In this recent article, Wall Street Journal theater critic Terry Teachout considers the political conversion of playwright David Mamet, author of such celebrated plays as American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross and Oleanna.

Let me refresh your memory. About two years ago, longtime liberal Mamet wrote an article for the Village Voice excoriating his erstwhile “brain-dead” political positions, and explaining that his core views are better reflected in the distrust of big government and faith in the free market that he takes to be the centerpiece of libertarian-conservative thought.

Mamet:

Tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

The extremism of this statement ensures its failure. Government built the National Parks system, landed men on the moon, and made it a lot easier for disabled Americans to take the bus to church like everybody else. These things make David Mamet cry? That’s a rational response.

Here’s some more:

I found not only that I didn’t trust the [Bush-era] government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster—were little different from those of a president whom I revered.

Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.

I almost wonder if Mamet is writing a parody. What’s disturbing about this article is that it cavalierly uses the most simplistic elaboration of the liberal-conservative divide — virtuous founders vs. decrepit modern politics; the market vs. government; Bush vs. Kennedy. Mamet rests lazily on on arguments that I’ve heard a thousand times from writers without a scintilla of his talent. You’d think he’d have some fancy trick, some new and compelling point. But he doesn’t. He just says the same damn thing everybody does, and he doesn’t even say it very well. That’s embarrassing.

Perhaps my objection is essentially aesthetic. A good conversion story should be like a good Aristotelian drama in that it does not just contain a reversal, but also an element of revelation, of sudden insight. That element is lacking here. Ironically, the problem with the conversion of this major American dramatist is that it is completely lacking in any drama whatever. Mamet comes across like a guy who is used to ordering corned beef and realizes he prefers turkey, and then writes an extended essay on this thrilling transformation.

Back to Terry Teachout, who explains that the conversion should come as no surprise.

The only unexpected thing about this conclusion is that it took the author of American Buffalo (1975), Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), and Speed-the-Plow (1988) so long to reach it. In these hard-headed plays, which established him as a major voice in American theater, Mamet respectively portrays small-time crooks, unethical real-estate agents, and ambitious Hollywood executives as engaged in identically savage battles for power over one another. His foul-mouthed characters behave like scorpions in a bottle, determined to sting or be stung. They have no past or future, only the unremittingly bleak present, though they somehow manage to entertain us—if that is the word—because of the manic energy with which they do their frenzied dances of death.

The battles in which Mamet’s characters are engaged, as one of them remarks in American Buffalo, the most archetypical (and artful) of his portraits of American life, are zero-sum games in which only one player can win: “It’s kickass or kissass, Don, and I’d be lying if I told you any different.”

Is this right? I thought that the point of these plays is that the characters stuck in these scenarios are full of pettiness, confusion and blunder. I mean, the guys in Glengarry Glen Ross are salesmen ready to claw each other’s eyes out over a brand new set of steak knives. Calling that a “frenzied dance of death” misses the joke of it. These titanic struggles are only interesting because they are so small-minded, giving these plays a signature mood of human self-delusion. To rationalize Mamet’s early work into his current politics we have to take away all of its edge, and that would be a shame.

And why do we need to fit old Mamet into new Mamet, anyway? The attempt to impose total coherence over a lifetime body of work usually comes across as intellectually desperate. Poet John Dryden admitted that although Shakespeare had the “largest and most comprehensive soul,” sometimes his plays could also be “flat” and “insipid.” Writers, like people, are inconsistent, and that’s okay. Actually, when you think about it, by arguing that the old Mamet “prefigures” the new Mamet, Teachout diminishes the profundity of the conversion itself.

So what’s “conservative” or “libertarian” about Mamet’s plays? Teachout writes,

[Mamet's plays] present human behavior rather than trying to explain it. None of the characters is obviously sympathetic, nor do any of them step forward at evening’s end to reassure uneasy audiences that they are seeing man at his worst and that a well-regulated society has the power to lead him in the paths of righteousness. Instead, Mamet portrays human life as a Hobbesian war of all against all, leaving it to the viewer to draw his own conclusions about the ultimate meaning of the struggles for dominance that he witnesses on stage. The only difference between Mamet then and Mamet now is that he has decided that government intervention can do little or nothing to ameliorate the effects of these struggles, and that men do better to work out their differences through the operation of free markets.

Teachout has elected to pursue this line of reasoning for obvious reasons. By arguing that the anti-liberal Mamet “presents” rather than “explains,” the essay aligns these plays with a whole set of attributes that conservatives often associate with their point of view — hard-headedness, practicality, a more accurate reflection of the actual world, the provision of a choice to a consumer. These are essential components of libertarian rhetoric. The only trouble is that we could apply this very model of “showing without explaining” to plenty of works by people all over the political and aesthetic map, including Chekhov, Pinter, O’Neill, even Ionesco.

My sense is that Teachout’s argument gets snarled on an unfortunate misidentification. In fact, he is not describing “conservative theater” or “libertarian theater,” but something else — “drama.” Mamet himself has recently written that all theater is about a conflict between good and evil: in comedy and tragedy, good wins; in drama it’s a tie; evil only gets to win in film noir. If Mamet is right, then Teachout’s philosophy seems to be that there is something inherently market-based and anti-government about “drama” because it is about ties between good and evil. Does that sound right to you? Part of me is delighted to concede the point (personally, I prefer comedy, tragedy and noir, in that order) but there remains something wrongheaded about it, since in the real world most “dramas” tend to be written, performed and watched by liberals, and in the past the lack of cozy resolution in these plays has been the very hallmark of soft, liberal equivocation.

Besides, it seems peculiar for Teachout to define Mamet’s libertarian-conservatism through the unremitting nihilism of plays that contain struggles without any hope of reconciliation. The drama that Teachout describes doesn’t so much make a case for market-based solutions as a case against the very existence of solutions of any kind — in that sense, these are not plays against “the government,” but plays against the premise of politics itself.

Perhaps the chilling prospect of that abyss is just what has made Mamet so compelling to liberal and conservative alike over the years. Mamet’s plays don’t just have political ideologies, they eat them.