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The internet made me a potty mouth

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You know, if you want to argue that the internet has made American politics “considerably ruder, cruder, and more paranoid than it used to be,” you’d do well to find a better totem of our lost virtues than the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates. Leave aside the obvious fact that the major subject of their argument — the question of whether to permit the extension of slavery into the territories — led to the bloody Civil War. And leave aside the obvious fact that the debates came at the tail end of a decade constipated with paranoia — from rumors of vast papist conspiracies, to racist yodeling about the “heathen Chinee,” to sectional beliefs that abolitionists or the Slave Power were conspiring against liberty itself. And while you’re at it, forget the other unpleasantness of the 1850s — the massacres in Kansas, or the bludgeoning of a US Senator at his own desk, or the national frenzy over John Brown.

While you’re forgetting all that, just remember that from August to October 1858, Stephen Douglas and his surrogates waddled about the state of Illinois, arguing that Abraham Lincoln opposed the extension of slavery because he wanted to marry a black woman.

But the debates were long, so Americans must have been classier back then.

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