cases. Kim Gardner, the St. Louis district attorney, reduced the jail population to stem the spread of COVID. Perhaps the most well-known of the reform district attorneys, Larry Krasner of Philadelphia, has been a center of resistance to Trump administration justice policies.

And in the course of electing reform candidates, the project has ended the careers of some notorious prosecutors, like the Chicago incumbent involved in the cover-up of the killing of Laquan McDonald and the bigoted sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County, Arizona.

Predictably, there has been a strong backlash. Soros is one of the right’s leading bogeymen, and once the “law and order” establishment got wind of his engagement in these races—as Whitney Tymas puts it, “when they know he is coming, they get ready”—right-wing voices like Newt Gingrich and Tucker Carlson have systematically sought to make him, and not the injustices of the system, the issue. Of more concern, since these attacks in most cases do not seem to have had much of an effect on the electoral contests themselves, the new prosecutors have been subjected to sustained and vicious attacks from the law enforcement establishment. In many cases, particularly for those who are women of color, the attacks have come in the form of misogyny, hate mail, and racist threats directed specifically at the Black women leaders. After Aramis Ayala announced her bold stance on the death penalty, Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, transferred her cases to another state attorney. She sued him, but the governor prevailed in court. She chose not to seek reelection, and the Justice and Safety PAC backed her chosen successor, who won.

If all Soros did was act alone to usher in a new generation of prosecutors committed to justice and smart on crime, it would have been a great achievement. But as in his other political and philanthropic activities, he created a “market” that did not exist before. How many national donors knew or cared about who was running for district attorney in some southern county? The success of the Justice and Safety PAC soon attracted other donors, sometimes working on the same races as Soros, and often taking on races in other jurisdictions.

SOROS WAS FIRST DRAWN to deeper engagement in US politics by his concerns about the global impact of the Bush administration, and so it is natural that he would also concern himself with politics outside the United States as well—and that his high-profile role in opposition to George W. Bush would have ramifications in other parts of the world.

At times, this involved trying to topple a dictator, as in Soros’s support for the “No” campaign, the 1990 plebiscite in Chile seeking to end the regime of General Augusto Pinochet. At other times, it has involved promoting human rights reformers, like Corazon Aquino in the Philippines, who ran for president in 1986, two and a half years after the assassination of her husband, Senator Benigno Aquino, an outspoken opponent of the autocratic president, Ferdinand Marcos.

More complicated have been situations where Soros became active politically—or was perceived, not always accurately, to be active—in places where his foundations were also prominent players. Sometimes, as in China, his already limited ability to operate was further restrained by the regime’s awareness of his opposition to Bush. Societies already distrustful of independent activity tend to see as unwelcome a donor who is also capable—albeit through his private funding, not his foundation—of seeking regime change.

This pattern was repeated throughout the former Soviet sphere. Even in those countries where Soros was not politically active—to the extent that distinction is meaningful in parts of the world where the lines are much more blurred than they have traditionally been in the United States—he was accused of funding the opposition. As Leonard Benardo, vice president of the Open Society Foundations, put it, Soros’s image steadily shifted from being the “darling of subsidizing textbooks, giving travel grants and supporting health systems and Internet resources” to a figure of menace.

AT THIS POINT in Soros’s life in philanthropy and politics, it is sometimes hard to separate the man himself, and what he actually does, from the backlash to him. The manufacturing of outrage against Soros—painted as a “radical left puppet master,” falsely accused of collaboration with the Nazis (as a child, no less), denounced as a nemesis of public safety, religion, and American culture—is a lucrative engine for right-wing fundraising, both through direct contributions and in advertising on conservative media. It is also, as David Brock, the founder of Media Matters for America, points out, a “convenient way to stigmatize the groups that Soros supports,” which is the ultimate goal for Soros’s adversaries.

For many, he exists primarily as a symbol. Progressives admire a man who took on George W. Bush and Donald Trump and champions immigrants and prisoners, who in 2020 alone committed more than $100 million in rapid-response grants to low-wage workers affected by COVID and $300 million to frontline Black organizations following the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department. They also love him for his enemies, like Fox News, Newt Gingrich, and Rudolph Giuliani.

At times it seems those enemies, and the rest of the vast right-wing media empire, from talk radio to Newsmax and the further digital reaches of conspiracy theorists, wouldn’t know what to do without Soros, who is (or at least their caricature of him is) a tremendous asset to them in stoking their base to stay tuned in or online and to donate money. (An insufficiently examined aspect of the extreme polarization of the US electorate is that, particularly on the right, it has made a lot of media figures and institutions rich.) While there has always been a strong anti-Semitic strand in the opposition to Soros, particularly in Europe, it has been more pronounced in the last few years.

Soros has said that he doesn’t take the attacks personally: “On the contrary, they have stimulated me to fight harder. I’m proud of my enemies—much less of my friends.” By which he means not only his disappointments in leaders like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, but his discomfort with some of the orthodoxies of the left, which in their most intense form amount to what some call cancel culture, in which the acceptable zone for discussion of controversial ideas is severely restricted. In this respect, if they actually paid attention to Soros and the depth of his commitment to Karl Popper’s principles of an open society, his right-wing critics might find more in common with Soros than they realize.

THERE IS NO QUESTION that the vast majority of attacks on George Soros and his role in politics are false, designed to create fear and raise money, and far too many traffic in nefarious anti-Semitic tropes. But none of that means his political activities should be free from criticism. Are there valid ones to be made?

As is so often the case with Soros, who holds himself to the high standards of scrutiny he demands of others, some of the soundest critiques emanate from the man himself. He readily concedes that he mishandled his early opposition to George W. Bush, taking out newspaper ads and barnstorming the country with anti-Bush speeches, making himself the issue and possibly feeding his own ego in a way that hurt his cause.

As he wrote in his book Soros on Soros, “There has been too much attention paid to me as a person. … But this preoccupation with myself is beginning to have some harmful side effects. I became a public personality in order to promote certain ideas.”⁹

There is also a belief that Soros doesn’t spend enough money on politics. While the $27 million he spent in the 2004 election was a high-water mark at the time, he has often been eclipsed in recent years by donors like Donald Sussman, Dustin Moskovitz, Reid Hoffman, and, since he became a Democrat, Michael Bloomberg.

Somewhat surprisingly, the conservative anti-tax organizer Grover Norquist is a grudging admirer of Soros, for his work on Eastern Europe and on drug policy (which to Norquist has a welcome libertarian cast). He once even invited Soros to speak at one of his famous Wednesday morning breakfasts for conservative activists. (Soros was impressed with and envious of the glimpse it gave him of the coordination on the right.) But Norquist told John Cassidy of The New Yorker in 2005 that Soros “tried to buy the Presidency on the cheap,” spending only $27 million in 2004 when “he should have been in for two and a half billion dollars, for crying out loud.”¹⁰

In particular, at the time of the 2010 US midterm elections—when the Democrats lost control of the Congress in the Tea Party wave—Soros resisted efforts to get him to spend heavily to stem the tide. In part this was because of his disillusionment with the first two years of the Obama administration, but in part it was his instincts as an investor coming to the fore: “I learned not to step in front of an avalanche.”

Some say that Soros, in his political giving as well as his philanthropy, is at times too captivated by charismatic personalities and less drawn to efforts where leadership is distributed with no dominant spokesperson—that he understands Georgia, where Stacey Abrams is the face of a movement, more than Arizona or Texas, whose political ecosystems feature quietly effective but less celebrated leaders. If this is true, it is a tendency Soros has in common with many political givers and philanthropic leaders, however much they may talk about strategic impact. The cult of personality in movements and organizations remains strong, and Soros has not been immune to it.

Apart from that observation, and from questions about the amounts of money he contributes, given the scale of the Koch network efforts and the huge donations made to Republicans by the late Sheldon Adelson, it’s hard to find many complaints about Soros from his own side of the political spectrum. He is widely regarded as someone who keeps his eye on the larger political and social context, asks good and often tough questions, welcomes being challenged, and eschews micromanagement of his political investments. In his philanthropy, Soros often talks of his desire to have a “selfless foundation,” where the emphasis is on the causes being supported and the leadership of those on the front lines, not on the foundation or its staff. This ethos permeates his political giving as well.

A key factor in maintaining this approach is his one-man political team, Michael Vachon, who has studiously avoided the limelight and the kind of self-aggrandizement that is all too common among political strategists and advisers. Even so, anyone who has dealt with or watched Soros in the political sphere finds it difficult to imagine Soros—famously a big-picture person—without Vachon, who represents him in all matters political and commands wide respect. Yet Vachon is the first to deprecate his own role and that of all political advisers: “If you win, you’re a genius; if you don’t, it’s someone else’s fault.”

Contradictions are easier to identify. Soros thinks money has too much influence in politics, but he is using the system he decries as a tool to change it. He would make the distinction that while most on the right, like the Kochs, spend money on politics to advance their bottom-line interests—to protect their oil and gas investments and to limit taxes and regulations that constrain their wealth and their business practices—his giving aims to bring about political changes that run counter to his narrow self-interest on a personal and business level.

Soros came into politics to oppose Republican politics and policies, and thinks the party has been captured since 2015 by a “confidence trickster,” but he believes to this day, even more strongly than in the past, that the United States would benefit from a revitalized and responsible Republican Party. Soros is proud of his support for the McCain Institute, and his longstanding relationship with the late Arizona senator. He’s surely right that a more diverse and tolerant Republican Party would be a boost for democracy. But given his toxicity on the right, Soros is perhaps the last person in America who is capable of bringing this about.

THE MOST IMPORTANT thing about George Soros as a leading donor and activist in US politics is that it is a role he has come to reluctantly. That in his adopted country, this man of many talents—as an investor, thinker, strategist, and philanthropist—is now best known, and at times reviled, for his involvement in politics is one of the great ironies of Soros’s ninety-plus years.

And yet he has made some very large marks on politics. He was in many ways the first “megadonor” after the campaign finance rules changed in the early 2000s. He has been followed by many others, on the left and on the right, and hasn’t been the biggest for some time. But Soros paved the way, whatever one thinks of that development, and as with all his other undertakings, he has been more shrewd and strategic, over many years, than almost any other. Other Democratic donors at his scale, like Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg, have created their own entities and often run field programs with staff accountable to them. Soros has worked, by contrast, to react to others’ good plans and ideas—as in the beginning with America Coming Together—and to empower existing organizations, building permanent capacity that he does not seek to control.

As David Brock put it, “The way that giving worked on the left was very different before Soros. There were a lot of ‘pop-up’ organizations. He changed the mindset.” Leonard Benardo adds, “He has been smart and valuable about the need for patient capital, understanding that the left has been plagued by funding streams that are too short term.” Cecile Richards, who first met Soros when he decided to fund America Votes, appreciated Soros’s approach when she took over Planned Parenthood a few years later: “George was steadily helpful in building us into a political force,” whereas for years, despite the organization’s broad base of support, it lacked any apparatus for politics.

Soros was the first significant donor to understand the importance of data—of a more scientific approach to politics, if you will—and has steadily supported the maintenance of a capacity to collect, analyze, and offer access to high-quality political data free of profit and marketing considerations. At the same time, by his leadership in backing ACT in the 2004 election, he revitalized largely dormant voter contact operations, and his investment in field organizing laid the groundwork for Obama’s electoral victory and (when adopted by the broad nationwide coalition Health Care for America Now!) the passage of the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s signature achievement.

Soros understood that the disparate and disconnected nature of the progressive movement at the outset of this century—issue and constituency groups working on parallel tracks, with poor communication and little sharing of strategies and plans—was a huge impediment to electoral and policy success. Virtually every investment Soros has made in the political sphere sought to change this dynamic, overcoming these divisions and silos through collaborative vehicles and campaigns: America Coming Together, America Votes, the Democracy Alliance, and more recently Win Justice, a field-based partnership of Community Change Action, Planned Parenthood Votes, Color of Change PAC, and the Service Employees International Union. While it is far from the case that the progressive world moves seamlessly and without divisions, duplications, and rivalries, it has developed habits of collaboration that funders like Soros have encouraged and rewarded.

As a financial investor Soros was closely watched, and he helped to move and shape markets by the steps he took. In the political sphere he was also keenly aware of being watched as a person who took risks that often made it safer for others to follow. As Andy Stern observed, Soros “also understood the theater of it—he believed in reflexivity and knew that his entry would create its own momentum.” He was the first donor to see the potential in state and local efforts, like ballot initiatives to reform drug policy or uncontested city and county prosecutor races, where he could make an impact. Over time he was able to change the terms of the debate, enact policy, and elect new leadership that made a real difference for millions caught up in the overcriminalization of America.

While Soros has fostered these deeper trends and made investments in structures and collaborations that outlast campaign cycles in a political world famously addicted to short-termism, he has also played an outsized role in the political careers of younger leaders of color like Barack Obama and Stacey Abrams, who have changed the face of American politics.

Soros has played a leading role in the transformation of progressive politics, and in the transitions to democracy of numerous countries on virtually every continent. And yet in his tenth decade the world remains by most measures a pretty disturbing place. While preserving the forms of democracy, too many countries—the United States included—have been drawn to authoritarian rulers and right-wing populist movements that persecute minority racial, ethnic, and religious groups and seek to dismantle the collaborative institutions to which Soros has devoted his life. In his native Hungary, despite Soros’s considerable role in helping the country move past Soviet-era repression, Viktor Orbán’s relentless and anti-Semitic attacks on Soros drove his Central European University out of the country, and it is not safe for Soros to spend time in his beloved Budapest.

Most fundamentally, the core tenets of open society are challenged as never before. Political and ideological differences can be fought out, as parties and philosophies have their times in and out of power. In Andy Stern’s formulation, Soros wants a system that functions, but is skeptical when one side has too much power. But those cycles of “normal” politics depend on a shared belief in underlying democratic systems and norms, and on a common understanding of the facts—a transpartisan belief that the truth matters. As Soros wrote in The Age of Fallibility, “Underlying the political debate there must be some agreement on the principles governing the critical process that is at the heart of an open society. Foremost among those principles is that the truth matters. Absent agreement on that principle the political contest deteriorates into a shameless manipulation of the truth.”¹¹

It’s hard to argue that in the United States (despite coming to the brink and stepping back from it when the 2020 presidential election was concluded) this scenario has not come to pass, with every election now cast in apocalyptic terms, with not just public policies on the line but the very existence of our democracy at stake. As long as he is around—and given his deep investments in institutions and movements that will long outlast him, beyond that—George Soros will be in this fight, the nemesis of those who shamelessly manipulate the truth. For as Laura Quinn of Catalist noted, “Soros is an emblem of a society which values institutions and norms—the exact embodiment of the enlightenment values they are trying to kill.”