He's a pedant; a pedant is someone with a hollow, puffed-up mind who, because he's full of words, thinks he's full of ideas, revels in his own pronouncements, and deceives himself in order to rule over others. He's a hypocrite who believes himself to be sincere, a Cain who fancies himself Abel.
In this shrunken brain, given over to abstraction, and accustomed to confining men to two categories under opposing labels, anyone not with him in the right compartment is against him in the wrong one, and in the wrong compartment, between the factious of every stripe and the scoundrels of every persuasion, intelligence is natural. […] Every aristocrat is corrupt and every corrupt man is an aristocrat.
The left that emerged from the Revolution displays a totalitarianism which, if sometimes latent, is nonetheless always present; it is based on hatred of those who do not think like it.
Hippolyte Taine, in his *Origins of Contemporary France*, described Robespierre in this way. But if, instead of Robespierre, we were to put Hollande, Valls, or even worse, Taubira, this portrait would fit them perfectly. Especially since "pedant" is both masculine and feminine, it thus places everyone on an equal footing, a notion so dear to these… pedants.
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