By Larry Kaufmann

The culture war has taken some interesting turns lately, but few are more surprising than David Mamet’s recent move to the right.  Mamet is probably the most important playwright of the last 40 years, in addition to being a prolific screenwriter and essayist.  He has also directed about a dozen feature films, several shorts and TV episodes, and was Executive Producer of the TV series The Unit.  Although not a household name (how many playwrights are, other than Shakespeare?), he is an A-lister in creative circles and particularly respected for plays like American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, which cast a caustic and cynical eye on capitalism.

So, when his essay “Why I Am No Longer A Brain-Dead Liberal” appeared in the Village Voice in March 2008, it must have stung.  David Mamet taking to the pages of the trendy lefty magazine Village Voice to bash progressivism is like Pat Robertson going on the set of the 700 Club to declare God is dead.  It’s also likely to rattle a few latte cups in Hollywood and the other elite cultural circles where Mamet travels.

That article, though, was only a warm-up for The Secret Knowledge, Mamet’s recently published book fully describing his political philosophy.  The Secret Knowledge is as hard on progressives as Glengarry Glen Ross was on real estate agents.  Mamet now finds that the liberalism he had imbibed and accepted unconsciously is hopelessly naïve, childish, and out of touch with the hard facts of life.  He particularly disdains contemporary education, which he believes is intellectually lazy and rewards students for successfully regurgitating liberal pieties rather than independent thought.

Since David Mamet is a literary man, it’s not surprising that his political conversion came by reading.  Mamet claims to have been completely ignorant of conservative ideas and serious conservative authors until he read White Guilt by Shelby Steele.  This opened his eyes and led him to works by Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman and, especially, Friedrich Hayek, who became his political and economic muse.

Mamet is now a firm believer in Hayek’s “Tragic View,” which holds that man and government are hopelessly constrained in what they know and can achieve with respect to social change.  Hayek argues that culture and civilization are indispensable in helping man navigate the uncertainties of daily life and achieve his full potential, but these institutions evolve spontaneously rather than through deliberate design.

Progressives intent on creating a perfect world often condemn inherited culture and place greater faith in using government’s coercive powers to design rational solutions to social problems.  Because these efforts can never take account of the manifold complexities in social and cultural relations, Hayek—and now Mamet—note that they nearly always fail, particularly when attempting to substitute “social justice” and more equal outcomes for procedural justice and equality before the law.

As a devoted Hayekian, I find much to like in The Secret Knowledge.  Mamet is clearly a sharp observer and close reader of many of the texts that have informed his thinking.  He also (obviously) has a fertile and creative mind and develops unique, striking  images and metaphors to illustrate his points (in particular, his chapters on “The Red Sea” and “Adventure Slumming,” as well as his description of the First Night in a New Home).

Overall, however, I can give The Secret Knowledge only two cheers, or maybe one and a half.  The biggest problem with the book is its structure.  Mamet conveys his thoughts through short, fragmentary bursts of prose loosely related to a specific topic (thirty-nine in total, in only 223 pages) rather than systematic and sustained argumentation.  His prose style bears some resemblance to the famed “Mamet-speak” of his plays, but the sharp, staccato rhythms of that style work better on the stage than the page, particularly for nonfiction.

The Secret Knowledge also sometimes displays the excessive zeal of the recently converted.  At times Mamet tries to fit too much into a single box and blame liberalism for everything. A good example is his discussion of culture and school shootings. Mamet asks “not why school shootings are happening, but why they are happening in school.”  He blames a breakdown in structured education, and the choices foisted on young minds they are unprepared to make, before concluding that “school shootings and the increased enrollment in postgraduate Liberal Arts studies may be seen as two unconscious attempts at adaptation of a culture evolving away from staffing a trained workforce. For though much has been made of the necessity of a college education, the extended study of Liberal Arts actually trains one for nothing. And the terrified adolescent, abandoned by society, coddled by society, may, if unbalanced, turn to rage and (a) kill; or, if merely clueless, (b) hide in college, as he does not possess the strength to grow up and leave.”

Even if you agree that there is too much coddling and choice in secondary education, Mamet stretches this argument past the breaking point, while ignoring the simple and more straightforward evidence that the Columbine shootings happened at school because that’s where the killers could take revenge on those who they saw as having rejected and tormented them.

A less erudite but more entertaining tale of political conversion is Andrew Breitbart’s Righteous Indignation.  Breitbart is of course a well-known media personality, and Righteous Indignation tells how he was transformed from pampered Southern California native (as a teenager, he would run into Farrah Fawcett at tennis lessons) to debauched Tulane University student to conservative culture warrior.

Unlike Mamet, Breitbart was awakened by television rather than reading.  The first break in his apolitical and apathetic life was Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court hearings, which he considered an outrageous, trumped-up spectacle.  It was also Breitbart’s first inkling that something was seriously wrong with the narrative constructed by the mainstream media, an impression that was only magnified as time went on.

Not long afterwards, Breitbart discovered AM talk radio, mostly because he hated the grunge sounds that dominated the FM dial in the early ’90s.  He was encouraged (by his father-in-law, Orson Bean) to listen to Rush Limbaugh, whom Breitbart considered “evil personified” even though he’d never actually heard his program.  He tuned in and, to his shock, found Limbaugh not just reasonable but persuasive.

Only then did Breitbart begin to read the works of the American founders, who were somehow not a part of the “American Studies” degree he earned at Tulane.  Breitbart’s self-education eventually revealed that his professors had taught a watered-down version of the Frankfurt School’s “critical theory,” a European Marxist import into the academy, explicitly designed to undermine American capitalism and institutions.

Breitbart’s reeducation was consequential because he applied it almost immediately to a new-media career.  The internet was just becoming popularized at the time he emerged from Tulane, and Breitbart knew immediately that the medium was perfectly adapted to his “wired,” ADHD personality. He also displayed a canny aptitude for being in the right place at the right time, first by befriending Matt Drudge in 1997 just as he was breaking the Kathleen Willey-Bill Clinton story. Drudge introduced him to Arianna Huffington, who at the time was on the political right.

Breitbart began to work with her to break stories online, which eventually led to him being present at the creation of the Huffington Post. The website was actually Breitbart’s idea, although he claims it was a kind of ju-jitsu move to use the left’s own words and actions against themselves.  As he explains it, “what … if we can get the collective left  that we have dinner with, cocktails with, the left that talks crazy in private but only expresses itself at the Daily Kos under pseudonyms—what if we can get them to put their names next to their crazy ideas?… [E]veryone could see what lunacies constituted the thought processes of the richest noblesse oblige liberals in our land, the people who benefit the most from our way of life and yet craft the culture of our land in opposition to that way of life. Frankly, I wanted to put them on display. And, for different reasons, so did Arianna.”

Breitbart says he knew he had succeeded when he was listening to Michael Medved’s radio show and Medved was quoting from a particularly idiotic HuffPo column just written by actor-director Rob Reiner.

Since then, Breitbart has become either famous or infamous, depending on your point of view, for exposing corruption within ACORN, demonstrating that a crowd of Tea Party protesters did not shout a racial slur at two black Congressmen, and (literally) exposing and driving Congressman Anthony Weiner from office. The Weiner episode is too recent to be included in the book, but the ACORN story (which Breitbart modestly describes as “the Abu Ghraib of the Great Society”) is told in extraordinary detail.

Righteous Indignation tells how one man was awakened from his adolescent slumbers to harness the powers of new media and communicate truths ignored by traditional media gatekeepers. It is a fast-paced but informative read from someone with a deadly serious agenda. Breitbart wants nothing less than to kill the legacy media and dance on its bones.

With his burgeoning collection of “Big” alternative media sites (Big Media, Big Hollywood, etc.), he has already taken some steps in that direction. Righteous Indignation is an entertaining tour through recent media and political history that may provide glimmers of what lies ahead.