A Political Awakening?

Playwright David Mamet wrote an interesting essay in the Village Voice on March 11 that belatedly came to my attention: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'

In his amusing way Mamet confesses a sudden revelation that he has been living in two different worlds - the functioning world of everyday life with work and play and family and fellowship versus the imaginary world where all was teetering on the brink of disaster due to some dark satanic conspiracy of the corporate-government-military complex. He equates the first with a democratic capitalist society and the second with the liberal fantasy world. In his words:

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

His revelation was that reality was the exact opposite and he had always recognized this in his work. People are greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, rich and complex human characters. And the constitutional genius of our society has pit the evil wizards of the military industrial government complex against each other, rendering these institutions much more benign than he imagined. Thus, left to our own devices, we somehow muddle through.

Mamet, though coming from the liberal, top-down, government-imposed mindset, has come to see the spontaneous order of a free society and how this insures the autonomy of the individual that permeates the American character and reinforces the community. This is the unifying idea that transcends our political ideologies and prevails over our political destiny. (This is the idea that would have propelled Obama to the presidency.)

I quote this article because this same idea is the basis of my argument in my last post: that the American people want policies and leaders that empower them with autonomy, choice and security from risks they can't control. Other than that, they prefer government to get out of the way so they may pursue their own slice of happiness, however they define it. If there is any "....and yet" for liberals to espouse, it should be to insure that this idea of empowerment and opportunity bubbles up for every member of our society.