Mamet sees the light

Playwright David Mamet (right) has long been one of my own favourites -- despite the sometimes teeth-grating anti-capitalism with which they're imbued his plays and films and commentary are still some of the sharpest around,which is really the crucial criterion when it comes to choosing films and theatre -- but the man who's for so long been the liberals' darling has recently had the scales fall from his eyes.

I recognized that I held ... two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).
And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.
"Aha," you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism...

The liberal reaction has not been kind.  Just witness the comments to his Village Voice piece in which he explains Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal. [Hat tip Tim Blair]