One of my anti-conspiracy theories is that remarkably little money is spent to influence American electoral politics relative to the stakes of controlling government power.
For example, billionaire George Soros has helped drive murder and traffic fatalities way up in the U.S. in recent years by investing a rather limited (for him) amount of money in electing soft-on-crime district attorneys in big cities.
By 2023 standards, these aren’t huge sums of money that Soros gives, but who else makes campaign contributions to District Attorney races? Not all billionaires want to sow chaos in the big city — demographically similar Michael Bloomberg spent 12 years as a successful crime-fighting mayor of New York — but nobody else of comparable wealth seems terribly motivated to counter Soros’s insight that prosecutor races offer a cheap chokepoint.
During the Mostly Peaceful Protests of July 2020, Alexander Soros explained his father’s motivations to NBC News:
As a young teenager in his native Budapest, my father survived the extermination of Hungary’s Jewish population under the Nazi occupation — an experience that shaped his view of the world. … He believes in an open society because Jews and other minorities need rights and equality under the law to prevent another Holocaust. …
And we are not stopping. Earlier this month, our Open Society Foundations announced a $220 million commitment to help achieve racial equality in America, building on our existing work with groups engaged on issues including voting rights, education, drug policy reform and ending the blight of mass incarceration of Black Americans.
We will continue to fight to eradicate systemic racism in America. And we will never stop fighting the bigotry of those who sow discord, spread lies and engage in hateful, anti-Semitic rhetoric.
If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis … It’s about our response.
Note that while Cheney is often assumed to have justified invading Iraq based on a 1% chance of Saddam possessing nuclear weapons, his original quote from late 2001 was about al-Qaeda. I don’t know that he justified invading Iraq using this quantitative form of the “precautionary principle,” but it seems not implausible.
Notice that it’s not immediately obvious why Cheney’s One Percent Doctrine is wrong about what would be justified to avoid nuclear terrorism or, in Soros’ version, another Holocaust. Both would be extremely bad.
Cheney and Soros are formidable men who see themselves as doing what it takes to save the world from horrible crimes. “Avoiding another Holocaust” is a motivation that deserves serious thought, much as Dick Cheney not wanting a terrorist’s nuclear bomb to go off in Times Square can’t be dismissed lightly.
But they get carried away and wind up dropping bombs on Iraqi weddings or getting little old Asians beat up on the streets.
Directly preventing either great crime could justify severe steps.
But what I dislike are these triple bank shot Rube Goldberg plans:
1. Invade country that wasn’t involved in 9/11
2. ?
3. Prevent another 9/11
1. Elect soft-on-crime DAs
2. ?
3. Prevent another Holocaust
