David Mamet's March 11 article in the Village Voice, "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal,'" talks about his transition to conservative thought as a function of his realization that, despite (perhaps a result of?) a disdain for the current administration, he was "hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow."
He writes that William Allen White, long-time editor and recent author, understood that
"government should most probably stay out of the way and let them get on with it. But there is such a thing as liberalism, and it may be reduced to these saddest of words: ' . . . and yet . . . '"His reference to Norman Mailer was to a review of a play he wrote without having seen it. After trashing the play, he had a chance to watch it and changed his mind. Although no longer writing reviews at the time, he took out a full page ad in a paper and detailed his error. Mamet suggests that his conversion is similarly nothing more than acting upon the quote by economist John Maynard Keynes, "When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?"
In a very different light, a July 3rd Economist article, "White Men Can Vote: Even if they can't dance," quotes Norman Mailer as supposing the reason Republicans garner the overwhelming majority of the white male vote is that, "They talk male talk."
The article suggests other reasons that Republicans have traditionally won the white male vote, such as "President Lyndon Johnson signed laws demanding equal rights for blacks," or because "those crafty Republicans have got them all worked up about silly moral and cultural issues such as abortion, guns and gay marriage," and finally, as the article quotes some voters as saying, "Democrats are associated with an assault on masculinity itself."
(Interestingly, I stumbled upon numbers of books and journals that explore Mamet's issues with masculinity.)
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