Two days after a disappointing third place in the South Carolina primary, Ted Cruz had another very bad day. On Monday, Cruz was forced to fire his communications director after he promoted an outrageous lie about Marco Rubio insulting the Bible. But instead of getting credit for holding what seemed like an out-of-control staffer accountable, the firing merely refocused media attention on broader charges that the Texas senator has been running a dirty campaign. In response, Rubio didn’t let Cruz off the hook and instead claimed that this was just one more instance of a pattern of bad underhanded behavior by his rival’s campaign. Donald Trump, who started the ball rolling on this meme by falsely claiming that Cruz stole the Iowa caucuses from him, chimed in with his usual “liar, liar” attack on him. The net effect of the incident not only undermined Cruz on the day before the Nevada caucuses but also lent credence to stories about his campaign being in turmoil.

The blowback ought to cause us to ask three questions about the subject of political dirty tricks. The first is whether it is true that Cruz’s campaign is qualitatively worse than others this year or in other recent election cycles. If Cruz is not really all that dirty, we need to ask why such charges seem to stick to him whereas other politicians generally get a free pass for the misdeeds of their staffers. And third, it’s worth pondering whether the sort of conventional political nastiness that no one would have raised an eyebrow about in the past is no longer possible in the age of the Internet, social media, and the 24/7 news cycle.

Is Ted Cruz really the dirtiest politician in America, as his rivals want us to believe? While he’s no angel, I think the answer is not really. Put in the context of a long history of political skullduggery, the list of charges in the indictment of Cruz as a trickster is not all that awful.

The Cruz’s campaign spreading of the rumor that Ben Carson was quitting the presidential race just as Iowa was about to caucus was a no-holds-barred tactic. But remember, this was not a story they invented but rather a mistaken report broadcast by CNN. Nor can one really be all that angry at the network, since the story was based on Carson’s leaving for home after the voting rather than heading straight to New Hampshire like the rest of the candidates. Carson’s camp was sending a bad signal to the public with that move and their subsequent explanation that he needed fresh clothes was as lame as the rest of his campaign (dry cleaning is available in New Hampshire).

I agree with Philip Bump who writes in the Washington Post that the rest of the charges against Cruz are similarly unimpressive. His “voter violation” flyer in Iowa looks bad but is a legal tactic that has been used by many others. Nor were his South Carolina attacks against Trump via robocalls or ads particularly terrible or, for that matter, misleading (Trump’s positions on a host of issues are liberal).

Nor are Cruz’s attacks on his rivals the worst we’ve seen in 2016. Jeb Bush has been praised to the skies since he gracefully left the race on Saturday night. But his super PAC attacks on Marco Rubio were as disingenuous as they were slimy. Though he is a good man, his campaign was not as honorable as the individual they were supposed to help. As for Trump, he lies about his opponents virtually every day with impunity.

Why then, is everyone ready to believe the worst about Cruz?

The answer is that in politics, style is often substance.

Cruz is a brilliant man and a deeply principled politician. But he also comes across to those who are not already his fans as something of a self-righteous prig who acts as if he is the only one with any principles. His scorched earth rhetoric in the Senate and on the campaign trail obscures the fact that his approach to the issues is usually quite thoughtful. He prides himself on making enemies in the name of uncompromising politics. But having spent years torching the reputations of others (including calling Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar on the floor of the Senate) in pursuit of his goals, it isn’t shocking that no one is prepared to give Cruz the benefit of the doubt.

Cruz’s reputation as a dirty trickster is similar to Chris Christie’s Bridgegate woes. It didn’t matter that no one could prove that the New Jersey governor had a hand in the bizarre plot to create traffic jams. The image of himself that Christie had nurtured of a take-no-prisoners bully both compounded and validated the charge that he had created an atmosphere in which such things were possible. That’s the same accusation Rubio lobbed at Cruz yesterday and it’s hardly surprising that it stuck.

But Cruz’s problems aside, what does the litany of accusations against him tell us about 21st-Century politics.

Only someone with no knowledge of American political history could look at the nastiness of 2016 — even the absurd lie about Rubio insulting the Bible — and see it as anything like a new low. Compared to the way some of our Founding Fathers attacked each other (Jefferson versus Adams) or elections that centered on accusations of fathering illegitimate children and corruption (Grover Cleveland versus James G. Blaine), Bush, Trump, Cruz, and Rubio are playing beanbag with each other. Indeed, 20th-Century hardball players like the Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and the Kennedy clan would laugh at the paltry smears concocted by today’s political class.

But unlike the newspaper wars of the 1790s or the dirty politics of the 1880s, no one connected with any of the campaigns can move a muscle, let alone plant a false story, without it being dissected on cable news and turned into a meme on Facebook and Twitter. The odd thing about social media and the Internet is that while it is playing an undeniable role in coarsening our culture, it is also providing a degree of transparency for political dirty tricks that was unknown in the past. Though social media helps spread false information at a speed that rivals the speed of light, it also provides a platform for the exposure of those planting the misinformation and then creates blowback that is usually worse than the original smears.

It remains to be seen whether Ted Cruz’s bad reputation will hurt him in Nevada or in the upcoming primaries as he struggles to hang on to his status as a first tier candidate. But the main lesson to be drawn from this is not just to avoid promoting transparent lies about your opponents. It’s that the Internet and social media may have rendered a long, albeit unsavory tradition of American political dirty tricks obsolete. If you can no longer count on getting away with lying about your opponents (unless, that is, your name is Donald Trump) then future political strategists may conclude it might be better not to try. If so, for all of our misgivings about the direction of our increasingly digital world, these innovations may be making it a little cleaner if not better.