Yeah, he was pretty full of himself.
I think he was influenced by other scientific egomaniacs of his time, John von Neumann being one, but there were many others. Asimov considered himself a member of that club, at least as I understand him.
He was a leftist I'm quite sure. He definitely believed socialism was the future. In that, he was not alone; the obviousness of socialism's superiority was "obvious" to the intellectuals of that time, educated in the 1920s and 1930s, when socialism was new, bright, relatively untarnished by any encounter with reality.
Of course, if they had taken time to study history, they might have figured out that socialist experiments of the past had come to bitter ends. But they thought that science and technology had finally reached a point where socialism could be made to work. Wrong again, for the Nth time.
Other very conceited scientists of the time included Brian Josephson (winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics) and Francis Crick (winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine, along with James Watson). Both were almost insufferable, at least to me. They were brilliant though, really astonishingly so. So I guess one must make allowances.
Personally, I don't think Asimov really belonged in the same orbit as these people, but he thought he did.
I would be very much surprised if any of the people I named were other than left-wing in their views. Particularly after the advent of atomic weapons, the enlightened ones all believed that a form of international socialism and one-world government was the only way the human race could survive the knowledge they had generated.
[Personally, I don’t think Asimov really belonged in the same orbit as these people, but he thought he did.]
If you want to bring up ego-maniacs, I nominate Carl Sagan. He was bad enough with his TV show “The Cosmos” but I sat through one of his lectures on astrophysics once at Bell Labs in New Jersey. His condescension and sneering smile of derision to his audience was entirely inappropriate behavior on his part,
especially since there were two Nobel Prize winners and numerous patent holders of sophisticated electronic devices in the seats. He was a rabid atheist and in a round table on nuclear disarmament, when challenged by another participant to explain an obvious flaw in his advocacy of complete elimination of nuclear weapons, he completely lost his cool, obviously enraged that some “peasant” would dare to question him.