After taking more time to review my original source for the David Mamet thing I posted yesterday (this piece in the Telegraph: “From left to right: on the mid-life political conversions”) I felt further commentary was essential.

Note anything interesting in the title of the article (emphasis added)? That little word ‘the’. As in “THE mid-life political conversions” It’s hard to credit as an editorial accident or oversight. The implication being that the ten they cite are definitive — and defining of a clear and boundable phenomenon occurring predominantly if not exclusively, in middle age and entirely defined if not motivated by politics.

Among those they cite are Paul Johnson (a switch that, to the Telegraph’s way of summarizing it looks like pure political expediency in order to land a job with his crony Margaret Thatcher) Gary Bushell (a former punk musician and amateur boxer — i.e., what could he know?) and Benito Mussolini. Hey, why don’t we throw Satan in there just for fun? After all, as Dennis Prager likes to note, while those of us of a more conservative persuasion tend to think of those on the left as being honest but misguided, the converse view often seems to be that we (and our views) are evil.

How about adding folks like the late (1990) Malcolm Muggeridge whose autobiography I’ve been enjoying these past few weeks? Muggeridge was a dyed-in-the-wool believer in atheist world communism, raised in a socialist home in Britain in the early 20th century and so convinced of the merits of a secular/leftist world-view that he sold his possessions and embarked with his at-the-time-pregnant wife to live in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, fully intending to give up his British passport for a Soviet one. It didn’t take long for reality to set in as his wife nearly died for lack of health care and he found himself, in his role as journalist, sanitizing outright lies to the Manchester Guardian on behalf of Josef Stalin. (As a side note, it’s amusing — now — to read his firsthand anecdotes of how Soviet bureaucrats and party officials regarded the Guardian as a staunch philosophical ally.)

Muggeridge went on, later in life, to accept Christ and adopt views completely contrary to those he’d held earlier. In this case, the two conversions went hand-in-hand (though clearly that is not always so). I offer it merely as a counter-example to the ones the Telegraph cites in that 1) it involved a religious as well as a political dimension, 2) it came as a result of prolonged first-hand exposure to the purest form of the leftist experiment in action, 3) it was anything but expedient in terms of his career (he lost both work and friends as a result) and 4) it resulted in peaceful fruit-bearing (as opposed to mere partisan in-fighting from the opposite side).

Come to think of it, the Telegraph could have talked about greats like Orwell, or Reagan.

It’s easier to do Mussolini.