When the Financial Times pronounced Wednesday that the philanthropist George Soros was its "Person of the Year," Twitter ignited with partisan congratulation and animosity.
The announcement seemed to sum up 2018: an elite, metropolitan and global publication honoring a man loathed by populist, nationalist and indeed anti-Semitic adversaries.
The FT described the 88-year old Soros as "the standard bearer of liberal democracy and open society," which is precisely why populists love to hate him. One tweet said the FT's definition of liberal democracy was "aka one world government under globalist socialism."
Since 1979, the Hungarian-born billionaire has poured $32 billion of the money he made as a hedge-fund manager into liberal, democratic causes through his Open Society Foundations. Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was sending copy-machines to Hungary to help the sprouting reform movement.
In the US he has supported liberal causes, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, and he's delved into the partisan snake-pit. He used millions of his own money in 2004 to try to prevent the re-election of George W. Bush, telling the New Yorker that Bush was "just chosen as a figurehead, an acceptable face for a sinister group" that ran his administration.
In the past decade Soros has earned the animosity of the emergent "illiberal elite" -- Presidents Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Russia and Turkey, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, to name but three. And he's become the bogeyman of the far right in the United States.