Long before Donald Trump arrived on the scene, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and screenwriter David Mamet declared that he was no longer a braindead liberal. Then as now, progressives responded by claiming he sucked all along.
As a conservative, I have long resigned myself to the reality that the great majority of my artistic and cultural heroes do not share my politics. Much as I admire, love, or even worship Bruce Springsteen, there’s no mistaking that he’s a far left progressive who would strenuously disagree with almost everything I believe at best, or even loathe me as a MAGA-loving monster at worst. I might take heart in the old adage to trust the art, not the artist. I might even analyze his songs and find evidence of a broader, shared ideology above and beyond the political issues of the moment, but ultimately, I have to reconcile myself that I am a fanboy of a person that I have little or even nothing in common with politically speaking. The alternative is not to enjoy Bruce Springsteen’s massive music library and legendary career, along with almost every other artist in the modern era or most eras for that matter. Perhaps because this has always been the reality for conservatives, an artist’s ideology has rarely, if ever, factored into my enjoyment of their creations or my estimation of their talent and worth, but the same situation doesn’t apply to progressives. For them, it’s reversed. Their artistic heroes have always been their political comrades, and when the two part ways, the progressive reaction is, generally speaking, more than a little revealing. Recently, this has manifested in increasingly strident attacks on J.K. Rowling, the world famous creator of the Harry Potter universe, a woman generally known as one of the most successful authors in human history, who’s artistic creations have amassed her a net worth of around a billion dollars while being enjoyed by millions of millions of people around the world. By any objective standard Ms. Rowling is successful beyond the average person’s wildest dreams, but since this otherwise generic progressive has chosen to take a stand against certain aspects of trans-culture, namely insisting that women and men are different and women need spaces of her own, those who would normally be her allies have turned against her, sometimes dramatically so. Sadly, this turn is more than merely political, where like me and Springsteen, they might disagree with her views on certain or even all issues, but acknowledge her talent and success nonetheless. Instead, Ms. Rowling now simply sucks in their mind and her work no longer has any redeeming value. Actor Pedro Pascal, of Game of Thrones and The Last of Us fame neatly encapsulated this phenomenon in a social media post last week, where he responded to a quote from LGBTQ activist, Tariq Ra’ouf. Mr. Ra’ouf insisted that Ms. Rowling has prompted activists like himself to make it their “mission as the general public to make sure that every single thing that’s Harry Potter related fails…because that awful disgusting shit, that has consequences.” Mr. Pascal promptly agreed, bizarrely claiming Ms. Rowling was engaged in “Awful disgusting SHIT is exactly right. Heinous LOSER behaviour.”
Nor is Mr. Pascal alone in his assessment that Ms. Rowling, creator of one of the most beloved and recognizable franchises of all time, is a complete and total loser in reality. He is only the most recent incarnation of the phenomena. In August 2022, Sean Donovan, writing on Medium, claimed “J.K. Rowling Was Always Terrible, and She Still Is.” As he described her recent work and her legacy, “If you are a vile bigot, if you happen to have an uncanny instinct to destroy your legacy and years of unearned goodwill, if despite all of this, you continue to believe thousands of voices telling you to knock it off are wrong, that energy glistens through the prose. When you read books from people like that, the shine that catches your eye is rarely the glint of gold in the literary riverbed. Instead, what you dig out of your pan is tawdry and gilded nothingness.” Thus, Mr. Donovan concluded, “In the end, if writing what we know is an immutable physical law, then perhaps there exists an equal and opposite reaction for the reader: There must also exist a law that dictates that we read what we already know — or at least we interpret what we read in such a way that it comports to whatever it is we already know (or think we know). This would certainly explain why Rowling is incapable of reading valid criticism without believing it somehow justifies her skewed worldview. But it is also telling about the rest of us. It can provide us with an answer to the question of why the mediocre Harry Potter books were ever popular in the first place. Why were works rife with racism and positive depictions of slavery embraced by such a wide audience in the first place? Maybe we should all take time to reflect. We ought to consider that the reason no one dwelled on the problematic tropes of the original books was because many of us were, indeed, problematic. And in doing so, we elevated someone who never should have been elevated in the first place.” Two years earlier, Gabrielle Bellot, a transgender woman writing for Lit Hub, claimed that Ms. Rowling “Betrayed the World She Created.” After describing her feelings of exclusion as a member of the trans community, noting that “In these moments of quieter disappointment, I wish everyone else could understand this, but know yet another transphobic screed from some famous figure is just around the corner. The latest in this saga comes from J.K. Rowling, an author I once revered.” Similar to Mr. Donovan, she concluded, “To be sure, Rowling is not her series. I may not subscribe fully to Barthes’ famous—or infamous—dictum that the author is dead, meaning that we should evaluate a work of art without reference to the artist behind it, but I know that her personal views are not necessarily the same as those animating the Harry Potter universe. But when our beloved artists fail us, it’s difficult to see their works as we once did. I fear that some of the series’ magic has faded for me.”
While it might be easy to conclude these and similar opinions on an artist of indisputable cultural significance are a product of our recent, hyper-polarized times, another manifestation of the rancor that has pervaded and poisoned our discourse the Trump Era, the truth stretches back even before President Barack Obama took office in what we can see as equally revealing. No, Ms. Rowling is not the first creator to be re-evaluated and found lacking as a result of a difference of political opinion. On March 11, 2008, famed playwright and screenwriter David Mamet, who has penned such classics as The Verdict, The Untouchables, Sexual Perversity in Chicago (About Last Night in the film version), Hoffa, and Glengarry Glen Ross, published an article in the Village Voice explaining “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.’” In it, he explained that he’d taken “the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind. 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. These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices.” As part of the process of changing his political views, he rediscovered “a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution” which “rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes 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.” “The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long. Rather brilliant.” In turn, this lead Mr. Mamet to realize “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. 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 Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.” This prompted him Mr. Mamet realize “that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace. ‘Aha,’ you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.”
For their part, progressives responded in kind with a preview of what awaited J.K. Rowling and have been doing so ever since. Suddenly, an artist they had celebrated for years simply wasn’t as good as they thought. Though Mr. Mamet had won the Pulitzer Prize and been nominated for multiple Tony Awards over a more than four decade career, it was discovered that he, in fact, sucked just like Ms. Rowling, not worthy of drawing attention to under any circumstances. In fact, the chief film critic for the Hollywood Reporter said exactly that while bizarrely remembering Anne Heche, who starred in one of Mr. Mamet’s films, Wag the Dog. In 2022, David Rooney posted on X that she was also “great in WAG THE DOG but it pains me to draw attention to a David Mamet movie these days.” Around the same time, a Broadway revival of American Buffalo was greeted with claims of “Fuck Mamet, there’s nothing he has to say worth hearing. Stop giving racist transphobic playwrights platforms. This show is shit” from the theater community, complete with graffiti outside the theater reading “David Mamet Is An Asshole.” That same year, Alex Kula, a Chicago-based actor, playwright, and screenwriter wrote “Confessions Of A Former David Mamet Admirer,” claiming “David Mamet is the reason I became a writer. I don’t want to tell you that, but it’s true. And I didn’t become a writer so I could lie to people.” While he believed, “to an extent, in the idea of separating the art from the artist,” Mr. Mamet is “one few times in [his] life [he] considered ignorance to be bliss, that you have the opportunity to consider a play as the author-less, made thing that it is, devoid of what its creator believes outside of it,” but “Mamet himself has written plays explicitly about sexual harassment, misogyny, homosexuality, racism, and the MeToo Movement, all deeply politicized topics. At this point, you’re probably wondering, what is it about Mamet that’s worth all these mental gymnastics? If you have to ignore his personal beliefs and put up with the weird practices that he doesn’t even follow himself half the time, what is it all for?” Alas, it’s “been a while since I’ve read one of his plays, and it’ll likely be a long time before I do it again. If you ask Mamet, I’m the product of a coddled, entitled generation who can’t handle sampling the wares of a person I have ideological differences with. If you ask me, I’m a writer who was made into what I am by David Mamet’s writing, someone who knows that the way I see and appreciate theatre for the rest of my life will be shaped by his work, being disappointed in his idol giving into a shameless grift. He’s an artist who has lost the favor of his original industry, one based on innovation and boundary-pushing that he was a healthy beneficiary of. All he can do now is spew right-wing talking points for the niche audience that consumes media based on political affiliation.” Two years earlier, fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Paula Vogel claimed she doesn’t even consider Mr. Mamet an “artist.” Even more recently, progressives savaged a revival of Glengarry Glen Ross, calling it “Painfully Offensive and Dated.” “There’s an argument to let David Mamet’s 1984 play stay pure to its words,” wrote Tim Teeman for The Daily Beast, “but those racist and homophobic slurs land with a thud in the era of MAGA.” This point was so potent it apparently bore repeating, “Beamed into 2025—via the enduring cultural imprint of the 1992 movie starring Al Pacino and Alec Baldwin—this revival of Glengarry Glen Ross, starring Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr, and Michael McKean, lands with a puzzling, bitter thud. The production, directed by Patrick Marber, feels both dated and absolutely of the political and cultural moment of now.”
Regardless, Mr. Mamet himself is aware enough to understand what has happened to his reputation, successful enough to not care, and astute enough to provide something of an explanation for these sudden changes of opinion. To that end, he quoted a 1936 tome by Christopher Hollis, Foreigners Aren’t Fools, “The Left is atheist, and, simply because it is atheist, its religious fanaticism is worse than any of the other fanaticisms of history. For the romantic of the past has sometimes, if all too rarely, been restrained by the memory that God is Truth. But the atheist fanatic has no reason for such restraint.” At the same time, I don’t believe this fully explains it. First, there is the ongoing sense of denial: Since at least 2015, progressives have a tendency to blame all of our cultural woes on President Trump, as though prior to his descent down the infamous golden escalator we were all living in harmony with one another and any disagreements were politely and rationally discussed. In their view, President Trump is to blame that we are now degraded and every possible issue has been elevated into a matter of life and death. As we have seen, however, this is completely false. Mr. Mamet fell from grace for his lack of ideological purity long before the Trump era, previewing tactics that would be used against other artists such as J.K. Rowling or previously popular cultural figures like Elon Musk, who once up a time was called a real life Iron Man and who now supposedly has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Second, there is the need to constantly bring it up. To progressives, bygones are never bygones. Personally, I wasn’t pleased watching Bruce Springsteen perform on behalf of Kamala Harris last year, but whatever I might have thought, it’s impact on me was precisely zero as is the impact of most political disagreements with an artist. Progressives, however, simply can’t handle that fact. They are, instead, so consumed by emotion, they react to these occurrences like jilted teenagers at the prom, completely and unable to look past them under any circumstances. A hundred years from now someone will stage Glengarry Glen Ross again and The Daily Beast will be saying the same thing. The only explanation is they view each and every instance as a personal betrayal, a family member who has somehow fucked them over, and they simply can’t get over it. Needless to say, this isn’t healthy, but sadly it is the reality of progressive ideological purity.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 