One other thought crossed my mind: to some extent what’s going on here is that people who take a public position are, thanks to the magic of the Internet, able to directly and immediately experience the sort of vile attack that politicians have been on the receiving end of for about as long as there’s been politics.

In “The Man He Became: How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency”, James Tobin describes some of the absolutely vile things FDR’s opponents printed about him, many of them claiming that he did not have polio, but instead had some STD (I won’t go into further detail here) that had driven him insane as well as crippled him. It’s pretty awful stuff, and that was 1932.