Playwright-author-screenwriter David Mamet has a piece (in the Village Voice, of all places) describing his gradual realization that '60s utopian-leftist idealism just doesn't square with reality.

The nutgraph, buried deep in a wonderfully discursive piece:

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

"Aha," you will say, and you are right. 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.