No “Brain-Dead Liberal” Anymore
Playwright and screenwriter David Mamet is no longer a “brain-dead liberal.” The main reason? He has learned that American liberalism has it all wrong. “What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow,” he writes.
And society? Well, “I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.” And then: “I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.”
As Ed Morrissey points out, Mamet has basically become a conservative. A moderate conservative perhaps, but a conservative. His break with American liberalism came by his decision to listen to the other side. And suddenly he realized that the other side wasn’t as stupid as he had thought for years and years. Not only that, he also learned that whereas American liberalism talks about lofty ideals, conservatism - true conservatism - is more pragmatical and doesn’t look a the world as ‘how they want it to be,’ but how it is.
More at Jules Crittenden’s place.
Though initially quite scary to not reflexively assume the "other side" is stupid and/or evil, it actually becomes quite exciting and freeing. Every situation stands on its own and, son of gun, there are some nice folks "on the other side". I’ve enjoyed Mr Mamet’s plays and now its nice to see he’s "seen the light". I would disagree that he’s become a "conservative". I’ve met and know some "left of center" folks who share his "enlightened view"
The most important line in Mamet’s essay IMHO is this:
"As a child of the ’60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt".
Why is this important? because it reveals the cognitive dissonance that American "liberals" suffer from: they believe that government is corrupt, and yet they want more of it. That is why I can understand how thinking persons could be communists, but not how they can be "liberals": you can say what you want about the commies, but they don’t have to deal with cognitive dissonance; they just have to ignore the facts, which is much easier and less stressful.