Renewing American Leadership

One of this nation’s most eminent playwrights, David Mamet, occupies an elevated position in contemporary culture.  Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for such plays as American Buffalo, responsible for such films as The Verdict and Wag the Dog (both nominated for an Academy Award), he easily embraced, early on, the regnant liberal ethos of his peers.  As a young writer, he “never questioned my tribal assumption that Capitalism was bad, although I, simultaneously, never acted upon these feelings,” earning a good living because of a nicely-functioning free market.  In time, however, he encountered challenges to his blithe assumptions in works such as Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.  “The great wickedness of Liberalism, I saw, was that those who devise the ever new State Utopias, whether crooks or fools, set out to bankrupt and restrict not themselves, but others” (p. 9).  He then wrote a “political play” that subtly reflected his shifting convictions, and that led to an invitation from the Village Voice to write an article on it.  He titled his article “Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal,” which led to an invitation to expand upon the theme.  Consequently Mamet wrote The Secret Knowledge:  On the Dismantling of American Culture (New York:  Sentinel, c. 2011).

Composed of 39 short chapters, The Secret Knowledge is more a compilation of thoughts than a

"The American Left, though quick to disavow the havoc done by earlier Leftists (Nazis, Fascists, Bolsheviks) cannot escape the link that binds them together:  socialism, which has become a religion, “the largest myth of modern times "

carefully constructed treatise.   He touches on subjects ranging from environmentalism to Israel, from literature to sex, that I’ll not address.  But let me illustrate, in this review, Mamet’s concern with Liberalism’s socialistic schema.  Though it only dawned on him lately, he has awakened to the fact that the Nazis and Italian Fascists and Russian Bolsheviks all “believed, in their beginnings, in Social Justice, and the Fair distribution of goods.  But these sweet ideas are encumbered in execution by the realization that someone, finally, has to do the work; their adamant practice will quite soon reveal this:  ‘Oh.  We will need slaves’” (p. 32). 

The American Left, though quick to disavow the havoc done by earlier Leftists (Nazis, Fascists, Bolsheviks) cannot escape the link that binds them together:  socialism, which has become a religion, “the largest myth of modern times” (p. 41).  “Liberalism is a religion.  Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated.  But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost” (p. 81).  In accord with Liberal dogma, “the prime purpose of Government is to expand Equality, which may also be stated thus:  to expand its own powers” (p. 92).

Furthermore:  “The baby boomer generation, my own, is content, if of the Left, to live out our remaining years upon the work and upon the entitlements created by our parents, and to entail the costs upon our children—to tax industry out of the country, to tax wealth away from its historical role and use as the funder of innovation” (p. 43).  These aging boomers still dream of the perfect Commune, a Return to Nature, the abolition of property and marriage, a world of untrammeled self-expression wherein no one “works” but “shares” the surfeit of society.  “It is,” Manet insists, “only in a summer camp (College or the hippie commune) that the enlightened live on the American Plan—room and board included prepaid—and one is free to frolic all day in the unspoiled woods” (p. 141).  Indeed, *“Liberalism is a parlor game, where one, for a small stipend, is allowed to think he is aiding starving children in X or exploited workers in Y, when he is merely, in the capitalist tradition, paying a premium, tacked onto his goods, or subtracted from his income, for the illusion that he is behaving laudably (cf. bottled water)” (p. 141).  In short, the “Socialist vision” is, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, “a trick” (p. 172).

 

"For Mamet:  'It has taken me rather an effort of will to wrench myself free from various abstractions regarding human interaction.' "

Rather than magicians the Socialists have demagogic politicians.  “Demagoguery is the attempt to convince the People that they can be led into the Promised Land—it is the trick of the snake oil salesmen, the ‘energy therapists,’ the purveyors of ‘health water,’ and on the other side of the spectrum, the politician and that dictator into which he will evolve absent a vigilant electorate willing to admit its errors” (p. 193).  Did we think rightly, we’d detect “the similarities between ‘Lose Weight Without Dieting,’ and ‘Hope.’  The magicians say the more intelligent the viewer is, the easier he can be fooled.  To put it differently, the more educated a person, the easier it is to engage him in an abstraction” (p. 193).  For Mamet:  “It has taken me rather an effort of will to wrench myself free from various abstractions regarding human interaction.  A sample of these would include:  that poverty can be eradicated, that greed is the cause of poverty, that poverty is the cause of crime, that Government, given enough money, can cure all ills, and that, thus, it should be so engaged” (p. 193).

The path the leftist boomers (such as Mamet in his youth) follow was identified by Hayek as “The Road to Serfdom.  And we see it in operation here, as we are in the process of choosing, as a society, between Liberty—the freedom from the State to pursue happiness, and a supposed but impossible Equality, which, as it could only be brought about by a State capable and empowered to function in all facets of life, means totalitarianism and eventual dictatorship” (p. 61).  Egalitarian Liberals constantly stress the importance of sympathyand compassion, of caring for others.  Translated into political action, however, these feelings frequently prove destructive, fully evident when Big Government imposes its agenda. 

“The judge who forgot the admonition in Proverbs, ‘Do not favor the rich, neither favor the poor, but do Justice,’ who set aside the laws, or who ‘interpreted’ them in a way he considered ‘more fair,’ was, for all his good intentions, robbing the populace of an actual possession (the predictability of the legal codes).  He was graciously giving away something which was not his” (p. 151).   Good intentions can never suffice!  But they “can lead to evil—vide Busing, Urban Renewal, Affirmative Action, Welfare, et cetera, to name the more immediately apparent, and not to mention the, literally, tens of thousands of Federal and Sate statutes limiting freedom of trade, which is to say, of the right of the individual to make a living, and, so earn that wealth which would in its necessary expenditure, allow him to provide a living to others” (p. 151).

Much that’s wrong with today’s Left, Mamet thinks, stems from a decision to ignore traditional canons of “justice” so as to impose a newly-exalted “social justice,” which can only mean, as Hayek wrote, ‘State Justice’” (p. 46).  Mamet acknowledges “that though, as a lifelong Liberal, I endorsed and paid lip service to ‘social justice,’ which is to say, to equality of result, I actually based the important decisions of my life—those in which I was personally going to be affected by

"'The judge who forgot the admonition in Proverbs, ‘Do not favor the rich, neither favor the poor, but do Justice,’ who set aside the laws, or who ‘interpreted’ them in a way he considered ‘more fair,’ was, for all his good intentions, robbing the populace of an actual possession'"

the outcome—upon the principle of equality of opportunity; and, further, that so did everyone I knew” (p. 154).  Inevitably, “social justice” leads to “redistributive justice,” whereby the State “confiscates wealth accumulated under existing laws and redistributes it to those it deems worthy” (p. 46).

“To the Left it is the State which should distribute place, wealth, and status.  This is called ‘correcting structural error,’ or redressing ‘the legacy of Slavery,’ or Affirmative Action, or constraining unfair Executive Compensation; it is and can only be that Spoils System which is decried at the ward level as ‘cronyism,’ and lauded at the national level as ‘social justice’” (pp. 46-47).   

“Government programs of confiscation and redistribution are called the War on Poverty, or the New Deal, or Hope and Change, but that these programs are given lofty names” (p. 153) guarantees nothing.  Still more:  States striving to insure social justice becomes dictatorial, for it is assumed “that there is a supergovernmental, superlegal responsibility upon the right-thinking to implement their visions” (p. 153).  “This progression, from Social Justice to Judicial Activism and control of means of production and distribution, can be seen . . . wherever the Socialists took power and brought terror and yet the Left, longing for the campfire, votes for collectivism, for better and more powerful and more ‘feeling’ Government” (p. 93).

Rather than “social justice,” Mamet urges us to recover a commitment to the rule of law, for “The awe and majesty of the Law are our basic inheritance of freedom.  Without these nothing can exist in Freedom:  here is the bright line, stay to the correct side and the community will protect you, venture across, and you will be at the mercy of its other name, the State” (p. 219). 

Gerard Reed is a retired professor of history and philosophy, most recently Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. He is the author of three books--The Liberating Law; C.S. Lewis and the Bright Shadow of Holiness; C.S. Lewis Explores Vice & Virtue--as well as a variety of articles and book reviews.