The Destructive Impulse of Liberalism
Where is 'progress' leading? And other questions you should never ask.
One afternoon in August 2011, I set up my laptop in a restaurant in Omaha, Nebraska, ready to write a column for The American Spectator. It was the week before the Iowa Straw Poll, and I’d spent the day following Herman Cain’s presidential campaign bus, ending the day with a rally at a park in Council Bluffs. My friend Dave Weigel was there, and when he said he was going to have dinner at a German restaurant in Omaha, just across the river, I sort of invited myself to join him.
When I set up my laptop, however, I kept having trouble getting a WiFi connection. After an hour of fruitless effort — and a couple of cold beers — I gave up, telling Dave that it was obvious that I’d fallen afoul of The Gods of Dateline Integrity. You see, I intended to have a Council Bluffs dateline on that column, despite the fact that I was writing it on the other side of the Missouri River in Omaha. This was perhaps not the kind of ethical transgression that would get a guy fired. After all, I had been in Council Bluffs to witness the events I was describing, but The Gods of Deadline Integrity were clearly offended and, no matter what I tried, my laptop simply refused to let me get online and file that column. So I packed up my gear, bid Dave adieu, and hopped in my rental car to head back to Council Bluffs, where I found an Internet connection, finished the column and filed it (“Aiming for Ames,” Aug. 9, 2011).
The reason for telling that story is to explain why I bought David Mamet’s book.
The other day on the Social Media Platform Formerly Known as Twitter, I came across a quote from Mamet: “In order to continue advancing their illogical arguments, modern liberals have to pretend not to know things.” This has been called the Mamet Principle, and it struck me as an excellent description of an observable phenomenon. So I quoted it, and attributed to Mamet’s 2011 book, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. What I did not tell my readers, however, was that I had not actually read the book myself. And the Gods of Deadline Integrity (or rather their cousins, the Gods of Proper Attribution) compelled me actually to order the book from Amazon, which cost me $16.04. So now my conscience is clear.
Until he was 60 years old, David Mamet had never talked to a conservative. When his discontent with events in the early years of the Obama Era finally led him to question his lifelong liberalism, the first conservative he spoke to recommended that he read Shelby Steele’s 2006 book, White Guilt — an excellent choice. From that start, Mamet continued his autodidactic course of remedial study, reading various works of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell and Paul Johnson, among others.
What Mamet gathered from his study, and from his own observations, was that liberalism is essentially destructive. In order to lead us to their Utopia of Equality (the “Promised Land”) liberals must first discredit and destroy the hated status quo, i.e., the American system of limited government and free enterprise. This was what Obama meant when he spoke of “fundamentally changing” the United States — destruction.
Mamet is offended by this project, which aims to cheat Americans of their patrimony:
Our forebears struggled and fought and died to establish and to preserve and broaden those freedoms they bequeathed us, and which have made us the most prosperous country in history. To denigrate our culture and traditions, to turn our back on our place and duty in the world … is an act of folly like that of any thoughtless and weak (not to say ungrateful) inheritor of wealth.
The fact that we are indeed “the most prosperous country in history” is little appreciated by most Americans. This has been the subject of much humor lately, when it was reported that the per capita gross domestic product of the United Kingdom is less than that of Mississippi. It is notorious that, in every measure of socioeconomic well-being that can be ranked, Mississippi is always dead last among the United States, so that if England is poorer than that … Well, it must be bad.
Brothers and sisters, I can assure you that if you visited the campus of the University of Mississippi in Oxford (“Ole Miss”) on the Saturday of a home football game, you would have the most wonderful time of your life, provided you weren’t a fan of the visiting team. The Grove on the university campus has been called “the Holy Grail of tailgating sites,” and if ever Southern hospitality had a native homeland, this is it.
Did I mention that fraternity boys at Ole Miss are expected to wear coats and ties on game day? And that all the sorority sisters get dolled up in their finest for the occasion? There are some mighty fine-looking young ladies at Ole Miss and while I, as a University of Alabama fan, am partial to our own gals, I think any visitor to the Grove on game day would be impressed by the abundance of pulchritude. My point being that, despite Mississippi’s reputation for poverty, it is nevertheless home to some mighty fine people who know how to have a good time. And if even America’s poorest state is richer than England, what the hell is anyone complaining about?
America has been the greatest success story in world history, and yet liberals want to wreck it all in the name of Progress and Equality — or Hope and Change, as the slogans of the Obama campaign promised. This is folly, as Mamet finally realized after decades of membership in the liberal tribe, and he’s spent the past 15 years trying to wake up others to the menace he belatedly has discerned. He sees now what I began to see more than 30 years ago when the first couple of years of Bill Clinton’s presidency cured me of my inherited loyalty to he Democratic Party.
The thing about being a loyal Democrat is that, if you ever start having doubts about the party’s agenda — and decide to investigate whatever it is that caused your doubt — the whole scheme can suddenly unravel. I’ve seen it happen to others, who came from completely different backgrounds, and fell out with the Democrats for specific reasons of their own. These people (e.g., Cynthia Yockey) might have been my sworn enemies had we encountered each other in the years after I became a conservative and while they were still Democrat loyalists. But once they escaped the party’s orbit, we became good buddies playing for the same team — and determined to do our best to destroy the Democrats, who formerly bamboozled us.
Times change, and the issues shift, but the War to Stop Liberals From Ruining Everything is incessant. Whether or not we can “Make America Great Again,” if we give up now, there won’t be anything of American greatness left to fight for.
Oh, and “just one more thing,” as Detective Columbo would say. Having spent hours reading — or, at least, heavily skimming — Mamet’s book, The Secret Knowledge, I have yet to find that sentence I previously quoted. So I’m next going to have to go through it carefully, page by page, to make sure I didn’t miss it, and it had better be there, or else the Gods of Proper Attribution will surely inflict misery upon me.
Liberalism is not only "essentially destructive," it's murderous too. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, et al. Why is almost all political violence perpetrated by the left? Because no sane person would want to live in a society based on Marxist or socialist ideology so despots have to imprison or kill citizens in order to impose their despicable ideas. Every last one of these countries led by despots turn them into the bed of Procrustes.
Thanks for the excellent Memet quote, which I have now memed - https://meme.aho.st/the-mamet-principle/