Kamala Harris won Tuesday’s debate with Donald Trump. She appeared coherent and composed; he ranted and rambled. It showed voters that she might not be the airhead that Republicans have sneered at; it showed voters that he hasn’t changed much in the past eight years.

Whether or not winning the debate will make a difference in November is another thing. Neither candidate gave viewers a clear idea of what they would do in the White House. They had obviously spent more time rehearsing zingers than developing policies. “Winning” this debate was more like winning a match in World Wrestling Entertainment – Hulk Hogan will pulverise The Undertaker!!!! Most of it is razzamatazz and the little that isn’t is incoherent.

Theatrical politics says as much about the viewers as the politicians. We are tuning in for the body slams and dropkicks, not for the transcript. It makes one wonder about the future of democracies which choose leaders this way.

America has a gold standard for political debates – the Lincoln-Douglas debates three years before the Civil War broke out. That’s 166 years ago, but it could be argued that their words changed American history.

In 1858 the country was being consumed by a ferocious clash of ideas over the constitutionality and morality of slavery. Abraham Lincoln had only spent one term in the House of Representatives, but he was emerging as the political leader of the anti-slavery movement. He decided to run for the Senate against incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas in Illinois. They agreed to have seven debates over 12 weeks in different towns in Illinois. In them, Lincoln honed the rhetoric and reasoning which he would later use in his 1860 campaign for the White House and for the policies and great speeches of his Presidency. It was a kind of primary for the Senate seat, as state legislatures selected senators until 1913.

The background to their debate is complicated. Lincoln opposed extending slavery to the new states in the west. Douglas backed “popular sovereignty”, that the state legislatures should be able to choose whether to allow slavery or not. Illinois was a pocket-sized mirror of the US – the southern part bordered on a slave state, Missouri, and was pro-slavery; the northern part supported abolition. The seven debates all centred on this momentous question.

Lincoln’s biographer Allen C. Guelzo has pointed out that the debates were fundamentally about conflicting views of what a democratic state was supposed to be. For Douglas, democracy was a process, a way of settling disputes by counting votes. For Lincoln, “democracy is a means, a means of realizing the truths of natural law that are hardwired in human nature.” The same issues crop up today, especially about abortion. In fact, Guelzo believes that Douglas won the debates: “It is Douglas’s procedural republic, and not Lincoln’s moral one, which has prevailed in our times.”

The format was exhausting. This week Harris and Trump were on screen for 90 minutes. Each spoke for three minutes at the most on a dozen or so topics – barely enough time to utter one or two platitudes. But in 1858 each debate went for three hours. One candidate spoke for 60 minutes, followed by a 90-minute response. Then the first speaker made a 30-minute rebuttal.

Both men were accomplished speakers, but even for them the format must have been exhausting. They were speaking to crowds of up to 25,000 people in the open air. Aided by the novelties of a railway network, shorthand, and the telegraph, newspapers immediately printed the long speeches in full. Broadcast across the country, they made an enormous impact.