To a point I can agree with you - the Internet has certainly made it easier to spread invective political statements, diatribes, and so on. But one of the main thrusts of my op-ed piece was that it's started so much sooner than usual in the election process.

At first I thought it was just me and my rather quirky memory. But delving into ye olde newspaper archives at the local library I found that I wasn't mistaken. I looked back almost 60 years and found that the political vitriol started just before the party conventions and usually ramped up from there. Keeping in mind that the news media is little like it was back the 40's, 50's, and so on, I still saw the level of rhetoric that we're seeing now, just not so early in the campaigns. Even 4 years ago it hadn't started as early as it did this time round. And from my reading I find it's far nastier than it's been in some time.

Of course it's quite tame as compared to campaigns in the mid-1800's through the early 1900's.

You raise some very good points, but I guess my question remains whether the invective is worse because we're getting more polarized, or simply it's easier to find the most extreme rhetoric now. You're certainly correct that the electoral cycle is taking up more and more time (see, for example, how long the Democrats were campaigning for this year's nomination), so it seems possible that what we're seeing is a combination of the two effects: the ability for the coarser discourse to reach the mainstream via the Internet and the gradual expansion of the Presidential election campaign cycle.

I think people are a little more politically active since 9/11. More people always means more extreme people (as well as more non-extreme people, but you hear from them less).

It's a silly complaint in macro; look at what they were saying about Thomas Jefferson.

In micro, it's rather pointless, due to the changed nature of communications media.

But if we looked at, say, 1952, to pick a semi-random cycle, neither the Birch Society/McCarthy supporters, nor the communist and non-communist left, at the grass roots, were quiet and passively waiting until the political conventions to express their opinions to their neighbors and each other; they simply didn't have mass communications at their disposal as we now do.