digs digs digs.

from "The Attack on Sensibility," pp129-132, in Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction, Routledge 1986 (bolding mine):

Sentimentalism was always on the defensive. From the outset it opposed the individualistic and thrusting values that were transforming Britain into an industrial and imperial power. Yet it could not be allied with the cultured, gentlemanly élite, whose members often apprehended it as anodyne, escapist and simplifying, suitable as a mode for a growing mass audience of the semi-literate and for women who were marginal both to the economic and social enterprise and to traditional literary culture.

Sentimental literature expressed its defensiveness directly through its nostalgic visions of harmonious fellowship and virtuous men and women. The former turned out to be either isolationist and in retreat from the metropolitan sources of power or fragile in its contact with the worldly and the predatory; the latter were often reclusive, melancholy or doomed. Although in the philosophy and literature of the early and mid eighteenth century this harmonious fellowship and the image of the sensitive benevolist could present a social and individual ideal, towards the end of the century the ideal disintegrated as the political and psychological implications of sentimental doctrine were clarified and assaulted.

Politics

The fate of sensibility in England is allied to the political situation. In the closing years of the eighteenth century, the English reacted not only to the French Revolution and its aftermath but also to the political and social situation at home. The Anti-Jacobin Review, the new organ of conservative opinion, worked to bind sensibility to radicalism, or 'Jacobinism' as it insisted on calling any reformist view, and it blamed both for the unrest it feared was spreading in England. The radicals, on their side, were just as eager as the conservatives to align sensibility with their opponents, and they attacked as sentimental the reactionary nostalgia and emotional callousness they saw promoted in the Anti-Jacobin. Clearly neither side wished to be left in possession of a now unfashionable sensibility, but neither side wanted entirely to abandon the power of emotive, sentimental language.

Many of the British supporters of the early French Revolution were rhetorically sentimental, although its radical theorists were far less so. For instance the early revolutionary events and measures were fulsomely depicted by Helen Maria Williams in reports which were much read, for she was one of the few eye-witnesses of what she related. In her lengthy series of letters, she rapturously converted the French ceremonies and revolutionary festivities into enactments of the tableaux of the sentimental fiction she also wrote; French revolutionary policy became crystallized into poignant family relationships and scenes of domestic tenderness.' The liberal Major Cartwright responded to French events with the solitary tear of sentimental fiction, the glistening eye and the leaping and ecstatic heart, a response regarded as eccentrically 'whimsical' by conservative critics.[2]

Because of these and many other effusive reports of the Revolution, when large-scale killings began in France under Robespierre it was easy for opponents to implicate sensibility. In a famous cartoon entitled 'New Morality', James Gillray portrayed the figure of Sensibility weeping over a dead bird, with the works of Rousseau in one hand; a foot rests on the unregarded head of Louis XVI. In lines from The New Morality, published by William Canning in the last issue of the Anti-Jacobin (9 July 1798), 'Sweet Sensibility' is implicated in French crimes through its disordered morality:

False by degrees, and exquisitely wrong; For the crushed beetle first, - the widow'd dove, And all the warbled sorrows of the grove; Next for poor suffering guilt; and last of all, For Parents, Friends, a King and Country's fall.

Sensibility is accused of being unmoved by 'foul crimes, but sicklied o'er with freedom's name'. Under the influence of the Jacobin Terror, former liberals came to believe that indiscriminate benevolence and desire to benefit humanity would lead to malignancy and that the over-warm heart would inevitably grow intolerant. In Example of France, a Warning to Britain (1793), Arthur Young blamed sensibility for the belief that what ought to be is or could be, a foolish idea leading directly to the bloodshed and chaos in France.

The long French wars in which Britain was engaged on and off from the early 1790s to 1815 meant a recoiling from revolutionary ideas. They also signalled a retreat from internationalism and from tendencies that seemed to ignore national boundaries. The cult of sensibility that had swept Europe in the 1760s and 1770s and had made Goethe's Werther a household name in literate England, and Clarissa and Yorick familiar presences in Germany and France gave way to a stress on national literature and to qualities considered peculiarly British, such as restraint, self-control and stoical, wry acceptance. The years of most vigorous conservative attack on sensibility from Jane Austen, Coleridge, and the Anti-Jacobin coincided with the alarmist and military years in England, when sensibility was felt to be demoralizing, anti-Christian and childishly French.

When they wrote their most influential works, the major English radical writers were severely rational. Like their conservative critics, they saw sensibility as dangerous and self-indulgent. It was the mode of an apathetic middle class which enjoyed dabbling in philanthropy, especially when it involved groups far from home, such as African slaves. It did not mount a general attack on the social problems of an unequal and unfree society and it did not encourage political response: indeed, by giving aristocracy and privilege a humane face, as it did in the fictional pictures of semi-feudal harmony, it often reinforced the legitimacy of the ruling classes. In Pigott's Political Dictionary (1795) the Rousseauist sentimental festival of social togetherness became a delusion and a confusion exalting folly and sinking talents.

Sensibility, it was often noted, could coexist with social cruelty: 'Where is the dignity, the infallibility, in the fair ladies, whom… the captive negroes curse in all the agony of bodily pain, for the unheard of tortures they invent?' asked Mary Wollstonecraft. Pathos and effusions were no remedy for poverty and injustice: 'Such misery demands more than tears'; revolutionary action should not be defused by individual humanitarianism or an idealization of society's victims.

The clearest radical opposition to sensibility as a conservative mode occurs in the pamphlet and book war started by the publication in 1790 of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France; the Wollstonecraft quotations above come from the first reply, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, which attacked the conservative work for its smug criticism of the French Revolution and its support of the unjust British status quo. Along with Burke's later opponents, a newly anti-sentimental Wollstonecraft considered the language and methods of Reflections just as offensive as the opinions, since Burke's defence of the establishment favoured the high sentimental style with chiaroscuro effects and persuasive emotional vignettes of tumbled royalty.

Burke saw himself as a reasonable man, praising 'a manly, moral, regulated liberty', but Wollstonecraft emasculated him by accusing him of the irrationality and effeminacy of sentiment. He was, she claimed, weakly emotional and self-indulgent, viewing the Revolution as a kind of theatrical tragedy, while ignoring the suffering masses out of which it grew. With Paine and Thomas Christie, she believed that he was using his magnificent sentimental language to manipulate the reader into reverence for institutions that deserved only scorn.

*****

Reading this I got an extremely specific mental image of that fashy poster that's like THEY HACKED WOMEN [I thought this was a meme but it's just something some fuckwad candidate made in Ireland .. ] like it's straight-up this but instead of THE IRISH PEOPLE it's THE ANTI-JACOBIN. and "they" is "the sentimentalist popular press." abolitionist mom. bourgeois revolutionary mom. temperance mom

the sense of "gutter" meaning low or disreputable is cited in dictionaries dating from the early 19thc but I don't see an earliest citation or etymology for that usage (i sadly don't have OED access) ... "gutter press" and "gutter journalism" seem to start popping up on ngram around 1880, "gutter racism" around 1980. I did notice one of the early hits for "gutter press" also calls it a "prostituted press" in the same snippet.

i haven't found anything specifically linking "gutter press" and "gutter racism", but that doesn't mean there isn't anything. snooping through the usage over time for "gutter press" and then "gutter behavior" (starts cropping up around the 60s) might provide some insights but i don't have the patience for that ... i'm curious as to what cultural lines are getting drawn there but i've spent too long on this already ...

as for "gutter racism," starting around 1980:

there's a 1980 citation to a book called The Legacy of Malthus: Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism by Allan Chase that looks like the right usage, contrasting "the genteel as well as the gutter racism of post-Civil War America," but i can only see a sentence fragment through google books.

then in 1983, a statement from PA state rep Gus Yatron in the House of Representatives, cited as Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the … Congress. United States: U.S. Government Printing Office, in a one-two rhetorical punch of anticommunism and "antizionism is antisemitism". again the usage is to associate certain types of racism with the lowly "gutter" in contrast with the higher-status "(pseudo-)scholarly":

and from Edward Said in 1995, in The Politics of Dispossession, kind of an interesting usage because he is specifically contrasting two different people's rhetoric, but the context of the surrounding passage makes clear that he understands that this contrast is superficial and largely cosmetic: