Last week, after an interminable investigation and a special counsel report that showed President Donald Trump neither guilty of collusion with Russia nor of obstruction of justice, Special Counsel Robert Mueller testified before two U.S. House of Representative committees regarding his report and investigation. Anyone who watched the hearings understood that Mueller looked uncomfortable, feeble, and reluctant to have to be subject to this Democratic charade.
But nothing is ever enough. No matter what may reveal Trump’s innocence, the Left continues to baselessly insist the president is guilty of being a Russian stooge in the pocket of Vladimir Putin.
However, the question remains as to why the Democratic Party would decide to have Mueller come in to testify and not merely move on — accept the results of the report, admit defeat, and fight on other issues that could benefit them at the ballot box. In fact, the hearing made the Democrats look worse, in the sense that Mueller contradicted himself numerous times and often could not remember what was in his own report.
So why did the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives move along with this sham?
Contrary to what many of us may believe, politicians aren’t stupid. They’re calculating constantly, and unfortunately, can use that for diabolical reasons. These Democratic committee chairmen are no different. And the Left, in particular, is drunk on arrogance.
The entire ideology of progressive leftism is premised upon arrogance. The early progressive thinkers, such as Herbert Crowley, John Dewey, and Woodrow Wilson constantly talked about “the masterminds” controlling the lives of the populace — the heartland yokels who the elitists believed were incapable of governing themselves. We also see this phenomenon today in other contexts: On college campuses, anyone not in lockstep with the Left is shouted down and ostracized. The on-campus Left believes that the only valid opinions are their own.
This is the logical conclusion of progressivism. Its philosophy rests on the notion that the all-powerful, centralized state is the new “god.” It explains why the Left despises authentic religion. However, since God is infallible, that would mean, to the progressive, that the state is infallible. Hence, the Left probably does not recognize its own arrogance, believing that the “group of masterminds” knows more than the lowly, common man.
The great Jewish philosopher Maimonides (1135-1204) was known for looking for the middle ground when assessing character traits. However, he emphatically stated that one should go to the ultimate extreme to avoid certain traits — one of them being arrogance.
As he states in his most famous work, the Mishneh Torah (Hilchot De’ot 2:3):
There are temperaments with regard to which a man is forbidden to follow the middle path. He should move away from one extreme and adopt the other.
Among these is arrogance. If a man is only humble, he is not following a good path. Rather, he must hold himself lowly and his spirit very unassuming. That is why Numbers 12:3 describes our teacher Moses as “very humble” and not simply “humble”. Therefore, our Sages directed: “Hold oneself very, very lowly.” Also, they declared: “Whoever is arrogant is as if he denied God’s presence, as implied by Deuteronomy 8:14: ‘And your heart will be haughty and you will forget God, your Lord.’ Furthermore, they said: “Whoever is arrogant should be placed under a ban of ostracism. This applies even if he is only somewhat arrogant.”
So we see that even a millennium ago, it was obvious that arrogance is a vice to be avoided at all costs — for it will cause man to serve God less or, even worse, to stop serving Him altogether. Arrogance will inevitably convince man that he is akin to God.
Does anything exemplify the progressive movement more than this?
The Left’s intense desire to warp reality itself is the epitome of arrogance. And sadly for the Left, no matter how hard it keeps trying to ignore objective truth, it will continue to beclown itself.