[Aristotelian]

Wall Street Journal columnist Dan Henninger called it "a remarkable coincidence" that Stoppard's column should appear within a week of playwright David Mamet's disavowal of liberalism.

As Mamet says, "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."

That the liberal intelligentia should suffer two major defections in less than a week says to me that something is giving way on the Left -- people are being mugged by reality.

[woofie]

As someone in the arts I applaud any artist that can recognize a good thing when they have it...way too many cant

[acapesket]

I pray to God that you are correct in your belief.
bu whn you see the Thugocracy that has been educating our children since 1970 or so,
It’s a very scary universe that we inhabit.

[tennteacher]

I celebrate these two great contributors to literature and now to reality.

I have long been an admirer, now unabashedly admiring.

[Billthedrill]

A very interesting if somewhat meandering article, and thanks for posting. One gets the sense of disillusion that resulted from the fall of that great tabula rasa the Soviet Union, on which so much youthful political naivete was projected. The invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 should have served as a wake-up call, but the street parties had started and everything was groovy, baby. Except, of course, for the Czechs.

What is most marked about this period is not the degree of self-delusion indulged in by youth, because youth is always self-deluding, but rather how long it kept hold of those who have grown old enough to know better but wish, instead of wisdom, to be eternally youthful, passionate, and unquestionably right. That's actually very sad.

I loved the music and the dressing up but I couldn’t take to the dialogue: a reductive argot of comrade-jargon and bogus wisdom derived from misunderstood eastern religions.

There's an awful lot of that still going about, isn't there? The eternal child in politics mouths platitudes and goes straight for raw power. It's a heady and fantastically self-destructive combination. For all the fear of secret government bureaus and closed company boardrooms, the most dangerous person in politics is one who simpers "our diversity is our strength" while attempting to cut the throat of anyone he doesn't like. He'd be right at home in the street in 1968 - Paris's, not Prague's.

[JLS]

Stoppard does not sound like a guy defecting to me. He sounds like level head immigrant from the Eastern bloc who knew how lucky he was to have freedom all along. His plays that I have seen reflected that some too.

[GVnana]

Liberalism is philosophically bankrupt, and the Democrat party in the US is nothing more than a vote-buying machine.

[Dad yer funny]

I’m watching shows that I haven’t watched in years , ..

tonight Larry King served-up softballs to The Empty Suit

I catch myself , agape , and wonder , ...

can MeeeeeCain really beat this guy (???) , .. I know its still early

but Obama isn’t very good fielding questions , .. ..

if his staff and TheMedia put him at a podium , just making like “The Aloof Orator” , well , then he’ll have the upper hand

[Poincare]

...people are being mugged by reality.

Nice.

I recall one friend that arrived at conservatism from liberalism not too late in life said to me, "I began to notice things."

[OeOeO]

I’m pretty sure Tom Stoppard is a long time self described conservative

[dead]

Today, they are elder statesmen, wealthy Democrats

The smelly hippies are in charge now.