“The open society is under attack. A generation of nationalist leaders, from Viktor Orban in Hungary to India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, are even less tolerant of outsiders stirring up civil society. Conspiracy theorists blame Soros for everything from starting the Arab Spring to Funding the Campaign of the Attorney General Who Indicted Donald Trump”. financial timessaid Sir Mark Malloch-Brown, chair of the Open Society Foundations (OSF), which was founded by Georgi Soros.
As he puts it: Soros’ insistence on liberal values has caused a diabolical hatred that is partly explained by anti-Semitism.
Malloch Brown sees the defamation as part of a broader backlash. According to him, developing countries are less willing to accept the education of the Western world, whose “double standards” have also been exposed in the field of Covid vaccines and climate change.
The liberal tools of liberal interventionism are in decline
– He said, adding: In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, globalization has already begun to decline. “The seemingly happy bond between democracy and free markets has failed to live up to expectations.”
At OSF, he has to manage the transition after Soros decided to hand control over to his 37-year-old son, Alexander. Successions rarely go well, Malloch Brown points out. Alex and I have been busy thinking about how we can ensure this foundation retains the essence of the founder. “
He also indicated that his appointment as president in 2021 was not without controversy. “I am fully aware that the average age of my peers is probably half my age, and I could easily look like a silly old man, quite old,” he said.
Progressives should not lock themselves into a theoretical bubble
A few weeks after the interview, the Open Society announced a significant downsizing. He justified his decision in an uninformative press release confirming Malloch Brown’s description of the institutions as “black boxes”.
In the conversation, he spoke of “strategic opportunism” and “patient capital”. He reiterated the phrases in an official statement that the changes were necessary “to confront the forces that currently threaten open and free societies.”
According to the newspaper, all of this points to an internal struggle within an organization where Soros’ old liberalism is not always compatible with the identity politics of the younger generations.
There is a lot progressives can fight about without being trapped in a weird theoretical bubble. The time has come when Trump’s comeback looms in the United States and Bolsonaro lost by a point and a half in Brazil.
He said of the urgent need to keep the most important issues in focus.
He’s like a Ukrainian general
Despite all this, he says, he has maintained a belief in a world and in a seemingly fading value system. “Totalitarianism has fewer and fewer answers. It does not have such a deep political overture as that of well-thought-out social democratic governments.”
“We are not in a partisan political battle. But we are fighting, as Georgi Soros likes, between open and closed societies. Closed societies ultimately feed on themselves. They do not have the capacity to renew themselves,” he said, finally adding:
Listen, I’m like a Ukrainian general. My attack has not been hacked yet. But I feel that law, ideals and history are on our side.
(Cover photo: Sir Mark Malloch-Brown on June 8, 2018. Photo: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing/Getty Images)
