David Mamet: A Hollywood Icon Gone Conservative

I've been a fan of David Mamet for quite some time. His stage and screenplays are nothing short of iconic and have been celebrated time and time again. If you're unfamiliar with his work, he wrote the plays The Lakeboat, American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross as well as films such as The Untouchables, Wag the Dog, The Edge and Ronin amongst countless others. Needless to say, the man is incredibly talented, skilled and intelligent.

Having grown up, studied with and been surrounded by the arts community, he spent much of his life as a left-wing liberal criticizing capitalist America. However, this view never really shone through in his works which focused more on the tragic nature of human interactions. Over the past decade he slowly came to realize that what he and his liberal friends said and what they lived were quite often two different things.

While he criticized capitalism and American society, he cherished and held tight to both aspects of his home. He even noticed this tendency amongst the far left-wing people he had long admired. It was this contradictory nature that led him to dub himself a "Brain Dead Liberal". In 2008, he even wrote an op-ed for The Village Voice titled David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer A 'Brain-Dead Liberal'. It is certainly worth a read.

In June, Mamet is set to release a new book titled The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. And in the latest edition of the Weekly Standard there is a very interesting article called Converting Mamet that outlines Mamet's transformation, his skewering of the education system as a thought destroying clone machine and his views on the hypocrisy of liberals who cry foul at a system that they cling to harder than anyone.

The book is supposedly an exploration of Mamet's turning point from the brain dead liberal to a conservative who understands the strengths and opportunity that capitalist Western civilization offers anyone fortunate enough to live in such a system. It's always nice to witness when such an influential writer and a Hollywood icon finally sees through the nonsensical demonization of conservative politics and finds a place for himself.