Explanation: During the last years of the Roman Republic, many populare (reformist) politicians, like Julius Caesar, were accused by optimate (conservative) politicians of having designs of tyranny and monarchy on the Republic! Why else, after all, would they try to get the support of the POORS!?

... but many of those optimate politicians had, themselves, supported the brutal tyranny of the ultraconservative optimate dictator Sulla not long before, who started two civil wars (over a matter of a choice political assignment, no less) wherein he butchered his political rivals and seized their property while reforming the Roman Republic to defang the ancient (if limited) democratic institutions within it, giving as much power to the conservative oligarchic aristocracy as possible.

Almost as if the conservatives' only real motivation was their own power and privileges.

The more things change the more things stay the same.

Those who study the past are doomed to watch others repeat it. 😬

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history"

• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel