A video clip of a conversation between Arianna Huffington and Bill Moyers about the victimization of George Soros features Moyers' claim that Fox News and right-wing pundits have become "Orwellian." Really? Orwellian? As in "like the Soviet Union" where dissidents are thrown in the Gulag?
This kind of overblown characterization strikes me as a troubling indication of the apparent limits of the open society as conceived by Soros, and the need for defense of pluralism of viewpoints and even basic First Amendment speech rights even from their premier proponent. Yet as I think of it, pluralism for its own sake, and ensuring the devices to maintain pluralism don't appear to have ever become the mission of his foundation or its grantees.
Increasingly, I've felt the left -- and the Soros-funded left in particular -- suffers from an inherent problem: rather than creating the conditions and mechanisms for a truly open society that is pluralistic with a range of viewpoints from left to right, rather than nurturing a climate for necessary adversarial debate, they are aggressively bolstering one perspective only, the "progressive" one, and in some places, in increasingly shrill and rigid forms.
It's worth reflecting on what the proposition is here: do the Soros board members and executives feel that the "progressive" view is so in the minority in a sea of conservativism that they have to artificially game it ahead? Or do they feel that the objective of the open society is, among yourselves, privately, to insist on maximum liberties but only to come to the "right line" and then propagate that line with all your might as correct?
Where's an example of a debate between right and left sponsored by Soros? Is the controversial grant to NPR about bipartisanship and fostering pluralism of debate and "empowering" local democracy? Or is there an inherent expectation that if liberal young i-phone-toting journalists tweeting and Livestreaming with the power of social media go wake up sleepy statehouses, they will prevail with their own "progressive" perspective inevitably?
EXAGGERATION OF THE CONSERVATIVE THREAT AND ELIMINATIONISM
Increasingly, I see an eliminationism that is profoundly troubling to me. When Bill Moyers -- describing Soros' views as he heard him at board meetings for years -- says that the right is *Orwellian* that's simply preposterous. Does he realize that? It's a horrible exaggeration. It's not true. The right is bad enough without demonizing it and setting up the proposition that *it has no right to exist because it is attempting to eliminate others' point of views*. An attempt to eliminate others' views would involve shutting down their funding or literally blocking their airwaves. Did that happen?
I try to understand how a seemingly thoughtful liberal man like Bill Moyers whose talk shows I've often enjoyed and who has always espoused liberal values could come to this illiberal proposition. Fox News is tendentious, and for a time even had the extreme provocateur Glenn Beck on it. But it only has 2 million viewers! Even allowing for the echo chamber around it in the form of all kinds of right-wing blogs and radio shows like Rush Limbaugh, which gives it some millions more, it still isn't any kind of real challenge, numerically or politically, to the left and liberal media amplified by social media.
Obvious case in point: Huffington Post, the online flagship of the "progressives" and liberals in America, has 35 million unique visitors a month. Now to be sure, some are only coming for the cat pictures or the missing babies, but many, many millions are absorbing the politics as well, as we can see in their replay of the vast hugely influential tech press (TechCrunch, was bought out by AOL, as was Huffington Post) and all the related "alternative" (but increasingly influential) web sites like Redditt. The many, many more millions that Huffington has in her empire and on people's i-phones absolutely dwarfs the old conservative bastions, even in TV.
Does anybody realize that?! Network TV and its more lefty variants like MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and now Current TV with the wayward Olbermann also have millions and millions of ardent fans and high-profile connected blogs like Daily Kos are enormously influential. And look at the comments under Paul Kruger's columns -- thousands of them -- or the liberals of the Washington Post -- even more thousands -- and you see the left and the liberal media and social media are heavily influential and command the mindshare of millions and millions of people. Why all the agida about Fox?
This was the question I put to Michael Massing, when he began the eliminationist drumbeat with Fox News in a piece titled "It's Time to Scrutinize Fox" -- he believed it should be investigated, like the Murdoch properties in England over the cell phone hacking scandal, even though there didn't appear to be any probable cause -- "just because". That is, he was just for having an investigatory look, because Fox was so bad. I don't have TV or watch it, and when I glimpse Fox in a doctor's office I get why he finds it biased or unappetizing. But all in all, I found his demand for "scrutiny" of that sort troubling -- as he'd find it if Rush Limbaugh demanded it of the New York Review of Books itself. It bewildered me, coming from a man whose lifetime was devoted to founding CPJ and many other ventures for the protection of independent journalism. Isn't the premise of free speech to allow more of it when bad speech appears? It's as if having independent journalism and funding it through foundations and having a voice and even being quite influential with books and articles in The New York Review of Books is never enough. The leftists want total power, too; they want hegemony; they don't want Fox News even in the view.
Although in fact their existing hegemony enabled them to put Obama into power -- a vote I shared with them -- the reaction against some of Obama's "stealth socialism" caused the right-wing and Republicans to prevail in the House in the Congressional elections, and now poses a real challenge to a second term for Obama. And I think -- I hope -- that it's merely election fever now for liberals when they express such a fear of backlash from the right, that they have decided that it so constitutes a threat that we must describe it as "Orwellian".
I see it differently. I see the backlash as induced by some of their own extremism and ideological rigidity, and their own inability to persuade Americans to adopt their "progressive" agenda or reassure them that they are not eliminationist. And there's a small but persistent movement in Occupy Wall Street that believes you don't try to persuade or reason anymore, you just occupy, and push over police barriers, and commit civil disobedience not by going limp, but provoking and pushing cops. They are backed up by the e-thugs in Anonymous who have caused hundreds of millions of dollars of damage to websites from Sony to Stratfor to even Gawker.
FACTOLOGY AND SCIENTISM
A key reason why liberals can mount this dubious "Orwell" proposition these days about Fox (instead of worrying more about Anonymous) is because the rise of 24/7 news cycles, social media, and enormous capacity for investigating and leveraging information (including through crowd-sourcing) has fed a particular ill of our time: the idea that facts are always findable and always right and always interpreted correctly by those who wield them.
Usually, this flaw -- when seen in the right -- is called by liberals like Steven Colbert as "truthiness". But on shows like Colbert's own or particularly the Jon Stewart Show, the proposition is, in fact, that "truthiness" of their sort wins: we smart urban sophisticates can find the facts to nail you to the wall, and we can expose your lies every time, without fail. Over and over, every night, we watch and marvel at the ability of the Jon Stewart Show fact-finders to dredge up old newsreels to show hypocrisy, or dig up statistical facts that completely blow O'Reilly or other targets out of the water. The findings are legitimate in many -- but not all -- instances. Yet the act of endlessly "fact-finding" without any self-doubt inevitably creates a wall of illusion of ominipotence that prevents fresh perceptions.
What such self-righteous "fact-finding" modes create is an environment for scientism to take root -- a topic Leon Wieseltier has taken up recently regarding an atheist's book, with great insight. With scientism, there is a belief not only that science has all the answers, but more practically, that the facts are all obtainable by imperfect humans, now especially that they have the Internet and all of social media to help them.
In the old days, you'd have to be I.F. Stone, dredging up old Congressional hearing transcripts and literally dogging the feet of officials to get such detailed facts and answers. Today, you merely have to Google or read a WikiLeaks or look at an old show on Youtube. That power makes you feel invincible; it makes you feel as if you really can find all the facts and the other side, with its opinions so different than yours, is really completely stupid and unscientific. You have absolutely no reason to listen to another point of view -- you have all of Wikipedia and all of Factcheck.org to help you clobber the opposition.
That's why, for Jonathan Stewart, the figure of Sarah Palin isn't just representative of a constituency, a culture, a way of life, a perspective that is legitimate in its own terms; she's guilty of "having a little box of crazy under her bed" and guilty of the worst kind of seeming factual errors, like saying she can see Putin in Russia from her window or saying that Obama's health care program would give us "death panels". The philosophical and lifestyle and cultural realities behind her words that resonate for a good many people don't matter for the factologist -- just the facts, m'am, and let me nail you to the wall on the base of scientism alone -- especially my scientism plucked from my ever-ready "progressive" Wikipedia.
BECK SELF-DISCREDITS -- THE OPEN SOCIETY CORRECTS ITSELF
The vicious attacks on Soros that Glenn Beck and others have mounted on him (factoidish as well), laced with antisemitism and loony conspiracy theories, ought to self-discredit for the left and not make them feel so anxious. They're awful, and should be countered, and were countered, vigorously. Whatever his influence, it was this kind of malicious assault that lost Beck his slot on TV.
So yes, such outrageous assaults and conspiracies should be opposed, but regrettably, the way it is being done now with Bill Moyers' "Orwellian" invocation, a paradigm is set up whereby the only criticism of Soros and his theories and practice of the open society comes from the hard or even loony right, and the left and liberals feel in that context that they can only circle the wagons. What kind of open society is that? It also essentially forecloses any legitimate critique of Soros from the liberal or centrist side -- it leaves it all to the illegitimate extreme right. That's also not an open society. (If anything, it reminds me of the Leninist "hostile capitalist encirclement" idea Soviet commissars invoked to justify the need to prevent debate of their ideals.)
But is the situation so fraught now that really, the wagons do have to be circled and that the conservative perspective has to be declared anaethema to the point of "Orwellian"? That suggests that we must all fight as if it were the Spanish Civil War!
Yet Obama is in the White House. He has considerable administrative resources, as the Russian phrase has it, to shape the debate and definitely commands it, harnessing social media in particular to whiplash something like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). The organic institution of representative democracy called "Congress" -- only partly Twitterized and partly compliant with the earnest ministrations of the goverati at Gov. 2 -- is trying to pass an anti-piracy law. But "the Internet" -- which can take the form of Anonymous thugs DDOSing websites and boycotting GoDaddy's business because they supported SOPA, or just lots of kids on Tumblr and Redditt -- incited by Google and Electronic Frontier Foundation lobbyists, are demanding that SOPA be stopped.
Obama has said he will not allow any legislation that harms Internet freedom or innovation to pass, and his social media maven Alec Ross has helpfully explained to his hundreds of thousands of viewers that the president can veto laws like this. The incredible power of social media and the tech blogs and the Google lobby are utterly dwarfing any conservatives, or liberal Democrats for that matter, on this piece of legislation. Where's Orwell? It's hardly in Fox News or Rush Limbaugh or anywhere else. If anything, it might be in the new ability of the executive branch to leverage social media to overcome any resistance to their programs -- which is the fledgling Wired State. Remember when White House operatives told us to write [email protected] so that like KGB informants, we could report on any blogger that was not telling the truth about the health plan?
Ah, but not so the NDAA, you say. There, Obama caved and compromised. That was troubling, given that this legislation would make it possible to continue the shameful practice of indefinitely holding people without trial, even Americans. To be sure, like SOPA, our sense of the awfulness of NDAA has been shaped by that whiplashing social media, blogs, Twitter and the online news media that chase them -- it's largely a function of hysteria and hypotheticals and edge cases, as the technologists call them. In the case of NDAA, however (the petitions against which I supported), the hypotheticals become more serious, as people's freedom and lives are at stake; in the case of SOPA, the need to stop piracy, a normal and narrow law-enforcement activity under the rule of law in a liberal democratic society such as we do in fact live in, should not be thwarted by copyleftists undermining intellectual property in general as an agenda, and by Google, which just needs to support its business plan (upload free content, sell ads, let IP holders catch them if they can).
With NDAA, lefty lawyers edge-cased hard as well -- and in fact the reason the essentially "progressive" Obama could seem to "waffle" on NDAA is because he didn't think those hypotheticals would occur. That's the problem with over-amplification of hypotheticals -- edgecasing -- using technologists' tools where they've baked in some of their own ideology (like no "no" vote, only "likes"). They prevent you from understanding that governance is a compromise, not binary self-executing code.
The liberal open society can correct itself, but you have to trust that it can without too heavy intervention. Make arguments, fund institutes, try to persuade: if you decide because you didn't win and weren't persuasive enough that you are in an Orwellian environment, then you aren't fostering the open society you imagine.
WHERE IS THE ORWELL? THE PREMISE OF PLURALISM
We can argue about where the Orwell really is -- and that would be a good sign that we all still live in an open society not threatened in fact by anything truly Orwellian. But do we? I don't believe we do, and the threats I see to pluralism as a value come more from the left than the right simply because the difference between 2 million viewers of the old-fashioned non-interactive box called "Fox TV," even coupled with the 20 million listeners (or is it really only 3 million) old-fashioned one-way box called radio, is utterly dwarfed by the 35 million visitors to Huffington Post and its related tens of millions in the left and liberal blogosphere online.
I never hear -- ever -- from any side in these debates a call for a tolerance of pluralism and for parliamentary democracy based on factions and compromise. It's a winner-takes-all environment of hegemony and one increasingly of eliminationist rhetoric from the left. The ideas for sustaining pluralism in fact seem to come historically more from conservatives like Russell Kirk, the Conservative Mind ; in the works of conservative Robert Nisbet you see that conservatism offers the liberal idea of pluralism and the free market to rigid Marxist prescriptions (the left dismisses the idea of political pluralism disdainfully and dogmatically nowadays by seeing it only as a cover to economic neo-liberalism," a pejorative term ).
I recall the late Yugoslav Russian writer and dissident Mihajlo Mihailov wrote of Kirk and the notion of sustaining pluralism rather than political correctness as a greater environment for reaching truth and democratically governing the state. These ideas seem to have evaporated today.
CRACKING THE SAFE
And now some thoughts on where the title of my blog comes and a more nuanced take than Bill Moyers could give on the question of Soros handing out Xeroxes and ostensibly making free societies.
When I worked at the Cultural Initiative (Soros Foundation in Moscow) some 21 years ago, before and then after the August coup, one of the Russian staff people quipped that the office should be called "Open Society, Ltd." This sounded more funny in the Russian translation of the Western concept of "Ltd" -- "Otkrytoe obshchestvo zakrytogo typa" or literally "Open Society of the Closed Type".
There were a lot of reasons for that nick-name -- while the Open Society Institute tried to support an opening of Soviet society at the time, they had to collaborate with the powers-that-be even to have permission for an office, and that meant various GRU and KGB agents roaming around the foundation or even holding staff positions. Compromises were made. Financial inspectors constantly tried to pounce on the low-hanging fruit of people converting dollars into rubles and handing out grants and handing out things like Xerox machines and laptops. I had one Soviet boss who threw people's civil society grant applications in the garbage and others who endlessly vetted them for political correctness.
The other piece of it was that in going about the task in a closed society, the Foundation couldn't always be transparent about its methods, and then the various Soviet bureaucrats and control freaks that had to be tolerated as part of the exercise also made it closed. There was the sense of a hidden agenda for all parties involved. The fact that a good number of Xerox machines and the control of the civil society grants were handed deliberately to Gleb Pavlovsky, who spent many years afterwards as a Kremlin advisor, particularly under Putin, lets us know that this proposition of making an open society in Russia was not quite the thing that Bill Moyer implies when he extols the role of Soros in giving out Xerox machines. To be sure, Vyacheslav Igrunov was among the decision-makers for civil society grants as well --, a Yabloko liberal and social democrat who later also inevitably cooperated with Putin in the controlled Duma or state parliament. Others like the sociologist Andrei Fadin (who tragically died in a car crash) were involved and they sometimes disagreed.
But there were Xerox machines, and then there were Xerox machines. I remember when I studied the formation of the crowds surrounding Yeltsin in those days very carefully (I wrote an article for New Politics in 1991 but it's not online), I had to conclude that small businesses that had been encouraged to appear under Gorbachev's perestroika, loosely attached to state enterprises, maybe did more of the Xeroxing than Soros grantees. It's an open question. And one outsiders aren't always good at determining.
The "Ltd" had other layers of meaning -- the essential illiberal contradiction and "non-open" proposition of having others outside come to pry open something that the state, and a lot of its actual supporters, didn't want. And then there was the most literal meaning of philanthropy turning to business: the corruption inevitably fostered when money is thrown around so quickly and in large amounts. One of the things I heard a boss talk about in those days was the legal registration of his tuna-fishing fleet.
Yes, some of George's generous gifts went astray. I still remember with a chill the laptop I gave away -- my own personal laptop in a fit of generosity -- to someone I thought was a democratic leader -- which he blandly used to cut out parts of the draft Constitution that other real democrats were trying to put in, including oversight of the KGB. Those were the times.
Emblematic of those years was a publication of the Moscow foundation that contained a cover of a blown-out safe. It wasn't just an image; it was a record of a safe that had to be forcibly opened after a director left under a cloud -- and it contained among other things his GRU korochka.
Whatever the outcome of our own elections, which will definitely split the country and let us know whether the Wired State or Congress is really in charge, the problem of maintaining pluralism and a variety of perspectives as necessary to a democratic society will remain acute.
And to some degree -- maybe a large degree, given the funds and influence available, this will be determined by the future of the Open Society Foundations themselves, now undergoing a transition in leadership and planning for the day when Soros, now in his 80s, will no longer create what are tactfully called "the problems of a living donor." Will that legacy be institutions funded as politically-correct hegemonic positions waging war to eliminate other politically-incorrect positions, as some say, and sometimes convincingly, or funding of the very means by which pluralism can still be maintained in an imperfect world?
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