David Mamet "no longer a brain-dead liberal"

Mamet's article is an interesting piece of introspection. Conservatives, though, shouldn't take unqualified solace from it. There's plenty of brain-dead dogmatists on the right, too.

I said "unqualified solace", Margaret.

Sowell, while a great intellectual, still fell for the Iraq Attaq, even repeating Condi Rice's risible warning of "mushroom clouds" on the horizon.

Funny, I find that most conservatives most of the time think most everything is always wrong.

Color me unimpressed.

I've always been skeptical toward these "come to Jesus" moments on the left and the right (see: David Brock, Dennis Miller, David Horowitz, the neocons in general).

A lot of folks, on both side of the political spectrum, appear to love them because that means another "recruit for their side," thus a win.

It reads a little like this:

The Left: "Oooh, we got the guy who called Anita Hill a little nutty and a little slutty! Score!"

The Right: "Oooh, we got the second-rate stand-up comic who's schtick comprises obscure references. Score!"

No one seems to question the poor judgment of these people that they have been so "wrong" for so long. Matt Welch of Reason magazine puts it best:

"How bizarre and distasteful is it, that the same people who -- unlike almost all of my liberal friends -- actually *did* believe in Marxism and apologize for dictators, are the most vocal in their blanket condemnations of people who never did any such thing? If I had ever been a Trotskyite, I'd spend one hell of a long time dwelling privately on my own character defects and terrible judgment, instead of immediately joining some other troupe & screeching out the same old insults to an appreciative (and forgetful) new audience.

"And I'm not just talking about [David] Horowitz here, or of people who made, in the paraphrased words of Martha Gellhorn 'that dreary and predictable late-life journey from left to right.' I'm talking about pacifists who became warhawks, Weekly Standard socialites who became Brentwood socialists, Castro apologists who became Iran liberators, college potheads who became parental drug-warriors, right-wing bagmen who became left-wing 'truth-tellers,' earnest Naderites who became earnest Wolfowitzians. People who confuse their own team-changing with some kind of 'new politics' that they can't stop yammering about.

"These people, in one direction or another (and frequently both) have made grave errors of judgment in the past. And yet many apparently believe that the best way of paying penance is not to quietly look inward, but to noisily accuse most anyone on the chunk of spectrum they just vacated of being anti-American, objectively pro-whateverist, and worse. Well, excuse me for ignoring morality lessons from former Fellow Travelers."

One day these guys think their ideology is just peachy, the next day they dump it like yesterday's garbage and shill for the "other side."

I'm a conservative and a long time Mamet fan. As he notes himself, his writing has always been more of a conservative bent than his public politics. In making this confession it seems like he is merely harmonizing the spheres of his own persona.

As a conservative all I have to say is welcome to a 1st rate artist and intellect to our ranks. As a fan I can only hope that he is inspired to create more great work.

One of the best lines I ever read was in, of all things, Playboy, when a fiction writer described one of his characters, "as dumb as a sixties liberal."

It is still a good line.

Mamet saw reasons
For taking a Reason-mag route
Found a good season
For throwing his inner lib out now

He's now a play switcher
White Way-ticket con
It took him so long to find doubt,
And he found doubt...

God and Mamet Rail

Mamet sounds more like a person breaking out of a fairly typical Sixties or Seventies mindset born of oppositionalisms of the time than anything else.

Joe Klein is roughly his age and has "revelations" of the same sort and gets into all kinds of messes trying to rearrange his Great New Discoveries into a coherent scheme. Over on Time's writer blog Swampland Joe actually tried to claim once that consensus liberal New York Jewish political views of the Sixties and Seventies he adopted and has represented since are the definition of American liberalism, by which he meant and included his dogmatic pro-Israelism and anti-Arabism. The combox regulars there had a good laugh at him and skewered him mercilessly.

I don't buy into either definition of liberalism presented here, Mamet's or Rod's. Liberalism proper is wrongly assigned the dogma of human goodness by those advocates of those -isms that believe in dogmas; it has unbelief in the dogmas of inherent human badness and the naive dogma of human goodness. It works on informed and fairly sophisticated knowledge that people will be good to the extent they can- that traumas, resentments, ignorance, and environment often pressure people to do wrongs, decide that wrongs are necessary or justifiable, and so on. Liberalism proper doesn't believe in government per se; it believes that if we must have government to restrain misdeeds (which is not in dispute in our times), we should restrain and counteract actual crimes and relevant violations and abuses rather than imaginary or fetishized ones, nor turn a blind eye to selected ones-- to the extent that we are able. Liberalism accepts what rigorous study- sciences- have to say about the physical universe and about human life, e.g. culture and family. Mamet's definition of liberalism contains too much classical Leftist retributive dogma based in the nature of Left/Right conflict of an age in the past; Rod's supposes that liberalism proper has an ideologically dogmatic and oppositionalist nature, i.e. has the attributes of his own belief system. (Though admittedly, people who defined themselves as liberal in the way Mamet did, do. And that's no small number.)

And for all we do, we do live in a collective history that defines the central issue set we are most polarized on (even though that is often hidden behind civility). There are always lots of lesser issues on which we can engage and finesse that on X we're "conservative" whereas on Y we are "liberal", and on Z we're okay with any compromise. But in the end those ways of coping, of surviving individually and distracting ourselves while the larger strife on a fairly narrow terrain grinds down the combatants and the arguments.

Jillian, I take issue with a number of your statements, but I don't want to get off topic here. Please contact me at jbruhner at yahoo com if you'd care to pursue this further.

Thanks,

John

"So, what, then, is liberalism?" IK

TR: There's never likely to be an agreement on this just as there won't be on "what is conservatism."

Still I'd say that most liberalism is based in "perfectionism" of some kind. The idea that through proper reforms, whatever those might be, humans can march toward earthly perfection. This might explain why Puritan New England became liberal/progressive while the less intense Anglicanism of the South led it to conservatism. The Puritans were more utopian while the Anglicans were more steeped in the past. I don't think seeing everything as wrong necessarily fits liberalism, but by focusing on idealized forms existing institutions will usually fall short. Likewise social criticism will be vital to reach the ideal. Granted all this would fit the Bush administration, in many ways, and therefore it is arguably a profoundly liberal administration.

Although in another sense it's not. In the US "liberalism" usually rejects market liberalization, but it trends toward belief in the absolute liberty of the individual's body. Hence defenses of casual sex, legalized prostitution, legalized hard drugs, euthanasia, and support for unrestricted abortion is mostly liberal. This is where "liberals" are different from "The Left." Leftists are almost opposite in matters of individual autonomy. In Leftism the community matters and it has every right to stifle self-harming behaviors for the sake of the common good or equality.

I'm sure there are exceptions to this. Some people who call themselves "liberal" have enough Leftism in them they have no patience for defenses of legalizing hard drugs and see euthanasia as harming the weak. Still utopianism and "absolute independence of the body" seem more universal than most things I've found in liberalism. The main problem with it as a description is that there are some on the Right who also believe in those two things.

Mamet should stick to writing dialogue. The personal essay is clearly not his strength. Mamet: omit needless words (and puncuation).

Rush's televions sponsors, the one time I watched it, were Brylcreem and Copenhagen snoose. I clearly wasn't his audience.

John, my experience with that is purely disappointments. Since this thread is becoming all about definition(s) of liberalism, that part can probably stay here, as can the question of distinction from classical Leftism. My characterization/definition of liberalism is, as far as I know, close to that of Hannah Arendt.

aaron
To this atheist's eyes, who manages to occasionally upset people here on Rod's conservative blog, and SOJO's liberal blog, conservative ideology seems to have a common thread, whereas liberal ideology seems to have competing interest groups (as noble as those individual interests may be).

A good deal of the weirdness of the left is due to fact, as I've mentioned before, it is two movements. It is liberalism and progressivism, merged together.

This happened because the left gave up on racism, which resulted in minorities flocking to it because it was the most progressive and they were all dirt poor, which sorta merged in liberalism almost by accident. Meanwhile you guys picked up all the left-over racists, thus losing almost all the classic liberals, which then picked the only vaguely liberal party.

The liberals that stayed away from the left, the 'Libertarians', valued economic business laissez-fair over the progressive business policies on the left.

And, confusingly, the right like to call the most progressive stuff 'liberal' and ignore the actual liberalism. Cheap housing for the poor, or government-paid health care, is not liberal under any definition of liberal except the one the US appears to be use for no apparent reason...it's progressive. If you want a slur, call it 'socialism', but it's not liberalism.

Thomas R, above, almost got it, how 'liberal' are not 'the left', except he called Progressives 'the left'. Which is correct, I guess...liberals are on the right, progressives are on the left, traditionally. The liberal-right defends equality and justice before the law, the progressive-left demands that we help those who need help, even if it's 'unfair' to those who don't need help. So they're often at each other throats, and that's the basis of most of the West's political systems.

Except here, where all that is entirely on the left and the right wanders around demanding prayer in school and 'law and order' and that we all can have guns and that immigrants go away and that, despite most of the US population's opinion, abortion should be illegal. It's like a bad caricature of liberalism, it's total crap crammed into the leftover 'freedom' context from when they were liberals, operated by people who don't believe a damn word of it.

Pick any position of the left, and I promise you it will be either liberal or progressive. (Except opposing the Iraq war, which is just being 'not stupid', as many on the right have figured out also.) Some are really dumb mixes of the two, like affirmative action.

Meanwhile, the common 'conservative' thread seems to be 'Don't change thing in a certain specific direction, but the other direction is okay', except when it's 'Change things back to how we imagine they were'. And a few things that fall totally outside that, like 'Spreading democracy', which is a (long discredited and discarded) progressive idea. As is the drug war. (Prohibition ring a bell?)