Soon after reading Jeff Jacoby’s column (see post above), I resumed reading Mike Duncan’s terrific “The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic.” By pure coincidence, I stumbled across a passage about ancient Rome’s own bout with Partisan Hypocrisy Derangement Syndrome (as I’ll now refer to it here on in). Duncan notes how a brutal fight over land reform and other bitter disputes in Rome revealed that politically “it was no longer a specific issue that mattered so much as the urgent necessity to triumph over rivals.”

And then Duncan quotes Sallust, a Roman historian who lived through the final turbulent years of the Republic, as writing:

“It is this spirit which has commonly ruined great nations, when one party desires to triumph over another by any and every means and to avenge itself on the vanquished with excessive cruelty.”