Fisking Mamet

The play, while being a laugh a minute, is, when it's at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

Mamet's premise is flawed from the start. Arguing about whether people are inherently "good", as pointless as such as argument is, may have had relevance when "conservatism" stood for a Burkean preservation of aristocracy for the good of social order and "liberalism" stood for more of an Adam Smith view (classical liberalism). It may have some relevance if you're arguing with an anarchist who thinks that people are "good" in their natural state and therefore don't need a government to deal with the times when they're not.

But Mamet's premise has nothing to do with the liberal/conservative debate as it's presently understood in the contemporary American context -- that is, the context in which he believes that he is being relevant. If you believe that people are inherently "good," then why would you support the raft of liberal programs -- from the Civil Rights Act to the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Environmental Protection Agency -- that are predicated on the belief that sometimes you need the government to intervene when people don't act "good"?

Maybe Mamet takes a Hayekian point of view here, something along the lines that, in the absence of government, there's an organic logic to human society and messing with it leads to undesirable results. But this seems a lot closer to the view that people are "good" (which Mamet implies is naive) than anything contemporary liberalism comes up with, or at least that the sum total of untrammeled human interaction is "good" in the aggregate, even if individuals aren't.

Either way, Mamet starts off his political discourse with a flawed and incoherent predicate. Bad sign of things to come.

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

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 in my life.

Well, again, as applied to current policy debates, Mamet's hangups from the '60s aren't relevant. Government is corrupt and business is exploitative? How does that guide us in figuring out what to do about workplace safety or antitrust violations? If government is corrupt, then there's no answer to the exploitativeness of business?

Also, look at the obnoxious words Mamet uses: "faith", "prejudices", "impracticable." He's now changed his mind about some things, which is fine and good, and he ascribes the fact that he was wrong to a failure to think things out, which is fine and good. The implication, of course, which the title "brain-dead liberal" screams out, is that liberalism in general eschews critical thought. If the only the scales would fall from our eyes, like they have Mamet's, and we'd all be neoconservatives, liberals who have been mugged by reality!

Aside from the absurdity of thinking that reasonable people can't disagree with you, the funny part is that liberalism is almost cannibalistic in the self-doubt it puts all of its ideas through. This was a criticism of liberalism from the point of view of Marxists or anarchists (who Mamet sounds more like in this prior incarnation, actually); that liberalism was too self-critical to take the necessary radical stands against various power structures.

... we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.

If Mamet's point is that most people in the U.S. enjoy a level of middle-class prosperity that makes us better off than a great majority of people in the human condition throughout history, then that's true, but a banal enough point to be utterly unresponsive to the issues at hand that divide liberals from conservatives. Does our privileged status mean that we shouldn't upset the apple cart with national health care? Or does it mean that it's endangered by the current health care system? Who knows? It's just a platitude.

If Mamet's point is that we are not "villains", well, what's he talking about? I'm awfully proud of the record of this country with regard to, say, the Marshall Plan, but pretty horrified by things that the US has done in places like Guatemala, Iran, Congo, Vietnam, Iraq, and Chile. An assertion like "we are not villains" may be fine and good, but for what purpose? To argue the merits of those individual cases? It doesn't do that. Rather, it's more about constructing a narrative that you can then use to shoehorn preconceived policy scenarios into (the Cuba embargo, the Iraq War, etc.) Again, ironically, it's the situational liberals who take these things on a case-by-case basis, supporting military action here in the Balkans and Afghanistan, but opposing it there in Iraq and Panama. The sweeping narratives that have little use for individual circumstances seems more the province of the flightier pretensions of neoconservatism.

And why is the Constitution "spectacularly effective", as opposed to often anachronistic, unfair, and ambiguous? Lots of countries do pretty well without bicameralism, rotten boroughs, winner-take-all first-past-the-post elections, a Second Amendment, and the Electoral College. I'm not saying that the Constitution is all bad, but vapid assertions on the "spectacular effectiveness" of the Constitution seems a lot closer to the impracticable faith-based prejudices of Mamet's prior life as a so-called liberal than a realistic look at our founding document.

For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.

To that end, the Constitution separates the power of the state into those three branches which are for most of us (I include myself) the only thing we remember from 12 years of schooling.

Again, this is fine, but really, so what? Are parliamentary democracies like the UK or Israel, where there's a lot less separation of powers between the executive and legislative, really totalitarian hellholes? The Constitution didn't envision political parties (until the Twelfth Amendment, at least), which operate in opposition as just a good a check on the flaws of elected officials as different branches of government. But again, what's the policy implication for Mamet's gushing? And how does it square with Bushian conservatism, which seems to think that the legislative and judicial branches don't matter?

I found not only that I didn't trust the current government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster—were little different from those of a president whom I revered.

Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.

I agree with all of this, but how does this implicate liberalism? Election theft, lying, and ties to organized crime aren't the province of any political ideology. And it's not part of any liberal program I know to invade Cuba or start a war with Vietnam.

And I began to question my hatred for "the Corporations"—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.

Oh, wow. Again with the straw men. Look, just to be clear, the ability to pool large amount of resources -- capital -- for competitive enterprise facilitated by the limited liability of a state-chartered corporation has been an important cornerstone of modern prosperity. However, liberals get wary of corporations because they can also be vehicles by which powerful people can take resources from others, in the form of corporate welfare, pollution, securities fraud, or bad labor practices. No liberal I know wants to, say, ban the corporation, we just want them to fulfill the policy objective of economic prosperity, not do the opposite.

And I began to question my distrust of the "Bad, Bad Military" of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world. Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations—they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not "Is everything perfect?" but "How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?" Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well.

Still waiting for the payoff, of how this point of view, reasonable to the point of being boring, discredits liberalism rather than a cartoon version of it.

Do I speak as a member of the "privileged class"? If you will—but classes in the United States are mobile, not static, which is the Marxist view. That is: Immigrants came and continue to come here penniless and can (and do) become rich; the nerd makes a trillion dollars; the single mother, penniless and ignorant of English, sends her two sons to college (my grandmother). On the other hand, the rich and the children of the rich can go belly-up; the hegemony of the railroads is appropriated by the airlines, that of the networks by the Internet; and the individual may and probably will change status more than once within his lifetime.

Mamet is just factually in the wrong here. Social mobility exists to an extent, but his anecdotal yarn-spinning notwithstanding, it's actually getting harder to move from one social class to another in the US. Does Mamet really want to test his view of "penniless immigrants" against their actual earnings? Does Mamet really believe that the rich don't insulate themselves from competitive pressures? Has he heard of the debate over the estate tax? Guess which side the "brain-dead" take.

What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing ...

Didn't he say earlier that government was corrupt?

... but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

Umm, examples, please? How do those corporations that he reveres get the limited liability that defines them as corporations in the first place? Would Mamet get copyright protection for his screenplays in a state of nature? And how about roads, Social Security, the Voting Rights Act, subways, that military he likes so much, the GI bill, deposit insurance, and OSHA? Would he really want to eat food that isn't regulated for safety or live next to a factory that doesn't observe any environmental rules? Of all of the things Mamet has said in this article, this lazy anti-government reflex is the most vapid substitution for thought yet (although unfortunately common).

But if the government is not to intervene, how will we, mere human beings, work it all out?

I wondered and read, and it occurred to me that I knew the answer, and here it is: We just seem to. How do I know? From experience. I referred to my own—take away the director from the staged play and what do you get? Usually a diminution of strife, a shorter rehearsal period, and a better production.

Oh. That solves everything. The free rider problem, externalities, vigilantism ... just wished away. "We just seem to," because human society is just a theater production writ large? Right, Somalia's a lovely place to be.

Strand unacquainted bus travelers in the middle of the night, and what do you get? A lot of bad drama, and a shake-and-bake Mayflower Compact. Each, instantly, adds what he or she can to the solution. Why? Each wants, and in fact needs, to contribute—to throw into the pot what gifts each has in order to achieve the overall goal, as well as status in the new-formed community. And so they work it out.

See also that most magnificent of schools, the jury system, where, again, each brings nothing into the room save his or her own prejudices, and, through the course of deliberation, comes not to a perfect solution, but a solution acceptable to the community—a solution the community can live with.

Note how this contradicts Mamet's earlier disdain for the ostensibly naive liberal view that people are good.

The rest of the piece meanders along without much interesting to say. The bottom line is that Mamet suffers from the same problem someone like David Horowitz does: he starts out with an extremist, slapdash political worldview, and doesn't correct himself by moderating, but rather by projecting his personal flaws to everyone on that side of the political spectrum. The convert is more Catholic than the Pope, as they say.