In The New York Times, David Brooks says this in the course of reviewing a new Alexander Hamilton biography:

These days we think our politics are nasty and partisan. But our discourse looks like a Platonic symposium compared with the vicious fighting that marked the early Republic. While they were secretaries of treasury and state, Hamilton and Jefferson waged internecine warfare that was, as Chernow notes, of ''almost pathological intensity.'' Members of each man's camp wrote abusive newspaper essays against the other. The secretary of state proposed Congressional legislation censuring the secretary of the Treasury. The Jeffersonians fabricated crude lies about Hamiltonian embezzlement schemes.

Abusive attacks in the political media? Dishonest accusations of financial impropriety? The use of severe Congressional punishments as a means of dealing with political enemies? Golly, that sounds really harsh. Thank goodness nothing like that could happen now.