From another reader:

Jonah, I beg to differ. Cato was indeed pretentious, although I’m not sure exactly what a “git” is. His pretension was seen by going commando under his toga, the rough equivalent of an America pol running around in cocked hat and knee breeches in memory of George Washington. If that isn’t pretentious I don’t know what would be.
The “Republican ideal” he fought for was in practice little but a license for Roman aristocrats to loot the rest of the world, then using its stolen resources to fight civil wars among themselves while killing millions of people in the process. The closest approximation I can think of today to the Republic of his time would be a “republic” of, by and for the Italian and Russian mafias.
Had Cato proposed some reasonable reforms that might have saved the Republic, then defending him would be appropriate. He didn’t. He only proposed a continuation of the comprehensively failed Republic of recent decades, which eventually committed suicide so thoroughly that the vast majority of the Romans acquiesced with little regret to the introduction of an autocracy. Under the Empire the common people at least had only one tyrant. Under the late Republic they had dozens of tyrants and wannabees.