David Henninger writes: "The American playwright David Mamet wrote a piece for the Village Voice last week titled, 'Why I Am No Longer a "Brain-Dead Liberal."' Mr. Mamet, whose characters famously use the f-word as a rhythmic device (I think of it now as the 'Mamet-word'), didn't himself mince words on his transition. He was riding with his wife one day, listening to National Public Radio: 'I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: "Shut the [Mamet-word] up."' Been known to happen.
'Toward the end of the essay, he names names: "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.'"
I would say he converted to libertarianism ( nineteenth century liberalism) rather than conservatism.