- A commentary by David Mamet, playwright, film director and screenwriter. Published in Wall St. Journal, Friday 22 Nov '24
For the past four years Israel has been the leader of the free world. The Jewish state has been the West’s sole protection against Islamist terror, fighting while reviled by the people and countries it was protecting. Its position was similar to that of Donald Trump—demonized, persecuted, targeted for violence.
Moses sent 12 spies to scout out the Promised Land. They returned and reported it was a good land, filled with milk and honey, but it was populated by giants so large “we must have looked to them like grasshoppers, and that is how we seemed to ourselves in our own eyes.”
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| David Mamet shook-up liberal fans by dissenting from leftist shibboleths at L.A. Times Fest of Books, April '24 |
Moses admonished them that they had been asked for their report, which gave their people information, rather than for their opinion, which made everyone afraid. The cowardice of the spies caused the 40 years of wandering, as Moses kept the Jews in the desert until that generation had died off.
God’s promise to the Jews, their fear and his rejection is a universal human myth. The hero is given a task he rejects. In the first instance he must confront himself and choose bravery over cowardice. The mythic hero is aided by the Word of God, contemporary Westerners by heroic example. Winston Churchill inspired in his country’s populace an awareness of their own greatness. So does Mr. Trump.
Yet half of America not only abides but fervently supports a codependent decline to poverty, crime and a nascent police state. Why? The leftist politicians and their media courtiers and designated beneficiaries profited from the perks of power. But why did the everyday American endorse them and their fear mongering? The actual threat wasn’t global warming, Islamophobia, the Supreme Court, the police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Mr. Trump. It was exclusion from the herd.
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.
In the energy devoted to accommodating lies, the mind puts them in the same category as truth. The codependent pays a huge price from them: his self-respect. President Biden suffers cognitive decline; the administration and the legacy media hid that fact and suppressed its discussion. They did the same with the chaos at the border, crime, inflation, the putsch of Mr. Biden and his replacement through fiat.
Before June 27, almost all Democrats and media outlets insisted that Mr. Biden was sharp and focused. On July 21, he was ousted from the campaign, and the hagiography of Kamala Harris began. Conservatives’ requests for clarification of her role as “border czar” were labeled “misogynistic.” Her catch phrases were “joy” and “turn the page.” Why would she have wanted to turn the page on four years of the Biden administration, of which she said she would do nothing differently?
To the left, it didn’t matter. “She isn’t Trump” was sufficient reason to vote for her. Trump isn’t the devil, but a rational consideration of him and his achievements was beyond the liberal’s ability. Mr. Trump was the enemy because he represented a challenge they could not accept.
The transition from party-line liberal to reasonable citizen generally involves some degree of shame. The genius of 12-step programs is that shame in them can be aired, and, so diffused, in a company each of which has undergone a similar upheaval; where confessions of complicity and shame are greeted and diffused with recognition, laughter and welcome—as among new conservatives, and new devotees to citizenship.
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.
