The academic left and the deep state — really, the same group of people — suffer from identical insufferable attributes: they’re smug, arrogant, and self-righteous. But even as they push our country to the brink of a presidential impeachment, the American people see through them.
Their attitude permeates every television interview and op-ed. “Trust us,” they communicate in so many words. “We know better than you.”
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz called out the deep state on Wednesday, when he told senators that the FBI failed to adhere to “its own standards of accuracy and completeness” when it sought warrants to investigate the Trump campaign.
The game is up. Neither the president nor his congressional allies — and, most importantly, the majority of Americans — are buying their claims.
All that does is intensify their credentializing, the abhorrent practice of academics in explaining why they’re smarter than you. What they’re beginning to realize, however, is that most Americans have come to see the fancy initials after their names not as credentials, but as indictments of their judgment.
I say that — in spite of having been an academic myself, with some fancy initials in my byline — because as a historian of early America, I am appalled by the baseless claims made by three prominent legal scholars in front of the House Judiciary Committee.
As a legal layman, they’ll have to forgive me — and the majority of the American people — for wondering why their opinion matters, when they have no first-hand, factual information about the alleged “high crimes.” And, again as a history teacher, I might ask them why they’ve suddenly become so interested in the Constitution, when they’ve spent their careers theorizing how to contort it to fit their leftist aims.
Put simply, they — and their deep state collaborators — are undermining the republic by placing their hatred of President Trump ahead of the truth.
Even those who did not vote for the president ought to care. The impeachment proceedings are the rotten fruit of a decades-long effort to replace the authority of our elected representatives with the opaque authority of unelected bureaucrats — most of whom, remember, emanate from the same elitist, leftist circles that fill the ranks of the professoriate.
This oligarchy of self-appointed, intellectual luminaries does not merely thirst for power. They panic whenever that power is threatened — just as it is by President Trump. His persistent, wide-scale dismantling of the administrative state strikes at the heart of the left’s authority. The only action that would rival that would be the president taking on the higher education cabal — a fitting goal for his second term, the likelihood of which increases with each sham hearing in the House.
Here, at the precipice of an impeachment vote, the leadership of the House, along with their collaborator-witnesses from the deep state and academic left, possess the same two flaws: they believe they can sway public opinion (they’re “the experts,” after all), and they aren’t paying attention to the fact that the more they speak, the less the American public believes them.
Take, for instance, the Rasmussen Daily Tracking Poll on Presidential Approval: the president’s net approval jumped immediately after the hearings, so much so that after the three liberal legal-eagles testified, his net approval was the highest in six months!
Having worked in the ivory tower of academia, I can say that academics will more readily dismiss the judgment of “ignorant voters” than they will accept the facts. Over two decades, I’ve seen that routinely in professors’ attitudes toward students, their institutions, the Constitution, America, and any president who isn’t a liberal. We see the same dynamic among the 2.2 million (!) federal employees, who have the same vested interest in keeping the people’s will from affecting their daily work.
But what’s happening is truly a sea-change. Few political leaders in modern history — aside from Reagan and Trump — have been willing to take on the intellectual syndicate of the leftist intelligentsia. And predictably, those noble intellectuals have resorted to belittling their intelligence, because, you see, that’s the only weapon in their arsenal.
What they don’t know is that the American people know better. And even sweeter, the political repercussions in less than a year may finally deliver a knock-out blow to the academic left and deep state that is long overdue.
Kevin D. Roberts, Ph.D., is the executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. A “recovering academic,” Roberts has been a college president, history professor, and K-12 school headmaster.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.