I assume that David Mamet is a name that most readers of my blog postings will recognize. Mamet is a highly-regarded American playwright, filmmaker, and author, and is a recipient of the Pulitizer Prize for his achievements in arts and the theatre.
Mamet is also, I was surprised to learn, a zealous and outspoken supporter of president-elect Trump. Mamet's opinion column, dated November 22, 2024, and published in The Wall Street Journal on November 23rd, was headlined as follows: "Decline and Fall of America? Not Yet." The subhead reads this way: "Trump appears to have broken the codependency of the woke and averted a destructive revolution."
Here's a sample of Mamet's commentary (emphasis added):
During the past four years, American politics has been dominated by a coalition each of whose members, like codependent kin, has its own investment in group integrity and the power it derives therefrom. The superrich, academia, Islamists, Marxists and the media have colluded to suppress the true and impose the false.
We know that their perfidies, lawfare, slander, blacklisting and civil persecution were practiced on conservatives and Republicans, particularly on Mr. Trump. But the suppression was targeted primarily at their own voters.
To remain unthreatened by reason, the liberal populace had to be convinced to endorse various lies and fantasies: Black Lives Matter, Israel’s perfidy, unlimited abortion as a woman’s right, men’s right to compete in women’s sports, the abolition of the police, Mr. Trump’s demonic power and so on.
Why would rational people vote to destroy their borders, their cities, their jobs and their children? For the same reason the sick family must tolerate its dysfunction: The co-opted liberal electorate was terrified that any deviation would result in destruction of its protective unit. As it would....
Why would sentient Americans vote away the freedoms of thought, conscience, assembly and expression guaranteed by our Constitution? It makes sense, as any suicide does, as an act of survival. The suicide takes his own life to stop unbearable anguish. It is the most desperate act of self-preservation.
Prosperity, interconnectivity and their attendant confusions have led to chaos, the denigration of religion, the family, law and the nations whose identity was created out of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The U.K. now is prosecuting those standing silently across the street from abortion clinics. Should they testify that they were praying, they are guilty of a crime
Since the ’20 election I have feared a new American revolution, the leftist government proclaiming its intent to destroy parents whom it calls terrorists and citizens whom it deems insurrectionists. During the past four years Mr. Trump—raided, indicted, convicted, sued, slandered and shot—continued to grow in popularity, and attracted the like-minded into a coalition stronger than that of the left.
To command, one must have lieutenants themselves capable of assuming command and inspiring subordinates. Their absence in 2020 led to that bump in the road; but their emergence and amalgamation in the last four years is now the Republican Party. This isn’t a cult of personality, but a group of citizen-workers, Americans who adore our country. We understand ourselves not primarily as Republicans or conservatives, but as “we the people.”
The horror of the past four years—the appeasement of terror, the slavish support of our enemies, the abandonment of the state of Israel, the assaults on free speech—seemed to me the descent into chaos which has been the end of every world power.
Rome, Greece, Nineveh and Tyre, Babylon, Nazi Germany—all were eventually returned to dust. I saw the irreversible decline of the U.S. and took comfort in the scripture. The Old Testament is a record of decline of those civilizations which fall away from God; and promises that a return to his precepts will restore his grace. We know that one day America, as all things, will go one with Nineveh and Tyre. But not today.
As I say, having known Mamet only through his plays, I was surprised to find him expressing the views just presented above. Those views are, without doubt, some of the most "hysterical" that I have ever seen. Many on the "liberal" or "progressive" side of politics are hysterical about the election of Mr. Trump. Clearly, there is equal hysteria among the pro-Trump contingent, of which Mamet is, I now know, one.
As for my own self-identification, I name myself as part of that group called "we, the people." That is an all-inclusive group, and yet this is the designation that Mamet seems to assert belongs exclusively to him, and to those who voted for Donald Trump. Maybe I am wrong, and I am misunderstanding his use of that "we, the people" phrase, but it does seem to me that Mamet is excluding "me" from the "we," since I obviously have political views that are totally different from his own, and am neither a "Republican" or a "conservative."
If I could sit down with Mamet, and respond, I would try to make clear to him that while I am neither "conservative" nor a "Republican," and while I voted against Donald Trump, and truly deplore what I know of his character and politics, I still don't write Mamet (or Trump, for that matter) out of the covenant.
As I keep on saying.....
We Are In This Together
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