Politics Have Always Been A Nasty, Nasty Business

Libby Copeland at the Washington Post makes a point I often make about politics by pointing out that even at the dawn of our nation politics here were a nasty, nasty business.

You want to talk dirty politics? Oh, we’ll talk dirty. We’ll talk about . . . 1800!
Thomas Jefferson was attacked by ministers who accused him of being an “infidel” and an “unbeliever.” A Federalist cartoon depicted him as a drunken anarchist, and the president of Yale warned that if Jefferson came to power, “we may see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution.” A Connecticut newspaper warned that his election would mean “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will openly be taught and practiced” — though the paper, which is now the Hartford Courant, did apologize some years later.
In 1993. “You turned out to be a good influence on America,” the editors wrote. Whoops! Never mind.

When we get to this time of year and emotions are running high right before a big election it’s easy for people to lose their cool and throw vicious, nasty hyperbole at those who disagree with them. And that nastiness is always followed up by people deriding the “coarsening” of political debate in this country, implying that political discourse has been getting worse over the years.
The truth is that it hasn’t. This idea of a golden age of politics when everyone was completely respectful of one another’s views and nobody ever made exaggerations or mischaracterizations of the other side is fictional. That age never existed, so we may as well quit pining for it.
Obviously, I think we’d all prefer it if everyone who engaged in politics in this country was honest with themselves and everyone else all the time. But the world’s “second oldest profession” (according to Reagan) has always been the same, and it’s never going to change.
Let’s just be thankful that mainstream Americans politics seldom get any worse than name-calling and lies, because it could be worse. We could live in a country where espousing the wrong kind of politics in the wrong place to the wrong person could get you killed.