First as tragedy, second as farce

 History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

~Karl Marx

I'm reading an epic biography of Trotsky just now, and this line describing the Bolshevik Party of the mid-1920s jumped out as somehow familiar:
“The party was shown a picture of itself and of its leaders which resembled those early medieval frescoes of The Last Judgment, where the virtuous, whose faces express nothing but piety, climb straight to heaven, while the sinners, concentrated symbols of vice, rush to damnation.”
There was a time when we treated our political opponents as fellow patriotic Americans. Why has the GOP chosen to follow in the footsteps of the Bolsheviks?
Feh.
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