Over the April 16/17 weekend, according to The Hill, George Soros led his progressive billionaire friends in an important strategy meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona.  The idea was to lay out the strategy for funding a progressive policy machine to go head—to—head with the notorious Right Wing Noise Machine, and develop progressive policy ideas, initiatives, and leadership schools just like the conservative policy shops. 

Should conservatives be afraid, or very afraid?  Or, like The American Thinker, just irritated?

George Soros first got involved in politics back in the 1990s when he built foundations in Eastern Europe and Russia to push his vision of a post—communist society.  He was associated with Jeffrey Sachs and his less—than—stellar shock therapy for Poland and Russia.  But Soros did not seem to be interested in helping built a bourgeois society from the tribal ruins of communism.  He wanted the peoples of the old Soviet Empire to vault in one leap to a post—modern, post—authoritarian, post—religious world, the world dreamed about by our own American liberal friends.

The Open Society Institutes and foundations that Soros funds worldwide are committed not so much to economic openness as economic shock therapy and a left—wing social agenda.  He supports abortion in Eastern Europe, needle exchange programs for drug users, and gay activism worldwide, but particularly in Eastern Europe, according to 'George Soros, Postmodern Villain' by Srdja Trifkovic in Chronicles.  In education, Soros foundations have promoted a move from 'authoritarian' models to more progressive education based on 'partnership' between teachers and students.  Soros is also eager to combat racism in Eastern Europe, and has developed a suite of western style anti—discrimination programs to combat victimization of the Romani people, known more widely as the gypsies.

What Soros seems to want, according to Trifkovic, is to 'destroy the remaining bastions of the family, sovereign nationhood, and Christian Faith east of the Trieste—Stettin line.'  (West of the old Iron Curtain, he feels, things are 'going his way anyway.')  In other words, from the perspective of conservatives, he is attempting to destroy the very institutions that did the heavy lifting in moving Western Europe from the old feudal, clannish world to the Anglospheric ideal of self—government under law.  He has bought into the left—wing view that family, nation, and Christianity are oppressions and superstitions blocking the breakout into the new age of universal creativity and community.

It is entirely appropriate, therefore, that he played a prominent role in the campaign to defeat President Bush in 2004, 'a matter of life and death.'  If he thinks that the way to his Open Society is through abortion, needle exchange, and gay activism, then he and the Democratic Party are a match made in non—judgmental heaven.

As Soros and the Democrats try to rush the American people towards their progressive nirvana, they might wonder whether their plans will really deliver the goods.  There are those that judge their bossy, top—down social transformation to be implementing social regression rather than social advance.  They do not see a creative world community but self—governing citizens reduced to the status of Mark Steyn's 'wrinkled teenagers' who get to decide what cars and DVDs they are allowed to buy, but in the important areas of life: education and work, life and death, are governed by a progressive one—size—fits—all policy.

Maybe they will find that the American people just don't want to listen to their message.  The American people were receptive to the progressive message in the depths of the Great Depression, when they were scared out of their wits by an economy in free fall, and they responded a generation later in the heights of 1960s drug—induced ecstasy.  But people free from fear may prefer self—government to dependency and subjection.  Americans just may not want to listen to the Soros Noise Machine.

Self—government is a concept that presumes that people have a right to control their lives, to muddle along in their little platoons without listening overmuch to resplendent generals, brilliant general staff officers, and international currency speculators.  Self—government means an elite willing to let people create their own society in their own way, an elite that can resist the temptation to bulldoze people around like social landfill.

When Pope Gregory's man went to England to bring Christianity to the heathen Anglo—Saxons in 597 he found a land ruled by kings that earned their crowns with wars of plunder and systems of dependency and clientage.  Perhaps in 2097 a future African pope will be moved to send missionaries to a post—Soros Europe to rescue its elites from their cult of predatory sexuality and its masses from their dependency on the welfare state.  Perhaps he will succeed in converting them once more to the love of God and the virtue of self—government.

We can only hope that he will not need to send his missionaries to a post—Soros America.

Christopher Chantrill (mailto:chrischantrill@msn.com) blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com.  His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.