NY Times Mag: "George Soros Bet Big on Liberal Democracy. Now He Fears He Is Losing."

[honest.abe]

An excellent although somewhat depressing article about Soros' career.. his achievements, failures, controversies and about how much of the world has treated him unfairly.

Its a long detailed article. Here are a couple of paragraphs:

Yet the political realm is where Soros has made his most audacious wager. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, he poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the former Soviet-bloc countries to promote civil society and liberal democracy. It was a one-man Marshall Plan for Eastern Europe, a private initiative without historical precedent. It was also a gamble that a part of the world that had mostly known tyranny would embrace ideas like government accountability and ethnic tolerance. In London in the 1950s, Soros was a student of the expatriated Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, who championed the notion of an “open society,” in which individual liberty, pluralism and free inquiry prevailed. Popper’s concept became Soros’s cause.

It is an embattled cause these days. Under Vladimir Putin, Russia has reverted to autocracy, and Poland and Hungary are moving in the same direction. With the rise of Donald Trump in the United States, where Soros is a major donor to Democratic candidates and progressive groups, and the growing strength of right-wing populist parties in Western Europe, Soros’s vision of liberal democracy is under threat in its longtime strongholds. Nationalism and tribalism are resurgent, barriers are being raised and borders reinforced and Soros is confronting the possibility that the goal to which he has devoted most of his wealth and the last chapter of his life will end in failure. Not only that: He also finds himself in the unsettling position of being the designated villain of this anti-globalization backlash, his Judaism and career in finance rendering him a made-to-order phantasm for reactionaries worldwide. “I’m standing for principles whether I win or lose,” Soros told me this spring. But, he went on, “unfortunately, I’m losing too much in too many places right now.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/magazine/george-soros-democrat-open-society.html

[Sanity Claws]

1. bet?

Why did they use that term? The so-called paper of record makes it sound like a game, where a person weighs up odds of winning and then places a wager.
That is not what Soros did. He supported groups, etc. because of his beliefs.

[honest.abe]

2. Yeah, I hear you.

Unfortunate choice of words. I suppose the author was trying to be clever connecting his financial "bets" with his political efforts.