Thread by @OlegUrminsky

This article is crucial to understanding our political situation:
buzzfeednews.com/article/hnsgra…

I actually worked a bit on polling for the Peres campaign mentioned in the article. It was a heartbreaking loss, but we had no idea what it would lead to. /thread

https://twitter.com/ChemiShalev/status/1087359037400907777

In politics (and in political consulting) there is a fundamental conflict between the mercenaries and the idealists. People sometimes start out as idealists and turn into mercenaries. In the US, on the Democratic side there are plenty of both.

On the Republican side, it seems like the mercenaries have completely taken over. (Happy to hear from Republicans who see it otherwise). This can result in Rs running effective campaigns while Ds are arguing over ideology (or worse, signals of ideological purity).

But ultimately, this is the result:
"Despite everything that followed, Birnbaum is proud of the campaign against Soros: 'Soros was a perfect enemy. It was so obvious. It was the simplest of all products, you just had to pack it and market it.'”

An entire school of thought said that moving from communism to free-market capitalism would create functioning democratic civil society. Stiglitz, among others, has written about the failure of this approach:
theguardian.com/world/2003/apr…
The result was corruption and oligarchy.

Soros actually invested in the difficult process of trying to rebuild a civil society after the fall of communism throughout Eastern Europe. A civil society that is lacking in most of Eastern Europe and very wobbly in other parts.

It was a brilliant and lucrative tactical move to turn this on its head, and demonize Soros as a shadowy puppetmaster, to enable actual authoritarians to take over and crush civil society:
insidehighered.com/news/2018/12/0…

It's an act of amazing naivete to pretend not to know what they were doing:
“Anti-Semitism is something eternal, indelible,” said Birnbaum. “Our campaign did not make anyone anti-Semitic who wasn’t before. Maybe we were just drawing a new target, not more. I would do it again.”

I grew up in a refugee family, cut off from our relatives behind the Iron Curtain. We dreamed that one day things would change. Then, amazingly, in 1989, it did! But since then, it's been a long slow slide back into corruption, authoritarianism & increasingly closed societies.

And the exporting of the worst of our US economic and political institutions bears at least some of the blame.