The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American
Culture
By David
Mamet
(Sentinel, 241 pages,
$27.95)
“The struggle of the Left to rationalize its positions is an
intolerable, Sisyphean burden. I speak as reformed
Liberal.”
The initial impulse was to give this one a pass. An erstwhile
left/liberal discovers he’s a conservative and writes about it. But
except for academics, Bughouse Square regulars, or New York Times editors, that happens to
most people as they grow older. Also, the writer is a playwright,
and most playwrights since Shakespeare have tended to be
certifiably loony. (And for all we know about Shakespeare, he may
have been as batty as Edward Albee.)
Then there’s the sometimes quirky style—unexpected italics,
unnecessary capitals, arcane spellings—and the format of the book
itself—39 mini-chapters, some three to four pages long,
aphoristically arranged around various topics, falling somewhere
between Eric Hoffer and Pascal—The True Believer meets
Pensées. Nor are the arguments
and observations shaped in a conventional way, less like essays
than soliloquies or extended monologues. But the man, after all, is
a playwright.
Not just any playwright, however, nor just any defector from the
left. As author of American
Buffalo and Glengarry Glen
Ross, for which he won a Pulitzer, as well as a
screenwriter and director (The
Untouchables, The
Verdict, Wag the
Dog), David Mamet is a charter member of show
business/theater/Hollywood royalty, one of the last great pillars
of our liberal/left establishment, providing political support to a
variety of leftist causes and bankrolling the candidacies of
politicians like our current president.
That, in part, explains the four-alarm reaction to the book by
the liberal elite, those writers and talkers and reviewers who call
themselves “public intellectuals”and feed on foundations and the
liberal think tanks, funded and supported by the system they
loathe. (In his ruminations, Mamet makes essentially the same point
about Karl Marx feeding off Engels.) Could it be they feel their
hegemony slipping away? Could it be, as Bob Tyrrell points out in a
forthcoming book, that liberalism is finally dying?
Whatever the cause, there’s no doubt Mamet’s book has hit an
exposed nerve, being dismissed as shallow and simplistic, beneath
notice. Yet the ferocity of the response—odd combinations of ad
hominem attacks (routinely allowed critics on the left, but never
tolerated from the right), condescension, and dismissiveness —
belies that. The New York Times Book
Review, for instance, the flagship of literary
liberalism, the editor of which not long ago puffed an extended
magazine article into a small book proclaiming the Death of
Conservatism, gave a full page to a negative and at times
contemptuous review. Why waste that prized space, one wonders, on a
book not worth reading?
Part of the problem is that Mamet, albeit at times quirkily,
makes his points with logical force and unrehearsed sincerity. In
other words, he hits them where it hurts. The “essence of Leftist
thought,” he writes, “is a devolution from reason to ‘belief,’ in
an effort to stave off a feeling of powerlessness. And if
government is Good, it is a logical elaboration that more
government power is Better. But the opposite is apparent to anyone
who has ever had to deal with Government and, I think, to any
dispassionate observer.”
IN 2008, MAMET WROTE an article for the Village Voice titled “Why I Am No Longer a
Brain-Dead Liberal,”in which he deconstructed some of the accepted
beliefs underpinning contemporary liberalism—beliefs that he had
in large measure accepted as true through much of his life. In this
book he expands and deepens his personal analysis of the failure of
liberalism and the reasons he has come to think of himself, like
Whittaker Chambers, as a man of the right.
He discovered, he writes, that the difference between right and
left is basically one of basic goals—“the goal of the Left is a
Government-run country and that of the Right the freedom of the
individual from Government. These goals are difficult to reconcile,
as the left cannot be brought either to actually state its
intentions, nor to honestly evaluate the results of its actions.”To
the left, “poverty and all human ills [are] eradicable by new
programs. But these revolutionary revisions destroy the human
ability to interact, which, in its entirety, is known as
Culture.”
Thus, the inevitable failure of “great society”programs, as well
as the social and cultural burden we’re all forced to share from
the imposition of what he calls “Good Ideas,”so-called not because
their implementation has led to human betterment, “but in homage to
the supposed goodwill or intellectual status of their
instigators.”Among these “Good Ideas”are “feminism, birth control,
‘diversity,‘“elements in “‘a new social vision.’”
“See also,”he tells us in a note, “the grand visions of Urban
Planning, which destroyed the Black Neighborhood, Welfare, which
destroyed the Black Family, and Affirmative Action, which is
destroying the Black Youth.” Such programs, advanced by elitists of
the liberal left, are “based upon the absurdity that there are two
classes of people and they may be distinguished by the color of
their skins.”
“Diversity (and ‘multicuturalism’) is a pat on the head from
White members of my generation sufficiently inexperienced and
self-absorbed to feel they are entitled to ‘bless their
inferiors.’”
His comments on other “Good Ideas” and their proponents are
similarly strong and pointed. He excoriates contemporary feminists
for the elitism and condescension with which they treat non-liberal
female politicians like Sarah Palin. “And where,” he asks, “was the
Left, and where were the Feminists, during President Clinton’s
savaging of Juanita Broaddrick, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones,
Susan McDougal, and Monica Lewinsky….How, by the Left, can this be
excused? It cannot. But it may be partially explained…by
class. They were, to the Left,
‘trailer trash,’ and so, de-facto, undeserving of a hearing yet
alone a defense.”
In other areas, his observations on global warming in particular
and liberal hysteria in general have been singled out for
criticism, although he is demonstrably at least as well informed as
his critics, many of whom now talk only of “climate change,”having
deep-sixed the “global warming”term because of lack of scientific
proof.
As Mamet puts it, “Fear of Global Warming was, in the seventies,
and as propounded by many of the same scientists, a fear of Global
Cooling. See also Malthus’s…assurance that as population
outstripped agricultural production, humanity must soon…starve. See
also the Y2K scare, antinuclear hysteria, and the yearly assurance that some new influenza
is going to devastate the population.”
“The Left,” he continues, “in addition to its embrace of the
false (higher taxes means increased prosperity for all) and its
acceptance of the moot as incontrovertible (Global Warming), must
account for the incidental effect of the sum of these decisions.
This effect is the destruction of our culture.”
MAMET IS PROUD of being an American, proud of being a Jew in
America, and proud of Israel. He pities the Jewish liberal who
denounces this country, attacks Israel, and denies “his heritage,
and his co-religionaries in their distress.”He quotes the muddled
linguist Noam Chomsky, who has strayed far from his field of
expertise: “To summarize, contrary to the claim that is constantly
reiterated, Israel has no right to use force to defend itself
against rockets from Gaza, even if they are regarded as terrorist
crimes.”
“Of course Mr. Chomsky feels that all is not right with the
world,”Mamet writes. “His hobby is promoting the cause of people
who want to kill him.”
Throughout his book, with these and other trenchant
observations, he speaks of what in this age of approved euphemism
is the unspeakable—tradition, absolute values, the primacy of the
individual. And if conservatism is applied intelligence, informed
by the best that’s been thought and said down through the ages,
reinforced by acceptance of immutable truths and leavened with a
healthy dose of common sense, then by any measure, David Mamet is a
conservative.
According to the bibliography he appends, he has read seriously
and widely—Tolstoy and Trollope, Melanie Phillips and Shelby
Steele, Victor Davis Hanson and Friedrich Hayek, Niall Ferguson and
Milton Friedman, Whittaker Chambers, Noam Chomsky, Eric Hoffer,
Paul Johnson, Mencken, Macaulay, Podhoretz, Sontag, Sowell and
Veblen, to name a few. In short, an eclectic reading list tending
toward the conservative, although no Burke, Buckley, Kirk. But that
will no doubt come.
“I spoke with my first conservative at age sixty,”he writes, a
Republican rabbi in Hollywood (“Where did he find one?”asks Suzanne
Fields in one of her splendid columns) who steered him toward some
of the more conservative writers.
But now that the ice has been broken, and broken with singular
eloquence, one suspects the conversation will continue.
