One is nice, the other less so. See if you can guess which is which. The asterisks are mine, for the record. Liberal 1:

Jonah, you ignorant schmuck,
“Or consider Rousseau. This is a particular problem for me. I have some harsh words for Rousseau in my book. But I have some friends and acquaintances I admire who just love Rousseau. They say I’m reading him wrong. And as they are close students of the man and I am not, it’s often very hard for me to win that argument.
You have the self-awareness of a curtain. On what f**king planet does can this be considered an expression of serious reading and thinking? You admit you haven’t really read Rousseau in any detail, but you feel you can make confident generalizations about what he stood for.
Point me towards a passage in The Social Contract, or any of Rousseau’s discourses, or any of his writings (surely there’s a proto-Robespierre-type passage in La Nouvelle Heloise!) where his ideas come anywhere close to justifying mass slaughter, or slaughter of any kind.
Seriously. Get off you fat ass and read. What does Rousseau actually say? I know it must be hard work to actually consider what a thinker ACTUALLY WRITES, as opposed to the cliches that some invented caricature of a thinker stands for (your preferred method), but if you want to make arguments and stand by them, do the actual work of f**king reading the f**king work, for f**k’s f**king sake.
But when I say, “Hey, look, Robespierre and the Jacobins were even closer students of Rousseau’s and they found something in there that sanctioned the Terror. Did they all misread Rousseau?” And their basic answer is “yes.” To which I say, okay, but does that really let Rousseau completely off the hook? If there’s something in there that led very smart people to believe there was a philosophical and moral writ to slaughter thousands and erase society surely that should count against Rousseau on some level, even if it’s only an indictment against his clarity of thought and writing. No?
What the f**k does this even mean? What “smart people” were led to believe that there was a moral and philosophical justification for slaughter during the French Revolution? Does Robespierre count as some kind of “intellectual?” And what the f**k do you mean by “erase society?”
As far as Rosseau’s clarity of thought, read his actual writing and not just what some Republican “intellectual” has to say about him. I think you’ll find he was a pretty clear and limpid writer, and even a cursory glance at The Social Contract should show you that his political ideal was the small city-state of responsible, often-participating citizens, not the Committee of Public Safety.
F**king hell. You’re f**king hopeless.
[Name withheld]

And, liberal 2:

“But when I say, “Hey, look, Robespierre and the Jacobins were even closer students of Rousseau’s and they found something in there that sanctioned the Terror. Did they all misread Rousseau?” And their basic answer is “yes.” To which I say, okay, but does that really let Rousseau completely off the hook? If there’s something in there that led very smart people to believe there was a philosophical and moral writ to slaughter thousands and erase society surely that should count against Rousseau on some level, even if it’s only an indictment against his clarity of thought and writing. No?”
As I’m rarely going to have the opportunity to write to say that I agree with you 100%, let me make the most of this moment now! And, to tell you a story that could come straight out of “liberal professors run amuk on campus”: both my husband and I were philosophy majors in college. Both of us were, and are, liberal Democrats. Both of us were told (me once, he twice) that we simply didn’t “understand” Marx. (Which goes to show that in our case at least, liberals don’t always equal Marxists…and don’t get me started in Engels…) In my husband’s case, the ensuing “misunderstanding” was enough that the professor gave him a lower grade in a six credit course; enough that he ended up graduating magna instead of summa.
On the other hand, I’ve also been told that I have “misread” or “misunderstood” Burke, Locke, Hobbes, Smith and Friedman, to name a few off the top of my head. Oddly, it is always conservatives (on campus and continuing up until today, since there are some of us who actually continue to read this stuff) who tell me this. Coincidence?
Funny how “misreading” sounds a lot like “disagrees with me” isn’t it?
Thanks for the post. (I’m very anti-Rousseau myself.) Keep up the good work at NRO,
Liberally yours,
[Name withheld]