Letters | 1 November 2018

Political vitriol

Sir: Vitriol and incivility seem to be everywhere in politics just now. In the last issue (27 October) John R. MacArthur linked a ‘rise in national coarseness’ to the election of Donald Trump, while Freddy Gray hints at a longer historical perspective when he writes that American politics ‘has always been unpleasant’. That ‘always’ is not hyperbole: in Alexander Hamilton Ron Chernow describes in vivid detail the ‘vile partisanship’ of the 1790s, stoked by newspapers that were often ‘scurrilous and inaccurate’.

‘Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper,’ said Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States. The second president, John Adams, lamented the ‘sour, angry, peevish, fretful, lying paragraphs’ with which the press battered the government. By 1792, early America was already becoming accustomed to ‘post-truth’ public life.

According to Chernow, ‘anonymous attacks permitted extraordinary bile to seep into political discourse… The brutal tone of these papers made politics a wounding ordeal.’