Why are Soros and Thiel funding Compact?
What could two capitalist oligarchs possibly have in common?
Peter Thiel and George Soros have invested money in Compact Magazine according to a new piece in Vanity Fair. Thiel for his part denies it, but his spokesman hedges that he “couldn’t rule out the possibility that an entity Thiel funds has in turn donated to the magazine”; so this probably just means that the money’s being laundered through The Rockbridge Network or whatever. There is zero question, meanwhile, that Compact is receiving money from the Open Society Foundation OSF, which means George Soros. So in other words, once we set up all the intermediaries that exist in part to obscure where this money comes from, it seems pretty clear that Peter Thiel and George Soros have invested money in Compact Magazine.
Thiel’s involvement is a story in and of itself — particularly since this is probably just one tentacle of the kraken — but in this article it’s Soros who understandably has the spotlight. Why Is a Progressive Mega-Donor Funding Right-Wing Ideas? the headline asks, bewildered that a committed liberal like Soros would promote ideas the piece describes as “reactionary,” “authoritarian,” and even “fascist.”
The answer, it turns out, depends on who you ask. Folks in the “Bronze Age Pervert” sphere of Republicans cosplaying as Nazis, for example, are claiming vindication and pointing at the link as proof that Compact isn’t, uh, as based as they are.1 Meanwhile, the OSF’s Leonard Benardo goes into the usual oligarch rhetoric about how Soros is just interested in “ideas.”
Other Republicans like Richard Hanania, meanwhile, have speculated that George Soros is involved because he wants to push a “socialist” agenda — but there are kinds of problems with this theory. One is that outside the asylum of the US right it is generally understood that Soros is a committed capitalist who has spent decades opposing socialist movements. Another is that Hanania’s theory just forces us to ask why arch-libertarian Peter Thiel is involved.
The third, and I would say biggest problem with this theory: if Compact is a socialist publication, why has it since its inception positioned itself against American socialists? The role of this magazine has not been to invite people into a socialist movement of any sort. On the contrary, it has relentlessly maintained a two-pronged attack on socialism: on one hand vilifying actual socialists as woke liberals who have been captured by the Democratic Party; on the other hand insisting that its version of centrist New Deal capitalism is the true populist position.
One possible explanation for this is that Peter Thiel and George Soros are both extremely rich men who decided that American socialism needed to be co-opted before it began to pose a serious threat to their wealth. Perhaps they don’t agree on thinks like nationalism and racism, but if Thiel and Soros can agree on anything it’s that things like mass nationalization pose a serious threat to their wealth and power.
This seems much more plausible to me than competing theories. Soros may like spreading his money around in unlikely spots, but there’s a reason why OSF orgs have historically focused on liberalization rather than socialism. The right-wing analyses, meanwhile, seem driven more by interpundit rivalries than by a serious attempt to understand Soros’s agenda. Once we view it through the lens of class interest, however, the explanation for a Soros-Thiel teamup is completely straightforward.
Ironically, BAP appears to have his own connections to Soros. As a rule, sparring among right-wing intellectuals about funding is usually just sour-grapes that a competitor got it instead; it would be a mistake to assume that any of our “heterodox” Republicans have scruples over taking money from Soros despite what they may say publicly.