David Mamet’s Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch is about neither. Critical observations about censors and blacklists run throughout the work, as do economic arguments, but they are only two of the book’s many themes. Failed institutions loom large: political, educational, and media. Meditations on art, music, film, theater, and writing abound. Freud emerges from behind many of the chapters. The city of Chicago is often the setting. Leftists (Marxists, feminists, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and more mundane Democratic Party politicians) are recurring villains throughout. Most movingly, religion, particularly Judaism and the Jewish people, are appealed to as a source of perennial wisdom and understanding.
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