The more things change......

A political party describes their opposition as "rabble" and an "ignorant herd wedded to worn out ideas." The President denounced those who had "sowed the seeds of jealousy and distrust in order to destroy confidence in the federal government." The President utilizes the State of the Union to denounce certain "self-created societies". The President's supporters take it one step further and insinuates improper connections between those societies and the opposition party. The opposition cries foul and charges that this is just an attempt to suppress freedom of speech and publications. Sounds like it is ripped straight out of today's headlines, only it wasn't.....it was 1794 and the all of this political vitriol was centered around the Whiskey Rebellion. A federal excise tax on whiskey pitted the western farmers against the eastern establishment, pitted Thomas Jefferson against Alexander Hamilton. It was the beginning of political parties in this country.

Other than a fascinating and important piece of American history it is just one example of how the political vitriol of today isn't much different that what is has been for over 200 years.

Some other examples of such vitriol in the 1828 presidential election Andrew Jackson was described as a murderer and a cannibal. His wife was called a prostitute. In 1860 newspapers called Abraham Lincoln "stupid" and described him as an "ape". In 1948 Truman drew an analogy between the Republicans and Nazis.

When I hear journalists and politicians self-righteously intone that we need to "tone down" our political rhetoric all it shows is a serious lack of historical knowledge. Perhaps due to the internet there is more immediacy to what is being said today, but the level of "vitriol" is hardly higher now than it has been in the past. Rather than the internet, in the past it was newspapers. In the book Infamous Scribblers, Eric Burns notes that modern readers would be shocked at the vulgarity and partisanship of colonial newspapers. Instead of blogs and facebook, politicians such as Jefferson and Hamilton underwrote newspapers to insure their points of view were published. Burns wrote that "The golden age of America's founding was also the gutter age of American reporting. The Declaration of Independence was literature. The New England Courant talked trash. The Constitution of the United States was philosophy; the Boston Gazette slung mud, Philadelphia's Aurora was less a celestial presence than a ground level reek."

Besides treading on extremely dangerous grounds determining whose rhetoric is vitriolic, the current "debate" disappointingly exhibits a complete lack of historical knowledge and context.