Left slays its apostates

Janet Albrechtsen
March 19, 2008
The Australian

WHY the shock when a smart guy decides to think about issues and changes his politics? It is not just in Islam where apostasy is a capital offence.

Judging from the reaction to David Mamet's self-proclaimed conversion from liberal to conservative politics, apostasy is also a mortal sin in the arts world. Declaring that he is no longer a "brain-dead liberal", the famed American playwright performed the ultimate act of treason. After turning his back on a lifetime of progressive beliefs, Mamet was flayed for staining his artistic credentials. . Just one question: why does an artist - whether a playwright, a painter or a writer - have to subscribe to left-wing views to make good art?

First to the conversion. Writing in The Village Voice last week, Mamet looked to John Maynard Keynes who, when chastised for changing his mind, famously replied: "When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?"

Mamet changed his opinion after he did some reading for his latest Broadway play. In November, he pits a corrupt, selfish, money-grabbing, realistic president against his left-wing, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.

"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 other conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than the idealistic vision I called liberalism."

It was quite a change for Mamet. He admits that, for years, he was such a "brain-dead liberal" that he listened to NPR - National Public Radio, which he dubbed National Palestinian Radio - with "wonder and rage contending for pride of place". A child of the 1960s who accepted the progressive orthodoxy that everything was wrong with the world, Mamet realised that "these cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them to my life."

His epiphany came from honestly reviewing his life. "A brief review revealed everything was not always wrong," he wrote.

In a series of acts that would shock the arts world, Mamet began to question his hatred of corporations, recognising his hunger for their goods and services, and dumped his "bad, bad military" views, instead realising these were men and women who risked their lives to protect the rest of us.

He found he was hard-pressed to find too many examples where government intervention "led to much beyond sorrow". And, drawing once again on his experience, he realised that the Marxist view that classes in the US were static, not mobile, was simply wrong.

Like a red rag to a bull, the Left attacked. "What worries me," Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian, "is the effect on his talent of locking himself into a rigid ideological position." The New Statesman lamented Mamet's embrace of "a more Hobbesian strain of conservatism". Back at The Guardian, Mike Marqusee saw the conversion as an unconditional "surrender ... to the dominant powers" of society.

David Lister, in The Independent, moaned that "so complex and gifted a playwright should now seek to reduce his own work and his own politics to simple concepts".

For the Left, Mamet's days as a provocative playwright are over.

As I parse the shrieks of horror over Mamet's move to the Right, I recall what a friend on the Labor side of politics said to me late last week. So many on the Left are obsessed with how they feel about something, he says.

Think about it. So many issues the Left is consumed by are about raw emotion, not intellectual analysis. They will ask you how you feel - not what you think - about some gripping issue. And that's why Mamet changed his views. He started thinking about issues, engaging his head. So many on the Left take the shortcut, letting their gut reaction dictate their response.

Of course, even before Mamet's political conversion it was easy to work out that left-wing politics is essentially emotional, not logical.

With only rare exceptions, poets, playwrights, actors, directors and artistes generally are overwhelmingly political bleeding hearts.

If your daily occupation is to emote as effusively as possible and your aim is making your audience feel some emotion or another, then rational analysis is simply not your strong point. Hence any collection of Australian artistes - think Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Judy Davis or David Williamson - resembles nothing so much as an old-time Fabian Society love-in.

And that's why Hollywood artists such as Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, George Clooney, Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, Matt Damon, Will Smith - the list is endless - have signed up to the Barack Obama campaign.

The campaign, based essentially on hope and change, all about feelings, is political manna to these guys. A large part of the problem is not merely that artists are frequently economic illiterates but that they actively reject the notion that knowledge of economics is helpful to policymakers.

So you won't find them reading Friedman. Instead, they will, as Williamson so famously did a few years back, lament that more Australians are not reading Proust.

And the richer they are, the likelier they are to think the average bloke ought to forgo aspirations for economic security in favour of a caring, sharing utopia where flourishing government-funded art houses will make up for crippling tax rates and a moribund economy.

It is no coincidence that in these lofty circles, the phrase economic rationalist is the greatest insult. Much more acceptable is the opposite: economic irrationality.

But let's be fair. There is a certain class of intellectually feeble capitalists who possesses a similar world view. Having made it big in the free market, acquiring all the accoutrements of a fine life, they have a perfectly timed conversion to the Left. Check out YouTube where you'll find rich guy "Warren Buffet 4 Obama".

Indeed, some of these corporate types get rich by avoiding tax, only to turn around and demand higher taxes of those still toiling away - not to mention the next generation - to fund policies that feed their consciences. It's easy to start subscribing to woolly politics that would mean bigger government, more regulation and higher taxes for the average punter after you've made your substantial stash of money.

The leftist glitterati is justifiably upset about Mamet's rejection of progressive beliefs.

After all, he unpeeled the layers of hypocrisy of those who have made plenty of money, feeding very nicely on the fruits of capitalism, only to espouse anti-capitalist dogma because, let's face it, it feels so damngood.

David Mamet's article will appear in Inquirer in The Weekend Australian this Saturday.

janeta@bigpond.net.au