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All this explains why David Mamet, America’s most famous and successful playwright, caused widespread consternation two years ago when he published an essay in the Village Voice called “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’” in which he announced that he had “changed my mind” about the ideology to which he had previously subscribed. Having studied the works of “a host of conservative writers,” among them Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, Thomas Sowell (whom he called “our greatest contemporary philosopher”), and Shelby Steele, Mamet came to the conclusion that “a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.”
On balance, I suppose that if you’re more interested in describing your world as you find it than in wanting to aspire to make it better, liberalism probably isn’t for you.
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He should just move to Europe. There his “liberalism” and “free-market understanding” would be synonymous.
In my experience, it is free-market libertarianism that is the idealized version of how things “work” and not liberalism, which accepts the grey areas and ambiguities and works toward making life bearable.
It strikes me as convenient that a writer like Mamet, after he’s struck it rich, would come round to the wisdom of free-market philosophy. A sinking back toward conservative thought is a pretty typical kind of slide, but one expects writers to fall outside the “pretty typical” category. Interestingly, William James went the other way — he started his life conservative, and grew toward liberalism as he aged…
“A few years ago he said to me that the old distinctions between left and right had become irrelevant to him, adding very mildly that fools and knaves of all kinds needed to be opposed and that what was really needed was ‘a United Front against Bullshit.’”
— Christopher Hitchens on Robert Conquest
[...] perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism” comes from the Conversational Reading blog, which says: “On balance, I suppose that if you’re more interested in describing [...]