We conservatives have a new ally, David Mamet. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, movie director (Glengarry Glen Ross, The Untouchables, Hannibal, and others) has had an epiphany. A conservative rabbi recently challenged Mamet and got him to read Milton Friedman, Shelby Steele, and Thomas Sowell. The scales fell from his eyes.
Berthold Brecht - one of his earliest idols - he now describes as “a show dog of communism,” who attacked capitalism even as his royalties made him rich and comfortable.. He discovered that Karl Marx was an alcoholic tramp who never worked; sponging money from Friedrich Engels and his family. So much for "social justice".
Mamet's new book The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, chronicles his conversion to free-market economics and awareness of the disaster of multiculturalism.
“The great wickedness of Liberalism,” he says, “was that those who devise the ever-new state Utopias … set out to bankrupt and restrict not themselves, but others.” Mamet first recognized his own hypocrisy, “talking Left and living Right". This led him to a collective indictment of himself and others in his generation, the "baby boomers", whose narcissistic ideology has always been out-of-sync with reality.
“As my generation did not live through the Depression, World War II, and the agony of the immigrants who are our grandparents or great-grandparents; as we were raised in the greatest plenty the world has ever known and in the most just of societies,” he writes, “we have grown lazy and entitled (not unlike Marx, who lived as a parasite upon Engels, and never worked a day in his life).”
He says that 'progressives' have replaced the Judeo-Christian roots of democracy with wishful Utopian thinking, and belief in the godlike powers of man. “We are told we need not produce, but may merely hope, we need not defend, but may hope, we must not consume, but are allowed, somehow, to hope for sustenance, magically, deriving from some unspecified actions of a government..."
Mamet criticizes Obama's 2008 campaign slogans of “hope” and “change” and exposes them for what they were, a triumph of advertising. “Hope is a very different exhortation than … save, work, co-operate, [and] sacrifice.” He compares these vacuous appeals of 'progressive' thinking to that of Mark Rudd, the leader of the radicals who seized an administration building at Columbia University during riots in the 1960s. “We got a good thing going here,” Mr. Rudd cried. “Now we’ve got to find out what it is.”
The federal government in its expanding power is “the zoning board writ large.”, Mamet says. His new hero is Friedrich Hayek, who maintained that man is limited and government should be, too. Good intentions aren't enough. They bring unintended consequences; whether in urban renewal, affirmative action, welfare, or busing. His ire focuses on 'liberal' education, which he claims is merely indoctrination into identity politics, where students are drugged with self-indulgence. He passionately praises patriotism, tradition, family, and the Bible.
'Progressives', Democrats, socialists, and crypto-Marxists everywhere are in shock. They've lost a cornerstone in the temple of 'modern' thought.
Berthold Brecht - one of his earliest idols - he now describes as “a show dog of communism,” who attacked capitalism even as his royalties made him rich and comfortable.. He discovered that Karl Marx was an alcoholic tramp who never worked; sponging money from Friedrich Engels and his family. So much for "social justice".
Mamet's new book The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, chronicles his conversion to free-market economics and awareness of the disaster of multiculturalism.
“The great wickedness of Liberalism,” he says, “was that those who devise the ever-new state Utopias … set out to bankrupt and restrict not themselves, but others.” Mamet first recognized his own hypocrisy, “talking Left and living Right". This led him to a collective indictment of himself and others in his generation, the "baby boomers", whose narcissistic ideology has always been out-of-sync with reality.
“As my generation did not live through the Depression, World War II, and the agony of the immigrants who are our grandparents or great-grandparents; as we were raised in the greatest plenty the world has ever known and in the most just of societies,” he writes, “we have grown lazy and entitled (not unlike Marx, who lived as a parasite upon Engels, and never worked a day in his life).”
He says that 'progressives' have replaced the Judeo-Christian roots of democracy with wishful Utopian thinking, and belief in the godlike powers of man. “We are told we need not produce, but may merely hope, we need not defend, but may hope, we must not consume, but are allowed, somehow, to hope for sustenance, magically, deriving from some unspecified actions of a government..."
Mamet criticizes Obama's 2008 campaign slogans of “hope” and “change” and exposes them for what they were, a triumph of advertising. “Hope is a very different exhortation than … save, work, co-operate, [and] sacrifice.” He compares these vacuous appeals of 'progressive' thinking to that of Mark Rudd, the leader of the radicals who seized an administration building at Columbia University during riots in the 1960s. “We got a good thing going here,” Mr. Rudd cried. “Now we’ve got to find out what it is.”
The federal government in its expanding power is “the zoning board writ large.”, Mamet says. His new hero is Friedrich Hayek, who maintained that man is limited and government should be, too. Good intentions aren't enough. They bring unintended consequences; whether in urban renewal, affirmative action, welfare, or busing. His ire focuses on 'liberal' education, which he claims is merely indoctrination into identity politics, where students are drugged with self-indulgence. He passionately praises patriotism, tradition, family, and the Bible.
'Progressives', Democrats, socialists, and crypto-Marxists everywhere are in shock. They've lost a cornerstone in the temple of 'modern' thought.
