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Like the late David Horowitz, David Mamet, now 77, was a red-diaper baby who, after spending the first act of his career as a prominent member of the left, eventually had second thoughts. Horowitz announced his change of mind in a 1985 Washington Post article, co-authored with his writing partner Peter Collier, headlined “Lefties for Reagan”; Mamet went public with his own political metamorphosis in a 2008 Village Voice essay entitled “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.’” In the years since, Mamet, whose oeuvre already included first-rate plays like Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and top-notch screenplays like Wag the Dog (1997) and Hannibal (2001), has published a slew of wise – and wise-ass – books about politics, culture, and the arts, including Recessional (2022), which I summed up as follows: “What, you ask, does he write about? Answer: What doesn’t he write about?”

Like Recessional, Mamet’s new collection of essays, The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment, also covers a wide range of topics: the glories of his hometown, the Windy City (“The culture of the Western world is American, which is to say Chicagoan”); the destructiveness of American schools under the aegis of the Department of Education; the mediocrity of poetry (or, at least, New Yorker poetry); the corruption of art museums; the the fraudulence of climate-change orthodoxy; the greatness of Shakespeare; the nature of heaven. While I agree with Mamet almost all the time, I must admit that I dissent from a handful of his robust assertions. “Government, like Circe, turns men into swine,” he states. Does it really? Or does it instead, I wonder, attract men who already are swine?

Unsurprisingly, given his long career as a Hollywood writer and director, many of Mamet’s reflections are about cinema (which was the focus of his delightful 2024 book Everywhere an Oink Oink): the preposterousness of the current Oscar rules, which demand that the credits of nominated pictures include a certain number of minority-group members; the lameness of most of today’s film dialogue (“few,” he insists, “can write dramatic dialogue”) and film music (nowadays, he feels, “all film scores sound alike”); and the absurdity of the concept of “Method acting” (“there is no such thing as ‘The Method’”). Ditto on all counts, although I beg to disagree, again, with the claim that the imposition of the Motion Picture Production Code (1934–68) resulted in three decades of cinematic “drivel.” Drivel? Casablanca? Random Harvest? The Good Earth? Citizen Kane? Really?

But The Disenlightenment isn’t just a grab-bag of random opinions. It is, as Mamet explains, “an attempt to identify a seemingly unconnected set of symptoms as a single disease.” That disease is the contemporary progressive mentality, which Mamet sums up as follows: “as it is no longer sufficient to demand Blacks be treated equally with whites, the Left demands they be given preference; as we have culturally accepted that homosexuality is a normal human behavior, the evil of the now-superseded discrimination becomes the demand that society avow that children are somehow born into the wrong sex.”

It is Mamet’s view – and I won’t argue with a bit of what follows – that the Biden interregnum was the result of a stolen election, a Democratic Party coup, which left it to Israel to spend four years as leader of the free world, “the West’s sole protection against Islamic terror, fighting while reviled by the very people and countries they were protecting.” For Mamet, the reinstallation of Donald Trump in the White House – Trump, “devilled, shot, and persecuted as no other figure in American political history, for standing up for his country” – was an act of “extraordinary intellectual courage” on the part of the American majority, among whom Trump “instilled” and “created,” as Churchill did among the people of wartime Britain, “an awareness of their own greatness.”

Of late, observing the responses of left-wing friends and acquaintances to the Trump ascendancy and to events in Gaza, I’ve been more baffled than ever by the progressive mindset. How, I’ve asked, can some people hate Trump with such irrational power? (Even if Hunter Biden had “the corpses of children in his basement,” podcaster Sam Harris notoriously pronounced, he would still have preferred Hunter to Trump.) How can the same people have so much sympathy for members of MS-14, Tren de Aragua, Hamas? Mamet’s explanation: “the sanguine do-gooder” won’t “pardon those enormities he has actually suffered,” but can easily muster up “compassion for the perpetrators of crimes by which he is not affected,” and does so “in gratitude, as they’ve permitted him to think himself omniscient, thus, a god.” Is it really about feeling omniscient? Or is it that they permit him to think himself more than usually virtuous – for while anyone can feel sympathy for a victim, it takes a person with an unusual gift for empathy to bleed for a criminal?

At a time, moreover, when left-wing college students are not only ardently anti-Israeli but explicitly antisemitic and pro-Hamas, and when the ranks of the Democratic Party includes Jew-haters like Ilhan Omar, I’ve been dumbfounded to see so many Jews continuing to vote Democrat. Why do they? On this one, Mamet provides real insight. Noting that it’s long been a meme – an in-joke – among Jewish men that they can’t hammer a nail or change a tire, Mamet comments that, far from being funny, this kind of nonsense is “a bid for group inclusion” – a “reminder,” born of two millennia of Jewish experience as a tiny minority in a majority Christian part of the world, “that safety demands passivity.”

But this self-image, Mamet counsels, “comes at a horrendous price: the Jew professing passivity invites and encourages attack.” And since the year 1948, this way of thinking has been challenged by the existence of Israel and, particularly, of the IDF. After October 7, 2023, you might have expected left-wing American Jews to throw off this mentality and rally to Israel’s side;  instead, many of them, apparently assured by the horrors of that day of the wisdom of their cowardice, retreated “further into the service of adversaries who sided with the assassins.” In the months thereafter, Biden’s White House withheld funds from Israel, condescended to Netanyahu, bribed Iran, left weapons in Afghanistan, and ignored the Muslim harassment of American Jew; yet when the 2024 elections came along and other groups – “Blacks, Hispanics, and gay and straight Americans” – voted for Trump and hence “saved the Jewish State,” most Jews stuck with the Democrats. Why? “I’ll explain it to you,” Mamet says: “he is ‘passing.’”

Mamet is withering about this pusillanimity. “It’s said that the most convinced liberal will change his politics when the rock comes through the window. But the rock did so a year ago and American Jews criticized the victims for preferring existence to annihilation.” These are Jews who declare “I am Jewish but not that Jewish” or “I’m not observant” or proclaim their disdain for Netanyahu – all of which, Mamet says, “are the utterances of fugitives willing to cringe rather than face their Jewishness.” About all of this, Mamet is blunt: “A Jew who votes for the Democrats is a damned fool.” Well, there’s one thing we can say for certain about Mamet: he’s no fool. Yes, he’s a world-class cynic. His cynicism is stinging. It’s through the roof. But he’s a cynic with a difference – a cynic who’s capable of stating without hesitation, and despite all his criticisms, that America “is the greatest country in the History of the World.” And he’s a cynic who concludes his book with three simple words: “God Bless America.” Well, God bless David Mamet. Long may he write.