Playwright David Mamet wrote an election-season piece for the Village Voice, provocatively titled "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal.'"

National Review, April 7, 2008

Playwright David Mamet wrote an election-season piece for the Village Voice, provocatively titled "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal.'" "Brain-dead liberal" was the moniker he had been applying to himself in interior monologues--even as he thought of NPR as "National Palestinian Radio." America's social classes, he now realized, were "mobile, not static, [the latter of] which is the Marxist view." He found himself reading Thomas Sowell, "our greatest contemporary philosopher." The upshot? Mamet used to hold two contradictory views of America.

"One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost." The other was of "the world in which I actually functioned day to day ... made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other." So he decided to cast off the first, and embrace the second. There are second acts, it seems, in American minds.