An Open Letter to Our Rousseauist Counterparts
(aka the “Be Nice” Liberals)

There are doubtless many among you who are already ready to accuse us here at 1585 of being “closet Conservatives.”  Who else, you might think, but a Conservative, talks so endlessly about logic, or is so sure that their opinions are the only acceptable ones, or is so fond of calling people stupid?  We would respond by saying that we talk about logic because logic is good, and that we believe our opinions to be superior because they are superior, and that we only call people stupid when they are in fact stupid—but we have tried these explanations on you before, and you didn’t listen.  So instead we will respond by saying that we have tried it your way, and it didn’t work.  Here’s what we mean.

    After twelve years of profound assclownery under Reagan and Bush the Elder, we elected a Democrat in 1992, and reelected him in 1996.  Under Bill Clinton, things were almost miraculously good: crime and unemployment went down, the economy soared, and Democrats felt that they had pretty much conclusively proven that they were way better at all the stuff people agree the government should be good at.  Then, for some reason, they lost in 2000 (okay, they didn’t actually lose, Bush the Younger cheated—but like our high-school football coach used to say, a bad call wouldn’t matter if you had been winning 56-7; it shouldn’t have mattered that he cheated, because it should have been a slaughter).  So why did the Democrats lose?

    Many people will tell you that they lost because of the Clinton sex scandal.  But from what we could tell, the average American wasn’t as pissed off about that as the Republicans pretended; we have never met a single person in our lives who changed parties because of the Clinton sex-thing, have you?  What we have met are people who switched sides because of P.C.  Growing up in the ’90s, we knew lots of young people who didn’t particularly like being bombarded with endless lists of words they couldn’t say anymore, or being lectured by radical feminists who were apparently trying even harder to keep everyone from having sex than the Christian Right was; we knew lots of attractive women who were tired of being called sell-outs and accused of having eating disorders, and we certainly knew buttloads of heterosexual white males who didn’t particularly appreciate being told that they were evil every ten seconds even though they hadn’t done anything.  (NOTE: 1585s love gay people, ethnic minorities, and women; we just don’t do the “straight white males are the cause of all the world’s problems” thing, because it is oversimplified and unproductive.)

    But mainly, we knew people who didn't like the way that the concept of fairness got all screwed up.  When it got to the point where elementary schools were banning the game of tag because it lowered the self-esteem of the kids who couldn’t run fast, tons of people became embarrassed to call themselves Liberals—and all this started happening before the Clinton sex scandal.

    Trying to eliminate all traces of competition—all dynamics where some people win and others lose—from life is a mad, impossible quest; it is the very essence of tilting at windmills.  Camille Paglia (a member of the 1585 Hall of Fame) saw the Left as being divided into the Rousseauist and the Sadean philosophies.  Rousseauists believe that life in its natural state is completely fair, and that if anyone ever has to feel bad about themself, something must be wrong, and that thing needs to be fixed somehow (and that it must therefore be possible to fix it, even if it isn’t).  Sadeans, on the other hand, recognize that all human existence is predicated on competition, that most human motivation is self-interested, and that some people are just clearly better at some things than other people are—Sadeans are still liberals; they are just liberals who refuse to deny reality.

    At this point, after several paragraphs of slamming our fellow Liberals, we here at 1585 would like to make it clear that the vast majority of our disagreements are with the Conservatives—it’s just that, well… you’re getting in our way.  In fact, you are not only making it harder for us to oppose the Conservatives, you are helping the Conservatives.  You see, amid all your ban-sports-because-they-make-the-slow-kids-sad, ban-magazines-because-they-make-the-ugly-kids-sad, ban-tests-because-they-make-the-dumb-kids-sad frenzy, you forgot something: the conservatives are the fucking dumb kids!  If you can’t ever tell people they’re wrong, or tell dumb people that they’re dumb, or acknowledge that some people are simply smarter than others and that the opinions of those people count for more, then there is no longer any way to fight the Conservatives.  Nice going, dipshits.

    And to affirm our status as part of the Left, we will introduce our conclusion by quoting that most liberal of Liberals, none other than Oscar Wilde:

“As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination.
When it is looked upon as vulgar it will cease to be popular.”

    As Wilde is using the terms, the modern equivalent of “wicked” would be something like sinful or nasty, and the modern equivalent of “vulgar” would be something like dumb, boring and outdated.  In a nutshell, this is exactly where P.C. went wrong.  Its core philosophy was to promote a dynamic of nice vs. mean over a dynamic of true vs. false or smart vs. dumb—and when you are trying to persuade a bunch of people who are avowedly assholes, and in many cases quite proud of the fact that they are assholes, calling them mean isn’t going to cut the mustard.  Know why?  Because assholes enjoy being called “mean” by nerds—that’s why they are assholes in the first place!  On the other hand, nobody likes being called stupid.  Sure, some people may pretend not to care—but when a stupid person gets called stupid by someone they know is way smarter than they are, in front of a bunch of people?  Believe us, they care.  Now, you’re probably going to say that this will just make them angry, and that then they will be an even bigger asshole just for spite, right?  Okay, great, except for two things.  First of all, these people are already being the biggest assholes they can possibly be, and it’s already just for spite.  Secondly, the key is to make examples of people.  Target the biggest douchebag chump you know and make a complete fool of them when the maximum possible number of other people are watching.  Do you think any of the fence-riders will be lining up with the chump after that?  On the other hand, if you just call him mean over and over while he gets to look like a badass in front of everyone because he’s being “brave” enough to be “politically incorrect,” and you just keep standing there going “I am a nerd; please walk all the fuck over me,” the fence-riders are just going to bolt to wherever it is you go to sign up for asshole lessons.

    We tried it your way for fifteen years, and the result was Bush the Younger getting (sort-of) elected twice.  If we lived in a society where more than 50% of the people were masochists, then we heartily admit that P.C. would be the way to go—but we don’t.

    1585 is here.  Join us, or we’ll call you stupid and prove it.  And you will care.

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