On Mar 15, 1:31 pm, John H. wrote:
"Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal' "
By Mark Alexander

Nothing annoys a liberal more than when one of their celebrated
intelligentsia defects toward the Right.

This week, yet another Leftist icon, David Mamet, announced he is coming to
his senses.

Mamet is a Tony- and Oscar-nominated playwright, screenwriter and film
director. His notable plays include Glengarry Glen Ross, which won the
Pulitzer Prize in 1984, and Speed-the-Plow. His films include The Verdict,
Wag the Dog, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Ronin (a personal
favorite). He currently writes for and produces the television show "The
Unit."

As an author and essayist, he has accrued a large and loyal following among
the Leftist glitterati.

Mamet chose to "come out" with an op-ed published by Norman Mailer's rag,
The Village Voice, entitled, "Why I am no longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal',"
in which he outlines, in some detail, his migration from the Left.

Mamet opens his essay with a quote from macro economist John Maynard
Keynes, who responded to a challenge about his changing views, saying,
"When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?"

You may recall that Keynes, whose early 20th century writings advocated the
"New Deal" socialist economic policies still embraced by Democrats, was
roundly criticized for adjusting his economic opinion after free market
economist Friedrich von Hayek critiqued Keynes' 1930 Treatise on Money. In
fact, after reading Hayek's seminal condemnation of socialism, The Road to
Serfdom, Keynes proclaimed, "Morally and philosophically I find myself in
agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with
it, but in deeply moved agreement." (Apparently, Demos did not get the
memo.)

According to Mamet, his own transformation began when he "wrote a play
about politics, and as part of the 'writing process,' I started thinking
about politics." Now there's a novel concept for Leftist politicos,
actually "thinking about politics."

He notes that central to Leftist thinking is the precept that so much is
wrong with America, and responds, "This is, to me, the synthesis of this
worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is
always wrong... I took the liberal view for many decades," says Mamet, "but
I believe I have changed my mind."

Mamet continues, "In my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not
always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which
I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous
communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of
which I was at various times a part. And, I wondered, how could I have
spent decades thinking that everything was always wrong... We in the United
States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged
circumstances--that we are not and never have been the villains that some of
the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a
confection of normal individuals living under a spectacularly effective
compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it."

Mamet contrasts current criticisms of President George Bush with the Left's
most revered protagonist, John F. Kennedy: "Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into
Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago.
Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at
the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a
Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the
Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia."

On capitalism: "Oh, and I began to question my hatred for 'the
Corporations,' the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my
hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could
not live."

On the military: "And I began to question my distrust of the 'Bad, Bad
Military' of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those
men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from
a very hostile world."

On the Left's relentless classist rhetoric: "Classes in the United States
are mobile, not static, which is the Marxist view. That is: Immigrants came
and continue to come here penniless and can (and do) become rich; the nerd
makes a trillion dollars; the single mother, penniless and ignorant of
English, sends her two sons to college (my grandmother). On the other hand,
the rich and the children of the rich can go belly-up; the hegemony of the
railroads is appropriated by the airlines, that of the networks by the
Internet; and the individual may and probably will change status more than
once within his lifetime."

On the freedom to think: "Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was
taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a
self-described independent (read 'conservative'), and he was driving the
flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught
that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first--that Jewish
law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow
out. I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to
attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held two views of
America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a
state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately
corrected at any cost; and the other--the world in which I actually
functioned day to day--was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably
trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the
workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the
school-board meeting)."

He concludes, "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. 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."

Predictably, some of Mamet's former colleagues and devotees among the
ever-tolerant and inclusive ranks of mindless tin men, were quick to
condemn Mamet for his changing views: "How sad that an intelligent person
like David would write such a simplistic, downright infantile article
filled with stereotypes and lacking any substantive insight whatsoever."
"Does this mean that you've given up on democracy and thrown in with the
authoritarians?" "I had no idea Mamet could be so shallow." "Mr. Mamet is
now simply brain dead." "I'm saddened to learn David is either a liar or a
fool or both." "Mamet is a political ignoramus who hides his frustration by
lashing out at an imagined 'liberalism'."

Notably, many of his Lefty critics mentioned Mamet's faith: "Our old friend
Mamet is perhaps too rich and too Jewish." And more to the point: "It's
been apparent for quite some time that Mamet is a Zionist. This screed is
just additional evidence."

For his part, however, Mamet's essay is courageous. He joins a long list of
Leftists who have moved right, including such notables as David Horowitz,
Chris Hitchens, Norm Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Nat Hentoff, Marvin Olasky,
Bernard Goldberg and Evan Sayet--all of whom are persona non grata among
their old colleagues.

There are also many Democrats who courageously switched political
allegiance and became outspoken conservatives, including Charlton Heston,
Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Bill Bennett, Phil Gramm,
Ben Nighthorse Campbell and Richard Shelby.

Of course, a onetime Democrat also became the 20th century's greatest
champion of conservative philosophy: Ronald Wilson Reagan.

President Reagan said, "I did not leave the Democratic Party, the
Democratic Party left me." To the millions of Americans who followed him to
the Republican Party, he said, "I know what it's like to pull the
Republican lever for the first time, because I used to be a Democrat
myself, and I can tell you it only hurts for a minute, and then it feels
great."

And a footnote: I can list countless Americans who have moved from the
ideological Left to the Right, but I am hard pressed to name a single
established conservative who has moved Left.

--
John H

You know what they say:
If you are 20 and you are not a liberal, you have no heart. If you are
40 and still a liberal, you have no brain