A fan of playwright David Mamet’s plays and films (Glengarry Glen Ross, The Verdict and Wag the Dog) I am sad to read his claims in a piece this month in The Village Voice  in which he states “I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'”.  

Five pages are what he takes to explain his epiphany, after 40 years of adult philosophical attachment to liberalism.

Let me summarize it for you (and yes, please do feel free to read it for yourself as well):

According to Mamet,conservative philosophy is about tragedy and liberalism about perfection.  As tragedians, conservatives accept human nature as small and self-absorbed.  Constitutional founder's understanding of it was so insightful that they (miraculously) invented a segmented government whose three sections of justice, legislation and leadership literally exist to force one another into submission and correction, not unlike a radical free-market.  The playwright goes on to illustrate his theory by creating a story of people stranded on a trip and how each would organically know how to contribute to devise a workable survival plan.  

The perfectionism of liberalism he writes, which he adopted in the 60’s, was that
“...government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart,” and “...the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.”

He then spends the remaining pages explaining how he could “... have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? ... I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama,” ultimately concluding he must therefore be a conservative.

Sigh.  

If Glengarry Glen Ross were not such a great piece, Mamet would have convinced me by his seriously over-simplified and poorly reasoned spiel, that he was simply brain-dead.

Let me illustrate with a simple point.  Since when is perfectionism the liberal idiom?  And  why would pragmatism end in tragedy, unless of course there is no hand (invisible as it is suggested by radical free-market thinkers) or otherwise?  Does Mamet really live in an America where tragic circumstances are met by inhumane indifferencce?  In his America do people sit idly by when homes light up in flames, or only when lives go down in them?   Are all humans victims of circumstance in his tragic conservatism-- or is it simply those to which they assign value?  A thief steals your car and you have a right to prosecute by laws the asset-holders create to protect themselves.  A corporation steals your health, and you have no right as the market value-- not human value-- takes precedence.  

And on that other over-simplification, of liberalism as perfectionism, I would submit that after my own 40 years of experience I could state that people under stress will also run into burning buildings, dive after sinking cars and even sacrifice their own lives. Somehow this is an example of the failure of human goodness?  That legislating equal opportunity “rights” to overcome the barriers to inclusion many humans simply could not (and still can not) redress when their bias blinds them, is somehow impossible (as perfectionism implies) when in fact it is only one example of many undertakings that have led  to a point in American history where two minorities are in line to be President of a country Mamet finds exceptionally good?  

If Mamet has proven anything, it is that he is a failed liberal.  Unable to admit he has failed his own ideals he claims instead that under his self-serving definitions he is good enough to be a tragic conservative.

And with that alone, I do agree.