Common wisdom says that once you walk downstairs to the place where the sizes of candidates’ body parts are fodder for discussion, where one presidential nominee calls another “such a nasty woman” in a debate, where middle-finger salutes at the working press become commonplace at presidential rallies, you never go back up those stairs.

On the eve of a midterm, we want to talk about whether that’s true and whether the 2018 political ecosystem caught the coarseness virus from 2016. And how do we get back up those stairs? How do we bleed some of the anger and vulgarity out of our political discourse?

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