Same as It Ever Was

Very funny video from Reason reconceptualizing actual rhetoric from the 1800 presidential campaign as 2010-style attack ads:

I was making a related point earlier today to someone who was complaining about some incoherent public views as registered in polls and how we now have "post-truth" politics. The fact of the matter is that as best anyone can tell levels of political information have always been low and most people have never had coherent political ideologies.

In 1960, for example, a majority of the population hadn't finished high school and the all-white electorates of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, and Arkansas cast their votes for John Kennedy on the grounds that Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery a hundred years earlier.