Con Games: Mamet, Miller, And The Ole Hitcheroo Switcheroo

If you're like me, blognoscenti, then you might have wondered more than once how a previously enlightened smarty-pants celeb can switch so effortlessly to a philosophy found abhorrent but five minutes before.

I finally figured it out: these media converts from liberalism are all fake conservatives -- not really conservative at all.

The latest casualty is the playwright and director David Mamet, a man who glowers over all the rest when it comes to creating socko 20th Century drama. No need to belabor his chops: suffice to say a lesser Mametian work -- the script for The Edge with Anthony Hopkins, Alec Baldwin, and a bear who snacks on homo sapiens -- is one of my favorite movies of all time.

Mamet was preceded in the conservative walk of flame by Dennis Miller, a comic talented enough to suffer the slings and arrows of Monday Night Football without pads. I am (or was) a big fan of Miller's comedy. He still has a command of the language and the lingo beyond compare--he makes glib look tongue-tied and hip look square.

Making the world safe for their conversions is, was, and will be the brutish formerly British writer Christopher Hitchens, the post-liberal slash-and-burn polymath now blessed to be both an American citizen and the petulant house pet of neoconservatives. As pundits go on either side, Hitchens is brilliant and cogent beyond belief, equally skilled in scornful sound byte and prose that glitters like swallowed glass.

Christopher Hitchens has the advantage of simply being smarter then everyone else. Attention must be paid.

A wag on the right might make the point that Mamet, Miller, and Hitchens are typical liberals who think nothing of flip-flopping when a prettier idea comes along. Someone equally cynical leftword might say Trotskyites and liberal Democrats turned out to be the testiest of neocons -- like converts to Catholicism who come to Communion late in life. Except it turns out that the conservatism of Mamet, Miller, and Hitchens are of the pick-and-choose variety who eat the Cheerios and leave the Breakfast of Champions behind. If the National Journal chose to rate them, they would all flunk the test of true conservatism faster than you can say Sean Hannity.

Mamet first. Based on his piece in the Village Voice, his conversion is circumspect at best, centering on sweeping pronouncements about the role of government, the military, and his own community based on his direct personal experience.

"Aha," you will say, and you are right," Mamet writes. "I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism."

No problem there, but as good as Mamet can be with the pen on screen and stage, he is routinely unpersuasive when working in plain old prose: this piece on his conversion to conservatism is no different. He eschews further elaboration or any nuggets from free marketeers, for example, and his ultimate conversion borders on the disingenuous.

"I took the liberal view for many decades," Mamet writes, "but I believe I have changed my mind."
There's a maybe in there somewhere. Like a fuzzy-headed liberal, Mamet can't seem to believe what he just said. In his favor, we can only presume the Jewish writer of Glengarry Glen Ross does not embrace all the noxious certainties of conservatism, beginning with a belief in Jesus Christ as his savior, extending to a ban on stem-cell research, and ending with the slam-dunk case for dinosaurs on Noah's ark. One can assume Mamet would flunk a conservative litmus test that includes social issues.

So too would Dennis Miller. The comedian is far more specific about his conservatism than Mamet: he's one of those "9/11 changed everything" conservatives, the kind who are forced to convert the hunt for Sunni Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan into the Shia beheading of Saddam Hussein in Iraq -- and thus to support all things preemptive in foreign policy. But he is also one of those stand-up goofballs who claims libertarianism as his true creed, thereby paving the way for a concomitant liberal embrace of things like homosexuality and even birth control.

"I'm basically a libertarian," Miller says. "I'm pro-gay marriage and pro-choice, but nobody wants to hear all that.... They determine who you are based on the war."

Of course, libertarians like Ron Paul oppose the Iraq war -- and all such wars -- but no matter. Miller hates the Clintons and thinks global warming is a joke. Add those two issues to Iraq in the conservative kitty, and that's more than enough for Miller to call Bill O'Reilly "Billy" and to embrace the Right like a long-lost friend.

Forgive me my cruelty, but I must also point out that Dennis Miller is the host of a new network game show called "Amnesia." I can forgive his 9/11 conservatism but I can't forget his palsy-walsy ways with the slugging thug on Fox.

And then there's Christopher Hitchens. His trip from the left at least has a compelling intellectual narrative: Hitchens went ballistic in the 1980s, when British labor unions let Lech Walesa and Polish shipyard workers twist in the wind in their fight with the Soviet Union.

"It just seemed to me that social democracy had much more in common with antidemocratic communism than it liked to admit," Hitchens says, "and I couldn't call myself a socialist any more after that."

His disaffection with the left took on an even more personal flavor when his friend, the writer Salman Rushdie, became the victim of a fatwa that required his death -- while most libs sat on their hands. Hitchens subsequent support of the Iraq invasion can be traced to a hatred of Islam that goes back as least as far as his friend's deathwatch.

Even so, Hitchens is not really a conservative or a neoconservative in American politics. He calls the big-shot neoconservatives his "temporary neocon allies." And he has written the book, "God Is Not Great," that is poison to Christian conservatives. Like Mamet and Miller, he too would flame out in any test of conservative doctrine beyond a discussion of "Islamo-fascism," a phrase some say he coined. His dismemberment of Sean Hannity during one televised appearance was a thing of beauty.

Here's my takeaway: fuzzy-headed liberals make lousy conservatives who are not really conservative at all -- according to the all-or-nothing conservatism that requires slavish devotion to the cause right down the line. Mamet loves free markets and Hitchens hates militant Islam, while Dennis Miller's ideas about abortion would be right at home on HBO.

Of course, once one declares oneself "conservative," a certain patina of independence does adhere to the skin, much like a balloon does when friction is applied. David Mamet, Dennis Miller, and Christopher Hitchens are entitled to their views. Call them what you will -- just don't call them conservative.

Comments

[WilliePilgrim]

It's easy to become disaffected with the titles "conservative" and "liberal" and their permutations since they are based on peculiar criteria as defined. Trying to wedge and contort one's allegiances onto the constricted one dimensional line of right and left is confusing, contradictory and illogical. It leads to a kind of disonance that makes us crazy. Examine the more expansive landscape portrayed by any number of other political spectra such as the Nolan or Pournelle axes and a sense of depth and latitude is revealed which removes a lot of the rhetorical posturing necessary for independent minds to know where they stand with their own perspectives in relation to existing political philosophies, making the current debate over "what exactly is a liberal or conservative" sound like just so much ranting and raving. Taking the expanded view enlightens the individual as to the whys and wherefores of complex world where choices are not simply yes or no, right or left. Google the term "political compass", take the quiz. Whether you agree with the accuracy of the model or not (it is just a model afterall), you will leave with a more realistic understanding of where it is that we stand in relationship to the reality we wish our ideologies represented and how we arrived there. In the mean time I find no contradicitons in someone who feels the need to abandon their allegiance either "side" when it no longer makes sense to them.

[LeeScho]

When the slave overseer who was fuzzy about the institution of slavery reluctantly flung the whip's lash at the back of a recaptured runaway slave, I seriously doubt if that slave's pain and humiliation were mitigated by the prospective thought that the overseer was not a true racist.

Please do not tell me that in a capitalist society you can be economically conservative and socially liberal. Because if either one prevails, the other has to suffer. But then that dilemma is, of course, what makes white liberals, by definiton, so wishy-washy.

[ignrnthllblly]

God forbid there comes a day when "liberal" is the noun which defines me rather than the adjective which describes me. God help all those for whom "conservative" is a fortress where they presume to wait out the siege

And vice-versa.

[davidly]

Neither should you call Hitchens "brilliant and cogent beyond belief" unless that's because you're grading on a curve that dictates he be compared to others allowed in the debate on a widespread scale. Sure he fairs well against idiotic neocons and mealy-mouthed liberals, but I would hope that we could find a better standard by which to evaluate intellectualism.

Miller was at his best when he first got his break on the FOX network in the early nineties. I recall him being a fan of Jerry Brown in the primary, and he, like me, found Clinton to be far from the best or brightest the country had to offer. If 9/11 didn't change everything, it changed Miller for sure; it showed that emotional uncertainty trumps tenuous intelligence.

Mamet is overrated. He's in with the in-crowd regardless of which side of the room he happens to be standing. That milieu's standards are quite simply too low.

[S1m0n]

"Christopher Hitchens has the advantage of simply being smarter then everyone else."

Hitchens does a good line in invective, but there's little evidence of substantial intelligence on dlisplay. Everything he writes is packed with fallacious reasoning, intellectual dishonesty, and 'frothy emotional appeals". If these are what's passing for intellect in the US today, it's no wonder the barbarians are at the gate.

[Doofus]

Sounding 'British' actually makes you SEEM 'smarter than everyone else', if you haven't noticed.

Doesn't seem to work in the UK, however, oddly enough.

[dperino]

i was accused by a successful blogger of being anti-government (the implication was that i, and others questioning tax increases are conservative) because i don't see how adding more taxes is going to cure the ills of government on any level. i believe something much more rational has to take place before any such discourse, like dealing with government waste and how better to streamline and manage government in the 21st century. he announced my alleged bonafides publicly, i believe, as a means to deflect the issue and to turn it into an "us vs. them" sort of thing. this blogger, interestingly enough calling himself "liberal", was attempting to bait individuals through scare tactics (we will lose the services of first responders) and guilt ("you want to live in a democracy, don't you?), something i thought to be more neocon in nature. apparently, to a political dogmatic you are rigidly for while anything differential to their ideology is a universal act of betrayal.

[NABNYC]

There are some people who are "liberal" when they're young because it suits their purposes. Particularly men, when they're young, like to drink, take drugs, screw around, being childish, party all night and sleep all day.

Then they have the awakening, at 50 or thereabouts, when they finally get clean, get sober, go on a diet, start to exercise, marry a 20-year-old and reproduce, and most importantly, they wake up one day and realize that despite their being complete jerk-offs, they've managed to accumulate a lot of money. Or they may inherit the family business. And then they start getting really parnoid that some will come along and take it away from them. Some welfare queen.

Every man I know who has a lot of money always has a story about how poor they were when they were growing up, no one ever helped them, they did it all on their own, they hate the welfare queens, hard work saved them. But once in awhile they slip up and mention something about how when they were kids their family always had Sunday dinner at the Club -- the Country Club. Aha. That must have been the "Country Club" for poor folk.

[joebhed]

...." Mamet loves free markets and Hitchens hates militant Islam, while Dennis Miller's ideas about abortion would be right at home on HBO."

In my heart of hearts I think I believe they will not be gone for long.

Dave Mamet
Dave! Dave!
He has learned that he loves the free markets.
Dave.
The free markets.
Bad timing, Dave. Really bad timing.
Think unlearn.
Again.

And, the Hitch-meister.
He hates militant Islam.
He hates it.
Hate.
That is a pretty low mark.
Hate can make you do some pretty ugly things.
It can't be that he hates the religion of Islam.
So he must hate militarism.
At least when it is done by someone not of his religion.
Miltarism.
Let's see, militarism.
Who does that make you think of?
What country? What country?
I can't think of it right now.
But I worry that the hate thing might come back and bitie him in the ass.
In the long run.

And, Dennis.
What can I say.
He's funny and people like to laugh.
Me, too.
I'm glad that Dennis has a venue to express his present political leanings in a way that can keep us all laughing.
We need more of that.
And less of the hate thing.

[Clinton]

It's difficult to know if these changes are genuine or just opportunism. They don't seem profound, and they don't appear to be well thought out. Even the alleged Marxism of Hitchens was of a decidedly pseudo-intellectual kind, the type usually associated with twenty somethings who still live with their parents. The fact that so many liberals are such posers and flakes is not a reason to reject liberal ideas.

[Desiderata]

and then there is Arrianna Huffington, who became an honest woman but maintains her disgust with everything Clinton.

[Doofus]

I've never been a fan of 'big government'. The less government intrusion the better.
Lately I see Grover Norquist has a book out title 'Leave Us Alone', purported to be
about insisting that government be less intrusive. So, apparently, I'm agreeing with
Grover Norquist, of all people? Does this make me an arch-conservative of the finest
kind? (Norquist being the guy who wants to shrink Government to be tiny & helpless
enough so he can 'drown it in a bathtub'.)

Not exactly. Grover wants to achieve his ends by drastic further tax reduction. I think
paying taxes is a privilege. He's a Conservative. Obviously, I'm not, even on my worst days.

From a review in/on 'The American Spectator': [http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=13038]

'Once again, America is veering dangerously close to European social democracy. The problem is not just the looming expiration of the Bush tax cuts or the $287 billion in new spending proposed by the Democratic presidential front-runner. "If nothing is done," Norquist writes, "even if no new taxes are raised, no new spending programs invented, the simple growth of federal government spending driven by the existing entitlement programs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and the aging of the baby boomers will drive federal spending from 20 percent of the economy to 40 percent by 2050."'

To which, I can only ask, Cheney-style: So?

[OtayPanky]

Michael Coniff: Call them what you will -- just don't call them conservative.

===

As someone who calls himself an independent, that sounds about right to me. The old labels of LIBERAL and CONSERVATIVE are less useful than they used to be. More of us have nuanced views, and don't toe anyone's party line.

BTW, you write something about "the Shia beheading of Saddam Hussein in Iraq". Maybe I missed a memo, but last I looked the man was hung.