A Conservative Journey Through Literary America – Part 6: Mamet of Tarsus

In March 2008, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright David Mamet, author of “Glengary Glen Ross” and the man many consider America’s greatest living dramatist, wrote an essay for The Village Voice titled “Why I am No Longer A Brain Dead Liberal.” This essay was a thunder clap in the arts community, leaving, as Dinesh D’Souza put it, the “left-leaning literary and cultural intelligentsia…in shock.”

The Saul-like conversion of Mamet has produced reams of commentary from both the left and the right, but it is the reaction of the left that is especially interesting. Many in the liberal “intelligentsia” have greeted the news by openly wondering whether such a political shift will result in the loss of Mamet’s famous creative powers. A “depressed” Michael Billington, for one, writing in The Guardian, is fearful of what Mamet’s conversion portends for his work because, “the precedents for a shift to the right on the part of creative artists are not exactly encouraging.”

So how did Mamet come by his new conservative frame of mind? The essay itself is fascinating, for it is that rarest of artifacts – the admission of an honest mind that it has been wrong about large and important things, and a frank embrace of what it once thought to be wrong.

Mamet tells us that while working on the political play November (which opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in New York in early 2008 and starred Nathan Lane) he started thinking about politics – specifically, how politics manifested in the clash between his two protagonists, a president who holds a realist (conservative) world view, and his Utopian (liberal) minded speech writer.

Mamet began to realize that a large gulf existed between his long-held liberal beliefs and the real world which surrounded him. For example, of the liberal aversion to business;

…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.

This is followed by an astonishingly mature re-evaluation of his views on the military;

…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.

Most interesting is Mamet’s realization that many of the reasons that he and other liberals had once lionized John F. Kennedy were some of the same reasons those same liberals detested George W. Bush!

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. Oh.

All of this is fascinating, but the question remains: Will Mamet’s conversion be followed by a loss of literary juice, as Billington and others feared? Of course not, or at least, not necessarily. The trope that one cannot be both creative and politically conservative is a vile myth, promulgated by snide liberals who fancy they have exclusive claim to the arts, a meme containing just as much validity as the one passed along by liberal professors that there aren’t more conservatives in academia because well, you know, you have to be smart to be a professor.

The reason liberal professors even say such things is because there is an undeniable dearth of conservatives in the academic establishment, so they come up with an explanation which elevates themselves while simultaneously degrading their political opposites. In so doing they fail to take into account other possible explanations for the discrepancy – differences in temperament, for example; differences in goals and values.

(It is not unlike, at bottom, the oft cited discrepancy between men and women’s pay – liberals are apt to see oppression in such statistics, completely ignoring what everybody outside of academia knows, that men and women choose, generally, different professions as a result of differing values and goals – family, flexibility, danger, etc.).

Can this be the answer to why there aren’t more conservatives in the arts? Could conservative minded folk just value the arts less, or in a different way, than liberal minded folk? Are we really talking about a difference in temperament?

Next week we will explore this possibility, and conclude the series.

Ed. note: You can read a new chapter of this eight-part series every Saturday and Sunday morning. Previous chapters –Part one, two, three, four and five.]

Matt Patterson is a columnist and commentator whose work has appeared in The Washington Examiner, The Baltimore Sun, and Pajamas Media. He is the author of “Union of Hearts: The Abraham Lincoln & Ann Rutledge Story.” His email is mpatterson.column@gmail.com.