DID CIVILITY IN POLITICS EVER EXIST OR WAS THAT JUST ANOTHER FOUNDING FATHERS MYTH?

The Election of 1800: How America's Founding Daddies Woke Up and Chose Violence

Picture it: The American political sphere, in the 2020’s. Ted Cruz is calling Mitch McConnell "a Democrat in drag" on national television. Matt Gaetz is dubbing Kevin McCarthy "the LeBron James of special interest fundraising." Gavin Newsom said Ron DeSantis's presidential campaign "has all the charm of a funeral home and half the charm of the DMV." Biden jokingly called a voter a “lying dog-faced pony soldier”. And just when you think we've peaked at high school cafeteria levels of drama, congressman Paul Gosar posted an animated video of himself killing AOC, leading to the first censure vote in over a decade.

Meanwhile, on cable news, a panel of extremely serious people in various shades of navy blazers are having absolute emotional breakdowns about the "unprecedented decline of civil discourse in American politics." The CNN chyron might as well read "BREAKING: Democracy Having Its Villain Era."

It seems everyone these days is lamenting the death of civility in American political discourse. They're all sharing the same desperate take: how we've descended from the hallowed heights of respectful debate into an unprecedented cesspool of ad hominem attacks and problematic rhetoric. The discourse has been thoroughly discoursed to death.

These self-appointed defenders of civility love to imagine a mythical past where America's founding fathers floated above the fray in their powdered wigs, engaging in perfectly civil debates about the nature of democracy while definitely not owning other human beings. It's giving very much "my parents never fought" energy from someone who's definitely going to trauma dump on their therapist later.

Alas, it’s all a myth. American politics has always been a little slap-fight between overly confident men who thought pants that went below the knee were for peasants.

Let's talk about the election of 1800, the original American reality show throwdown between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. These weren't just any founding fathers – these were two men who had literally created the country together, BFFs who had co-written the Declaration of Independence. And how did they campaign against each other? Ruthlessly.

Jefferson's campaign called Adams a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which