Does Anyone Care About David Mamet’s Conversion?

The playwright David Mamet, writing in the Village Voice, declared that he had renounced his unabashed liberal world view for a more conservative one, due primarily to the influence of economists like Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. Mamet 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.

His essay is titled “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.'” It is well worth reading, although if you are unaccustomed to Mamet’s writing it may take a while to learn to navigate your way through the turbulence.

In the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger wondered why Mamet’s conversion had received so little play in the mainstream press.

It is true that the story didn’t make it into the Times, and the results of a Google News search are pretty light.

You could argue that nobody reads the Village Voice anymore, but the blogosphere is pretty good at disseminating big news from even more remote precincts.

You could argue that most people don’t really care about Mamet any longer, if they ever did.

Or you could argue, as Henninger did, that the “mainstream press” is liberal and therefore loathe to report on a prominent liberal defection.

So: what gives?