In The Good Citizen, a book I've touted before, Schudson argues against the stern do-gooders who decry current public apathy. He points out that the mythology around the Lincoln-Douglas debates has served to bolster these critics' ends. "But," he notes, "the Lincoln-Douglas debates did not depend on greater virtues in the populace than we have today, nor do they indicate a generally higher level of public deliberation on pressing questions in that day than in ours. The debates were an explosion into a political campaign of an issue that politicians did their best to shun. There is much to learn from the Lincoln-Douglas debates about the politics of the 1850s, but there are no lessons to 'apply' to our own time, certainly not in the form of a rebuke to a purportedly diminished political culture."