I asked Socialism AI two new questions and got the following answers:

1. Can you Point me to any reviews or criticism of the writer and director David Mamet at the World Socialist Web Site?  I only recently discovered some of his older films, which I found intriguing, but flawed. I find there is something disturbing and even simplistic about his themes, but he seems to have a strong style and interesting narratives.

Socialism AI:

The WSWS has covered Mamet's work and career in several substantial pieces, all of which engage directly with the qualities you're describing — the strong style and the disturbing, ultimately simplistic themes. The main ones are by the WSWS arts editor David Walsh, who has written about Mamet over many years.

The two essential pieces

As long as you don't look too closely (January 2001) — a review of State and Main that doubles as a general assessment. Walsh is blunt about his reservations: he calls Mamet's "mannered staccato dialogue" something that "merely irritates," and notes his "apparent contempt for those of his fellow beings not as clever as himself." But he also credits what Mamet does well — Wag the Dog and Glengarry Glen Ross are singled out as genuine public services, "when he turns his attention to institutions that deserve a thorough going-over." His conclusion is that Mamet's satire works when aimed at worthy targets, but that his "nastiness seeps through" and his "meditations on life and morals… usually fall flat, deflated by the author-director's smugness and cynicism."

Writer David Mamet: Man overboard (March 2008) — this is the most important piece, written in response to Mamet's notorious Village Voice article announcing his conversion to "conservatism" and his embrace of Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. Walsh uses the occasion for a serious retrospective that speaks directly to your sense of "disturbing and even simplistic themes." He argues that Mamet's early work (American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross) did contain a genuine element of social protest against Reaganite cut-throat commercialism — quoting critics who read the plays as attacks on the "distorted morality of American capitalism." But he identifies a contradiction present from the outset: Mamet lacked "a broad or deep understanding of society," so his anger was directed "not against [society's] foundations, but against some of its more repulsive… symptoms." Without social and historical context, the plays often left the impression "that the rottenness on vivid display was nothing more nor less than the rottenness of humanity itself." Walsh traces this misanthropy partly to Mamet's response to the Holocaust — a refusal of historical analysis in favor of a "gloomy and irrationalist" conception of humanity's innate "heart of darkness." His 2008 defection to the right, Walsh concludes, was a "moral collapse" made possible by the "generally wretched cultural-intellectual atmosphere" of the preceding decades.

Also relevant

David Mamet's Race in Toronto (April 2013) — a review by Jack Miller of Mamet's later play Race, about a wealthy white man accused of rape who hires a law firm with one white and one black partner. This is a useful gauge of where Mamet's "identity politics" themes lead in his later work.

The 2008 piece is really the one to read — it's the fullest articulation of the WSWS's judgment, and it grapples with the precise tension you've sensed between Mamet's undeniable craft and the corrosive cynicism underlying it.

2.  Yes. I just read the second 2008 piece by David Walsh. It is full of fascinating conjecture and descriptions. I like especially this passage: "It is possible to fight against the stream with all one’s might, but a truly powerful current has a way of wearing one down over time. Perhaps without even being conscious of it, one finds oneself floating in the opposite direction." This has me wondering, why have, not just self-professed reformed liberals as Mamet describes himself, but fervent leftists, often abandoned their beliefs, even becoming idols of the far right? Is the answer due mostly to the contemporary political and social tides affecting humanity? 

Socialism AI:

This is a question to which Marxism has given a precise and, I think, genuinely illuminating answer — and it is not "the tides affecting humanity" in the abstract, though that is part of the picture. The decisive factor is class position.

The class character of apostasy

Notice who actually makes this journey. It is not the working class that defects en masse to the far right; it is, overwhelmingly, the petty-bourgeois intellectual. The phenomenon you are describing — the "fervent leftist" who becomes an idol of reaction — is essentially a phenomenon of intellectuals, writers, academics, and the declassed middle strata who pass through the socialist movement.

Leon Trotsky analyzed this with extraordinary precision in 1939–40, in the struggle against James Burnham and Max Shachtman inside the American Trotskyist movement — the very faction whose members later became the seedbed of neoconservatism (Irving Kristol, and through Shachtman's acolytes, figures like Wolfowitz, Perle, and Feith). In his "Open Letter to Comrade Burnham", Trotsky wrote:

"Naturally, any man, any party and even any class can become bewildered. But with the petty bourgeoisie, bewilderment, especially in the face of great events, is an inescapable and, so to speak, congenital condition."

This is the crux. The worker's socialism is rooted in his position in production — in the daily, objective experience of exploitation, which no intellectual fashion can dissolve. The petty-bourgeois intellectual's socialism rests on something far more fragile: an idea, a moral impulse, a literary sensibility, a revulsion against the coarseness of capitalist society. That revulsion can be genuine — Mamet's early plays were genuinely angry at Reaganite philistinism. But because it is not anchored in the material interest and discipline of a class, it is susceptible to being dissolved by pressure, by defeat, by the passage of time, by the prospect of a comfortable career.

What the "tides" actually do

So the "contemporary political and social tides" you mention are real, but they operate selectively. They do not act on "humanity" in general; they act with devastating force on a particular social stratum, and almost not at all on another.

Trotsky's point about the petty-bourgeois intellectual is that he "vegetates in an artificial and shut-in environment," has "ample time to dabble in politics or its substitute," and is constitutionally prone to demoralization when the revolution does not arrive on schedule. The working class, by contrast, is schooled by the factory, the strike, the struggle itself. Trotsky's conclusion was organizational and programmatic: "The class composition of the party must correspond to its class program. The American section of the Fourth International will either become proletarian or it will cease to exist."

The subsequent history vindicated this completely. As Bill Vann documents in The historical roots of neoconservatism, the 1939–40 faction fight was not about minor programmatic details — it was about whether the party would hold to a revolutionary, internationalist perspective in the teeth of a catastrophic defeat (the Stalin-Hitler pact, the onset of world war). Burnham and Shachtman, disillusioned with the prospect of the working class extending the October Revolution, abandoned the defense of the Soviet Union and adopted "the grim perspective of a new totalitarianism." Trotsky warned that those who begin by rejecting dialectical materialism "end up not infrequently in the camp of reaction." Burnham was writing for Buckley's National Review within a decade; Shachtman ended as an advisor to the anti-communist AFL-CIO bureaucracy and the hawkish "Senator from Boeing," Scoop Jackson.

The pattern recurs in every period of reaction. The defeats of the 1970s and 1980s, the dissolution of the USSR, the collapse of the social protest movements — these produced a wave of apostasy among intellectuals who had never broken from their petty-bourgeois milieu, and who therefore had nothing to fall back on when the tide turned. This is the social origin of the Frankfurt School's pessimism, of postmodernism, of the whole "identity politics" apparatus: the intellectual expression of petty-bourgeois demoralization. The former radicals didn't become right-wing despite their old beliefs; in a deep sense their old beliefs had already been hollowed out, because they had never been grounded in the class.

The distinction that matters

So the answer to your question is: it is not primarily a matter of "tides acting on humanity," but of a specific class's relationship to those tides. The intellectual who is "fervent" for socialism as an idea, but who remains embedded in the petty bourgeoisie — in the universities, the journals, the professions — is precisely the figure most exposed to the current that Walsh describes, the current that "wears one down over time."

This is why the ICFI has always insisted on the distinction that Trotsky drew: the party needs "emigrants from the petty bourgeoisie who have broken completely with their social past and who have come over decisively to the standpoint of the proletariat" — and those who prove incapable of settling in the proletarian milieu must not be placed in positions of leadership. The apostasy of Mamet, of the neoconservatives, of the countless "ex-radicals" who populate the think tanks, is not a mystery of human nature. It is the predictable trajectory of a class position. The working class, by contrast, does not "become an idol of the far right" — it is betrayed, by leaderships drawn from precisely this unstable stratum, and then blamed for its own betrayal.

That is why the revolutionary party's task is not to recruit the cleverest intellectuals, but to build a party of the working class, whose socialism is not a mood but a class interest.