"all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice . . . the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." Marx, riffing on Hegel, failed to realize how farcical this repetition can be. The most shocking thing isn't the obvious parallels to modern day events with hand-wringing, useless bourgeois elites permitting a strutting clown to appoint himself emperor. Rather, it's the ease with which Trump is accomplishing the same feat compared to RXKNephew Napoleon, who had to engage in a constant contortionist act playing France's competing royalist factions against one another and the bubbling discontented proletariat. Trump by contrast has the entire force of America's capital behind him with only an inconsequential fraction of it devoted to propping up a useful party of controlled opposition. Louis' antics of bribing soldiers with sausages and barely escaping deposition as president prior to his ascension makes for a much more dynamic story. Marx's diligent, thorough accounting of the events in France from the 1848 revolution to its complete reversal by the end of 1851, while somewhat dry, is well worth reading.