Scott Galupo sums up David Mamet’s new conservative-convert book:
Capitalism, free markets, and families are part of the naturally evolved order of things, and liberals can’t do anything except screw up that ecological balance.
Also, they hate Israel.
The problem with the book, says Galupo, is that all Mamet does is say these same things over and over, and says them badly. More:
Substantively, Mamet’s book will annoy longtime conservatives the way teachers’ pets annoy their classmates. The kid simply tries too hard. He’s ingratiating. “I speak as a reformed Liberal,” he announces as if in front of the parole board.
Perhaps a better comparison is to the door-to-door cultic propagandist. There’s something unsettling about the intensity, the totality, of his post-Damascene convictions.
The literary critic James Wood once described a certain kind of freshly adopted religious commitment this way: “It is like entering prison: you must turn out your spiritual pockets and hand over all your inner belongings, even your shoelaces.” Well, Mamet has handed over his shoelaces, voluntarily stripped, and appears eager for a cavity search.
Ouch.
Grumpy Old Man 
Jon 
Hugh 
Sounds to me more like Mamet has missed the lesson of the Baptist preacher who assembled most of his flock from reformed thieves, drug addicts, pimps and prostitutes. He found the work very rewarding, but he cautioned “You don’t let them sing in the choir for the first five years.” Mamet apparently wanted to do the lead solo the first Sunday after his baptism.
If he took his time to learn something before he opened his mouth, he might recognize that, conservatively, a free market is not a natural condition at all, but something which exists only with a foundation and cocoon of laws designed to foster and protect freedom of the market. Many who have called themselves conservative railed against such laws, when they were first proposed… by liberals.
Disillusionment in a liberal can be the first step toward wisdom, but not if he is simply trading in one simplified secular faith for another.