Thursday
David Mamet, the US playright who for most of his adult life thought of himself as a liberal in the US sense - ie, a leftist with a favourable view of government - has had a sort of epiphany:
As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.
These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. "?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."
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 finishes thus:
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.
Interesting. Sowell is primarily an economist - and a great one - rather than a philosopher, although he has written on the topic (his debunking of Marxism is first-class). Even so, Mamet joins that small but influential group of writers, like Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and others who have become disenchanted with the default mode of big government worship of their peers. Mamet deserves applause for writing this piece; it appears in the Village Voice, and I bet his readership will get a sharp dose of the vapours.
I also couldn't help but giggle when I noticed that the piece is in the Village Voice.
Check this out. The slippery slope may have began back then.
Posted by Alisa at March 13, 2008 01:48 PM
Direct link to the article. When I followed the one above I got a picture of Alistair Darling. It was horrible.
Seriously, I think Mamet always was a true liberal underneath. You can see it in his writing, and you can see it way back.
I also like the way he defers to the wisdom of his wife in passing, not just here but in other pieces of writing as well. He's a smart man.
Posted by Michael Jennings at March 13, 2008 01:56 PM
Looking at the comments section below the article in Village Voice certainly indicates that many US liberals are more than willing to confirm Mamet's points for him. They are truly bizarre and thoroughly stupid.
Posted by murph at March 13, 2008 02:04 PM
Johnathan. VERY interesting. Learning about this kind of thing makes it all worthwhile, doesn't it?
Posted by Brian Micklethwait at March 13, 2008 03:28 PM
Good news indeed!
Any chance that Harold Pinter might....
No forget I mentioned it.
There's a cracking video by the American Libertarian party over on Devils Kitchen. Take a look.
Posted by RAB at March 13, 2008 04:48 PM
LOL RAB, that video is a riot! (I could do without the America-bullying-other-countries part, but I cannot be too picky). It deserves a post of its own, if only for Mary saving the environment by reusing her napkins.
Posted by Alisa at March 13, 2008 05:58 PM
I hear there is a new environmentally sound
Toilet paper on the market called-
Twotimers
Slogan
There are two sides to everything!
Ych yr fie! ;-)
Posted by RAB at March 13, 2008 09:15 PM
I read something interesting like that at the CATO blogsite, but the item continued with an interview with Tom Stoppard, who describes himself as a 'timid libertarian'. Stoppard is particularly incensed that he had a party at his place in Britain, and because ha had a pond on the grounds, he needed to hire two lifesavers for the occasion! Does that kind of nanny-statism happen a lot in Britain? I have not heard of anything like it in Australia.
Posted by nick g. at March 14, 2008 01:00 AM
Possibly the left will explain it away as a middle aged, family man.
"Changes in the brain due to ageing, social position also means he develops towards an authoritarian personality with a likeing for tradition - approaching death makes him more interested in religion"
And so on and so on.
However, he does have a get out of jail free card.
He is still anti Bush - he still thinks that Bush "stole Florida" (and so on), he just thinks the Democrats steal elections also.
And his anti government interventionism includes the wars of George Walker Bush.
It is difficult to over stress the hatred of the left for Bush - so as long as a person expresses hatred for Bush the left may give such a person a pass (at least some of the left, to some extent).
I would advise this gentleman to put all his attacks on government interventionism in antiBush terms.
For example, "George W. Bush's No-Child-Left-Behind shows the failure of Federal government intervention in education".
The left will hear "Bush is bad" and that will soothe them.
Just as, in the old days, attacking price controls as "Richard Nixon's price controls" reduced some of the hated of the left towards the speaker or writer.
Posted by Paul Marks at March 14, 2008 01:26 AM
That's an interesting way of handling things, Paul! So, even though Bush has done nothing about the dreaded Greenhouse, we can sneer at "George Bush's Greenhouse Policy", thus contaminating ALL Greenhouse policies anywhere! I like it!
Posted by nick g. at March 14, 2008 01:48 AM
A very interesting article, but one I'm not surprised to see. I've been wondering about Mamet's politics for a while now.
He is the creator and executive producer of "The Unit", a show on CBS here in the U.S. about an Army Special Forces counter terror team. It manages to be pro-soldier and fairly pro war-on-terror while also extremely skeptical (actually kind of cynical) about the motives of many of those in power in government and the pentagon.
I had assumed Mamet was a conventional liberal (American leftish statist) until I'd seen a few episodes of The Unit and then spotted his name in the credits. At that point I began to think he was going the way of Roger L. Simon and Ron Silver.
Posted by CALibertarian at March 14, 2008 07:08 AM
There's a cracking video by the American Libertarian party over on Devils Kitchen. Take a look.
Let's see
Demonisation of tobbaco industry*... check
Corporate profits .... check
Banks** ... check
Bullying other countries ... check
Abu Ghraib(sigh) ... check
Snotty nosed kids in desperate need of a beating ... check
Drugs as no different from alcohol*** ... check
I remember being told that the LP is going to try and appeal to disaffected Leftists. So I guess this is what it looks like. It looks like shit.
* Given the unbelievable restrictions placed upon tobbaco by the federal government, subsisides for tobacco farmers are certainly the least unjustifiable.
** Of course this is a legitimate point, but there is a way of saying it without coming out like a Berkely dickhead.
*** One does not need to be in favour of narcotics prohibition to know this is bullshit.
Posted by Gabriel at March 14, 2008 12:52 PM
Hey I just linked it, I didn't write it.
It does have the feel of the Firesign Theatre to it, yes.
And is probably designed to appeal to the generation that grew up with the "alternative society".
That generation (mine) didn't do "Old Man" politics.
We did Yippie politics. Taking the piss and challenging conventional left/right patterns of thought.
That most of the ideas from back then were unworkable fantasies or complete bollocks, is neither here or there. We wern't into forcing people into supporting our ideas, we were in to "Funning" them around.
Always remember that a lot of heads got broken in Chicago in 1968 for a joke that Mayor Daley and his stormtroopers didn't get. Nominating a Pig for President.And that was the Democratic Convention fer chrissakes!
Mamet is of my generation. It obviously took him much longer than me for the penny to drop, but he got there in the end.
The video is flawed yes, but it may well reach it's target audience and encourage to think and look deeper into Libertarianism.
Posted by RAB at March 14, 2008 05:16 PM
I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.
looking at Iraq today I would have to agree
Posted by hennesli at March 14, 2008 08:49 PM
Paul Marks,
We classical liberals (I'm a New Yorker, so "liberal" will always mean socialist to me, sorry Brits) and libertarians are not very happy with Bush either. He's used the war on terror to illegally spy on us, increase the police state, strengthen the war on drugs and the militarization of the police, promoted torture of suspected terrorists, and used scare tactics to force the American people to accept big-government. His economic policies are better than, say, Obama, but it's not like he's stopped spending. Bush is no friend to libertarians.
Posted by Paul at March 15, 2008 05:05 AM
Paul.
Senator Clinton and Senator Obama learned their politics in Chicago (Hillary wrote her thesis on the leading "community organizer" of her day, and B.O. actually was a "community orgainizer) so the chance that either of them is really interested in defending the civil liberities of "anti social" "un progressive" people like libertarians is zero.
Actually McCain (for all his anti free speech campaign finance restrictions) might be your best bet on civil liberties - indeed he goes rather too far for evil reactionaries like me.
"So you are not going to tell us where the nuke is or when it is going off - O.K. I am sorry to have bothered you".
John McCain was the only Republican in the debates to clearly take the no torture under any circumstances line. And I believe him - I wish I did not.
Whatever they say Clinton and Obama would be cutting bits off people as soon as either of them felt they had to have certain information.
Well Senator Obama would allow other people to do it, I suspect Hillary would do the job with her own hands (for kicks).
Posted by Paul Marks at March 16, 2008 08:01 PM
Paul:
Remember that in the accounts of Senator Obama and Senator Clinton, George Walker Bush is an ultra miser who is anti government spending on health, education and welfare as Warren Harding or Calvin Coolidge.
We may think of President Bush as a wild spending sick joke (right from no-child-left-behind), but to Clinton and Obama the problem is that he has not taxed and spent enough.
If you think things can not get worse (MUCH worse) you have a shock comming.
Again old white hair is your only hope. He opposed the wild spending of Bush right back in 2001 - when virtually no one else was.
Pitty that conservatives and libertarians are not helping Senator McCain.
Posted by Paul Marks at March 16, 2008 08:06 PM
CALibertarian: Check out Spartan as well. The hero of the movie is a Special Forces soldier who is ultimately honourable, but the film's view of politicians and the handlers and lobbyists and media that surround them is the most cynical I have ever seen, and that is really saying something
Posted by Michael Jennings at March 17, 2008 03:55 AM
