RUTHFULLY YOURS

There’s a fun game for long car rides called “Mametspeak.” It involves a nerdy group of friends talking without communicating — stumping every sentence, repeating words with random variations in emphasis, stuffing utterances with modifiers and starving them of syntax — in the style of David Mamet’s dialogue in plays such as Glengarry Glen Ross, whose characters can make nothing but their anxiety understood. Done well, it’s an absurdist riot.

The way Mamet speaks in real life is nothing like Mametspeak, but it does say a lot about him. His raced syllables retain the hard, sharp vowels of a boyhood in Chicago. His soft, almost therapeutic tone suggests the progressive schools and hippie circles of the 1960s. His unpretentious diction — he drops his gs, and talks about what “we gotta” do — conjures a busboy or cab driver (Mamet was both). And, unsurprising for a playwright, he brings fresh metaphors — even to discussions of politics.

But the most peculiar, and novel, thing about what Mamet says is the content: Lately it’s become conservative, and assertively so, especially in his latest book, The Secret Knowledge.

It wasn’t always this way, as Mamet told me while he was in New York last Sunday (“shootin’ a movie,” he explained). Up until eight years ago, he was innocent of conservative ideas. By default, he held a liberalism that was “inchoate.” It was a matter of “being in a group, and reflexively nodding and nodding at each communal evisceration of the Right — compulsively.” He was no left-wing polemicist, just a typical member of the culture industry, observing its rituals as he moved through its ranks.

When Mamet moved to Los Angeles in 2002, a rabbi gave him a book by Shelby Steele and recommended some others from the conservative canon — those of Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, etc. So he read them. Jarred out of a dogmatic slumber, he even started listening to conservative talk radio. Two years ago, he had a coming-out party on the pages of the liberal Village Voice, explaining to the arts world “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.’” It caused a small sensation. So he wrote a book, his first extended political work, elaborating, defending, and even intensifying his ideas.

What’s the book all about? Toward the end, he hints at the meaning of his title. “There is no secret knowledge. The Federal Government is really the zoning board writ large,” he writes. What does that mean? He explains to me: “Mark Twain famously said, ‘God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.’ The zoning board is like that — they’re just a bunch of people with power. Some are good, some are bad. But they gotta be watched like hawks, because power corrupts.” So “secret knowledge” is a Hayekian insight wrapped up like a Talmudic paradox. The secret is there is no secret — no special caste has the knowledge or goodness, inaccessible to the rest of us, to order society. Hence Mamet’s skepticism of technocracy and his preference for order created from the democratic and disaggregated processes of the marketplace.

What kind of conservative is Mamet now? Friedrich Hayek, both directly and indirectly via Thomas Sowell, is the major influence on his political thought. Mamet repeatedly returns to Hayek’s “tragic vision” — the acceptance that humans are incapable of inventing a perfect society, and required to choose among evils. But the most unusual thing about Mamet’s conservatism might be how, well, ordinary it is. Conservatism carries a stigma in Mamet’s circles. So when the rare littérateur dissents from liberalism, we might expect him to be snobbish or effete, distancing himself from the déclassé elements of the Right.

Not Mamet. He is aggressive — even rude. He calls multiculturalism “garbage, pure nonsense.” He says “many liberals” have a “preverbal mind,” which, “when confronted with arguments it can’t refute, just sees red.” He says “the Obama administration is the perfect example of the Europeanization of America in the nanny state.” He celebrates America as a “Christian country,” and feels no need to dissociate from the dreaded “Christian Right.” He condemns “elites” repeatedly. He says “the State of Israel wants peace within its borders, and its enemies want to kill all the Jews — both parties are clear about that.” He approvingly acknowledges “Dennis Prager, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, and Glenn Beck.” He exalts Sarah Palin. In a phrase: He eats conservative red meat.

So, the natural follow-up is: Has he made any ex-friends? “I probably have. But if they’re ex-friends, they weren’t really friends to begin with.” His close, decades-long companions have received his politics with disagreement, and respect.

It’s tempting to look back now for politics in Mamet’s previous plays. Did he, maybe, have sentiments and ideas that he just now recognized as conservative? Was his change as much a realization as a conversion? “It’s probably a mix of both,” he says. But he’s not romantic enough about politics, or moralistic enough about theater, to see quintessential conservatism in his plays. “I never wrote political plays. I wrote plays about human interaction. And I will continue that. I don’t think politics has a place in the theater.” The artist, Mamet believes, should dramatize, not prescribe. (He concedes only that Oleanna critiques the psychology of the university.)

He did, at least, feel cognitive dissonance in his previous life. He was bothered by pious hypocrites, on multiculturalism, in particular. “Go into any restaurant in American and see how much multiculturalism there is. You don’t see black communities saying ‘you know, we need more white people here.’ It’s only vice versa. And it’s really a racist idea, based on the assumption that black people repel whites and so whites need the federal government to counter that.” This ideal, like environmentalism, was one to which he found himself and his fellows paying only “lip-service”: “When I started to do the math, I found that I thought differently than I acted, and that I should change one or the other.”

So he did. But he downplays his first conservative polemic. Politics is only one component of his intellectual life, not his identity: “This is something I’m doing on the side. I’ve written about 15 books of nonfiction. Each was an attempt to figure something out, and the last one happened to be about politics and economics.”

For Mamet, those both reduce to culture. A theme of our conversation is the inverse relationship between culture and government: Where one retreats, the other advances. Culture consists of “the unwritten rules” which arise from “people trying to get along, so that their common life can continue.” A child (“a learning machine”) absorbs the culture unconsciously. The “unwritten law precedes the written law,” and forms its basis.

But liberalism, Mamet thinks, is dismantling culture. The problem is that “the Left today is essentially an elitist movement, and it has invested a lot of time and money in the idea that they know better.” Elites have been led to think “by getting the grades, and getting into good schools and think-tanks and government positions that they are fit” to reorder society more rationally. But this requires first demolishing the order produced by the organic processes of tradition, democracy, and markets — the culture. Why are some so susceptible to this fatal conceit? “They get out of elite schools being told nothing but, ‘You’re the best.’” Hubris — a dramatist’s area of expertise. (The liberalism of his own elite group, the literati, he blames on “devotion to fantasy — this sort of Manichean view.”)

This ties in to what Mamet sees as the critical distinction between the Left and the Right — the competing ideals of fairness and justice. Justice involves “making rules in advance of our knowledge of the actors and their outcomes, about what is permissible and what is not.” Fairness is “inchoate,” reordering outcomes artificially, without regard to what went before it. Justice is procedural, comprehending neither status of persons nor ultimate outcomes, while fairness is revolutionary, concerning only the two. In a state that exalts fairness, “the way you get power or recognition is to cast yourself as a victim.” This leads to games of competitive victimhood. “But mature people don’t do that,” he says.

I ask Mamet to explain one of his most original connections between culture and economics. He writes in his book that “a man whose income is taxed has less incentive toward monogamy.” He explains his meaning to me: “The impulse to monogamy is, for a man, ‘I wanna take care of my wife and children. I want to be independent. I get a kick out of responsibility.’” But, “if your income is taxed, if you can’t put aside something to support your wife and kids, and look forward to passing something onto your kids, and the government will tax your family into nothingness, and all you’re gonna do is collect free health-care, you’ll say, ‘Hey, I’ll keep dating until I’m 80.’” Put another way, “You need two things for a nanny-state: You need nannies, and you need infants.”

A religious sensibility permeates his book and conversation. Mamet is Jewish, and he connects that to a special reverence for the Founding: “The language and concepts involved with the Declaration of Independence come out of the Old Testament, which is our way of trying to understand how to live a moral life, consonant with the desires of God. So that’s one thing we have as Jews.” He also finds a tragic vision in the Torah and Talmud: “We’re cautioned constantly about taking the law into our own hands, or exceeding those strictures placed upon us in the name of the good. The Talmud teaches that we can deal with the evil men do in the name of evil, but heaven help us from the evil they do in the name of good.” Mamet is also naturally disturbed by rising anti-Semitism and the international preoccupation with Israel, particularly within his own profession.

Mamet’s proud Jewishness meshes with a glad assertion that “America is a Christian country.” I remind him that those five words are considered very bad to say. He snaps back: “There are 330 million Christians in America. Do the math.” To call America “Christian” is neither cultural chauvinism, nor aggression against minorities, nor a denial of the establishment clause, but “simple arithmetic.” He recalls a time a “pastor came to our schul — he was a friend of our rabbi. He said ‘I’m not going to say that Christ was a Jew — Christ is a Jew.’ And everyone wept.” A Christian country is one where Mamet feels at home.

The biggest threat to America today? This is Mamet’s quickest, shortest, most assured answer: “The government.” When Mamet gets Manichean, his cosmogony places government in darkness and evil, and the family in goodness and light. “The totalitarian state tries to destroy the family, because the family is where tradition is transmitted.” This takes place, too, in non-totalitarian states, on a gradient: “To the extent to which they supplant the family, and the state has won as the prime transmitter of cultural information, we’re in a world of trouble.”

Mamet downplays his politics, suggesting that he won’t make much more ado about it after The Secret Knowledge. But let’s hope he changes his mind. We partisans of culture, as against the State, are happy to have him on our side.

— Matthew Shaffer is a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute.