John Maynard Keynes was twitted about changing his mind. He replied: “When the facts change, I change my opinion. Pray, sir, what do you do?”

My favourite example of a change of mind concerns Norman Mailer when he took on the role of drama critic for The Village Voice and reviewed the New York premiere of Waiting for Godot – the 20th century’s greatest play. Without bothering to go, Mailer called it a piece of garbage.

When he did get around to seeing it he realised his mistake. He was no longer a Voice columnist, however, so he bought a page in the paper and wrote a retraction, praising the play as the masterpiece it is.

Now it’s my turn: after taking the liberal view for many decades, I believe that I have changed my mind. Not long ago I wrote a play (called November) about a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter. The play, while being a laugh a minute, is a disputation between reason and faith – or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (perfectionist) one.

The conservative president holds that people are each out to make a living, and that the best way for government to facilitate this is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are fewer than those of government intervention.

My own view? As a child of the 1960s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, business is exploitable and people are generally good at heart. But these cherished precepts, I realised, had over the years become increasingly impracticable prejudices.

Why do I say they were impractic-able? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. In fact I had been – rather charmingly, I thought – referring to myself for years as “a braindead liberal”.

The synthesis of the world-view with which I now found myself disenchanted was that everything is always wrong. But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong; and neither is it always wrong in the community in which I live or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived and among the various mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.

How, I wondered, could I have spent decades thinking that I believed everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I believed people were basically good at heart? Which was it?

So I began to question what I actually think and discovered that I do not believe people are basically good at heart; indeed, the negative view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the past 40 years. I think that people in stressful circumstances can behave like swine – and this, indeed, is the only subject of drama.

I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money; but that nonetheless people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day in rather wonderful and privileged circumstances. We are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplici-tous, corrupt, inspired – in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the constitution.

This constitution, rather than suggesting all behave in a godlike manner, recognises that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.

Rather brilliant. In the abstract, we may envision an Olympian ideal of perfect beings in the government doing the business of the people, but any of us who has ever been at a planning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious bullshit and go straight to firearms.

I found not only that I didn’t trust the current 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.

George W 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 Sorensen. Bush was in bed with the Saudis; Kennedy with the mafia.

And I began to question my hatred of “the corporations”, the hatred of which, I found, was but the flipside of my hunger for those very goods and services they provide, without which I could not live.

I began to question my distrust of the “bad, bad military” of my youth, which I saw is composed of men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a hostile world. Is the military always right? No. Nor is government, nor are the corporations – they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of my country into separate working groups, if you will.

Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption or crime? No, and neither are you and I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not: “Is everything perfect?” but: “How could it be better; at what cost; and according to whose definition?” Put in which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well.

Do I speak as a member of the privileged class? If you will, but classes in the United States are mobile, not static, which is the Marxist view. Immigrants came and continue to come here penniless and can (and do) become rich; the nerd makes a trillion dollars; the single mother, penniless and ignorant of English, sends her two sons to college (my grandmother). On the other hand, the rich and the children of the rich can go belly-up; the hegemony of the railways is appropriated by the airlines, that of the television networks by the internet; and the individual may change status more than once in a lifetime.

What about the role of govern-ment? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing; but tallying up the ledger in those things that affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance in which the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

But if the government is not to intervene, how will we, mere human beings, work it all out?

I wondered and read, and it occurred to me that I knew the answer – and here it is: we just seem to. How do I know? From experience. I referred to my own. Take away the director from the staged play and what do you get? Usually a diminution of strife, a shorter rehearsal period and a better production.

The director generally does not cause strife, but his presence impels the actors to set aside the original goal (staging a play for the audience) and indulge in politics, the purpose of which may be to gain status and influence outside the ostensible goal of the endeavour.

Leave unacquainted bus travellers stranded in the middle of the night and what do you get? A lot of bad drama. But each instantly adds what he or she can to the solution. Why? Each wants and in fact needs to contribute, to throw into the pot what gifts each has in order to achieve status in the new-formed community.

Then there’s the jury system, where, again, each juror brings nothing into the room save his or her own prejudices, and through the course of deliberation comes not to a perfect solution, but to a solution acceptable to the community – a solution the community can live with.

Before the US mid-term elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flak. The congregation is exclusive-liberal, yet he is a self-described independent (read “conservative”) and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first; that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon one to hear the other fellow out.

So I, like many of the liberal congregation, began – teeth grinding – to attempt to do so. And in doing so I recognised that I held two views of America.

One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other (the world in which I actually functioned day to day) was made up of people who were in the main reasonably trying to maximise their comfort by getting along with one another (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, even the school meeting).

And I realised that the time had come for me to avow my participation in the country in which I chose to live – and that this country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but also Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson and Shelby Steele and a host of conservative writers, and found I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

At the same time, I was writing my play about a president who was corrupt, venal, cunning and vengeful (as I assume all of them are). And the speechwriter I gave this fictional president was in his view a “braindead liberal”, much like my earlier self.

But in the course of the play they have to work things out, and they eventually do come to a human understanding of the political process. As I believe I am trying to do.

Indeed I believe I may be succeeding. The words of William Allen White come close to summarising what I think. For 40 years he was the editor of the Emporia Gazette in rural Kansas and a prominent and powerful political commentator. White was also a pretty clear-headed man, and he’d seen human nature as few can.

He understood that people need both to get ahead and to get along; and that they’re always working at one or the other; and that government should most probably stay out of the way and let them get on with it.

But, he wrote, there is such a thing as liberalism, and it may be reduced to these saddest of words: “ . . . and yet . . . ”

© David Mamet 2008

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