Quick, grab the smelling salts—pundits are having fainting fits over profanity in public discourse. Writing at American Greatness on Tuesday, right-wing military historian Victor Hanson Davis lambasted CNN as the “Crude News Network” because their hosts use “obscenity, crudity, and a sort of cruelty” in criticizing President Donald Trump. (Anderson Cooper told Trump surrogate Jeffrey Lord that if the president “took a dump on his desk, you would defend it,” and Reza Aslan called Trump a “piece of shit” over his response to the London terrorist attack). What’s worse, Hanson argued, such profanity has spread from journalism to politics. “Aslan is channeling the vulgarity of other journalists, which in turn has brought the inner vulgarian out of politicos like Tom Perez, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, John Burton and other Democratic grandees.”

Hanson is just the latest in a long line of writers to observe this trend. In April, writing for Politico, Alex Canton noted the “expletives ringing from large sections of the Democratic bench,” adding, “It’s enough to make you wonder what the hell is going on.” Last month, Josh Kraushaar, the impeccably middle-of-the-road political editor of the National Journal, tempted the dreaded reply-to-retweet ratio with this:

The cursing and coarsened Democratic party https://t.co/bWahX1GpJW — Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) May 7, 2017

The rise in profanity is real. Early in his presidential campaign, in 2015, Bernie Sanders implored supporters not to let anyone tell them that “politics is bullshit.” Gillibrand, the senator from New York, told the New York magazine this year that “if we’re not helping people, we should go the fuck home.” Perez, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, said at a party forum that “if you don’t have the trust of the community, then you ain’t got shit,” and said a rally that “Republican leaders and President Trump don’t give a shit about the people they were trying to hurt” with their Obamacare alternative. Congressman Ted Lieu tweeted in March:

Mr. President: If there was a wiretap at Trump Tower, that means a fed judge found probable cause of crime which means you are in deep shit. https://t.co/i7dUMtHXmo — Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) March 4, 2017

Prissy complaints about “the cursing and coarsened Democrats” do little to explain the cultural shift that has made politics much more blue. For one thing, this is a Republican phenomenon, too. Look no further than the president, who in 2011 said his message to China will be, “Listen you motherfuckers, we’re going to tax you 25 percent!” (Trump has since learned that he needs the help of these motherfuckers to deal with North Korea.) In 2015, Trump said he would “bomb the shit” out of ISIS. Last year, he said U.S. businesses returning from Mexico can “go fuck themselves.” These are only some of the indelicacies that have issued forth from Trump’s mouth:

But the current era of political obscenity also must be put in historical context. Privately, presidents ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Richard Nixon were prone to use off-color language. But in public, their political rhetoric was loftier, aiming to be more sacred than profane. When America was on the cusp of the Civil War, Lincoln in his inaugural address evoked “the better angels of our nature” and the “mystic chords of memory.” Behind closed doors, though, Lincoln could be as coarse as anyone, and had a predilection for potty humor.