David Mamet interviewed for the New York Times:
Years ago, you described “American Buffalo” as being about “how we excuse all sorts of great and small betrayals and ethical compromises called business.” In this book, you defend enormous payouts to C.E.O.’s working for failing corporations. You seem to have changed radically.
I have. Here’s the question: Is it absurd for a company to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to a C.E.O. if the company is failing? The answer is that it may or may not be absurd, but it’s none of our goddamned business. Because as Milton Friedman said, the question is not what are the decisions but who makes the decisions. Because when the government starts deciding what’s absurd, you’re on the road to serfdom.Don’t you have to denounce your early, anticapitalistic work then?
Of course not. At that time in my life I didn’t have a penny, and I was glad to be working at entry-level jobs. Having lived for quite a while longer, I see life from a different perspective. What am I going to do, go on denouncing capitalism all my life?
Mamet first came out three years ago, in a screed for the Village Voice in which he explained that all you liberals are doodyheads and he never liked you anyway. Judging from the interview above he has swallowed the whole range of wingnut beliefs whole and as uncritically as he himself said he had believed his old liberal assumptions Which is a sad commentary on (arguably) America’s greatest living playwright but typical for a lot of those road to Damascus stories. All those people who move to the right when they’re middleaged and rich always have to make up a fairytale about how their eyes were suddenly opened to the evils of liberalism, yet their conversion stories never betray more than a superficial understanding of either their old or their new politics. Their vanity doesn’t allow people like Mamet to admit they switched for purely selfish reasons, hence that urge to write books about their completely unprecendented journey from unthinking liberal to still unthinking conservative.