FIORINA POPS THE LIBERAL BUBBLE: “It has been impossible to miss the shift in tone among liberals when criticizing Carly Fiorina. The timbre of their opposition to the surging Republican candidate has evolved from dismissive and aggravated disappointment to disproportionately seething rage. Among liberals, Fiorina has inspired passionate resentment, and it isn’t hard to see why. She has rather deftly infiltrated the left’s comforting and previously impenetrable habitat of fictions, and they vehemently resent the contamination of the fragile artificial environment they have constructed for themselves,” Noah Rothman writes at Commentary:
For two weeks, Fiorina has been made to answer for what the political press has universally dubbed not merely the conflation of B-roll footage with actual events – an honest and deserved critique of her characterization of the Planned Parenthood videos – but a willful misrepresentation of the specifics. There is a reason for this: the image of the moving, likely viable fetus out of the womb – an infant born alive during a failed abortion attempt – is so grossly disturbing that it has the potential to move the cultural needle. Those images present an existential threat to those who would advocate for unrestricted access to elective abortion. The videos themselves cannot be discredited in the absence of an investigation, but the Republican candidate who has become their chief evangelist can be. In that way, the liberal activist and journalistic classes can perhaps vicariously delegitimize the bombshell Planned Parenthood videos.
“This is about the character of our nation,” Fiorina warned from the debate stage. To her credit, she has refused to back down even amid a withering assault on her credibility from the left. The intellectual self-deception that they have summoned in order to contend that Fiorina made her claims from whole cloth is borne more out of fear than frustration. Their bubble has been popped.
While the now-interlocked stories of Fiorina’s presidential bid and her impact on Planned Parenthood are still very much playing out in real-time, at the moment, it reminds of the way Tom Wolfe described the fury to which the left responded to the arrival of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to America in his 1976 article “The Intelligent Co-Ed’s Guide to America:”
The publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, however, was a wholly unexpected blow. No one was ready for the obscene horror and grotesque scale of what Solzhenitsyn called “Our Sewage Disposal System”—in which tens of millions were shipped in boxcars to concentration camps all over the country, in which tens of millions died, in which entire races and national groups were liquidated, insofar as they had existed in the Soviet Union. Moreover, said Solzhenitsyn, the system had not begun with Stalin but with Lenin, who had immediately exterminated non-Bolshevik opponents of the old regime and especially the student factions. It was impossible any longer to distinguish the Communist liquidation apparatus from the Nazi.
Yet Solzhenitsyn went still further. He said that not only Stalinism, not only Leninism, not only Communism — but socialism itself led to the concentration camps; and not only socialism, but Marxism; and not only Marxism but any ideology that sought to reorganize morality on an a priori basis. Sadder still, it was impossible to say that Soviet socialism was not “real socialism.” On the contrary — it was socialism done by experts!
Intellectuals in Europe and America were willing to forgive Solzhenitsyn a great deal. After all, he had been born and raised in the Soviet Union as a Marxist, he had fought in combat for his country, he was a great novelist, he had been in the camps for eight years, he had suffered. But for his insistence that the isms themselves led to the death camps — for this he was not likely to be forgiven soon. And in fact the campaign of antisepsis began soon after he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. (“He suffered too much — he’s crazy.” “He’s a Christian zealot with a Christ complex.” “He’s an agrarian reactionary.” “He’s an egotist and a publicity junkie.”)
Solzhenitsyn’s tour of the United States in 1975 was like an enormous funeral procession that no one wanted to see. The White House wanted no part of him. The New York Times sought to bury his two major’ speeches, and only the moral pressure of a lone Times writer, Hilton, Kramer, brought them any appreciable coverage at all. The major television networks declined to run the Solzhenitsyn interview that created such a stir in England earlier this year (it ran on some of the educational channels).
And the literary world in general ignored him completely. In the huge unseen coffin that Solzhenitsyn towed behind him were not only the souls of the zeks who died in the Archipelago. No, the heartless bastard had also chucked in one of the last great visions: the intellectual as the Stainless Steel Socialist glistening against the bone heap of capitalism in its final, brutal, fascist phase. There was a bone heap, all right, and it was grisly beyond belief, but socialism, had created it.
Fiorina has exposed yet another socialist bone heap – naturally the left wishes nothing more than to consign her to it as well.