Midge Decter, RIP

 In 1987, I attended a conference her Committee for the Free World put on at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. I was just a thirty-something guy from flyover country, working in the family business and hating it. I'd had my conversion experience about two years prior, which had led me to subscribing to National Review, The American Spectator, Commentary and a slew of other journals, as well as embarking on a pursuit of a master's 'degree in history. I happened upon an announcement about the conference and signed up. I drove out to DC by myself and stayed with friends in suburban Maryland.

It was quite the immersion experience, rubbing shoulders with the giants of neoconservatism: Jeane Kirkpatrick, Norman Podhoretz, Bill Bennett (behind whom I stood in the beer line at the opening-night reception), Irving Kristol, Joshua Muravchik (next to whom I sat at lunch one day and had a great conversation about the Marxist-Leninist threat in Central America), and, of course, Midge Decter. 

It's only later that I came to see how instrumental she was in the formation of the movement that's come to be known as neoconservatism.

She, too, started out as a midwesterner who knew there was more to life:

In her early years, Decter did not uphold tradition; she challenged it. Born Midge Rosenthal in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1927, she was the youngest of three girls and, apparently, the loudest. “Annoyingly talkative” was her family’s consensus, she recalled, underlined by “a certain note of turbulence.”

As a teenager, she acted out, 1940s style — cutting school on occasion to smoke, swear, drink “gallons” of Pepsi and talk about boys and sex. She dreamed a liberal dream. Visits to relatives in Brooklyn left her longing for the “bustle and the smells and the variety” of a big city. She dropped out of the University of Minnesota and transferred to New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary.

In 1948, she married Jewish activist Moshe Decter and for a time lived in leftist paradise, Greenwich Village. Her decision to divorce her first husband had a similar ring to the words of an imagined suburban housewife (“Is this all there is?”) in a book Decter would very much dislike, Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique.”

“Divorce begins in that moment when one looks into the mirror and says, ‘Is THIS all there is going to be forever?’” Decter wrote in her memoir, published in 2001.

That split was the first foreshadowing of her split with leftism, a move she made with her second husband:

She doubted the modern wish to “have it all,” but Decter managed a full life of family, work and material comfort. She was married more than 50 years to Podhoretz and had four children, two with each husband. (All four worked in journalism and son John Podhoretz eventually became editor of Commentary). She wrote for several publications, from The Weekly Standard to The New Republic. She was an editor at Basic Books and executive editor at Harper’s magazine, where she helped work on what became Norman Mailer’s award-winning book “The Armies of the Night.” She founded the anti-Communist “Committee for the Free World” and was a member of the conservative watchdog Accuracy in Media.

Her turn to the right, like her husband’s, was personal and political. She and Podhoretz were longtime Manhattan residents who had socialized with Mailer, Lillian Hellman and others from whom they became bitterly estranged. In her memoir, Decter accused her leftist opponents of not simply disagreeing with their country, but wishing for its downfall — an attitude she feared would spread to her own family.

“Living as I had been, and where I had been, I had been subjecting my own children to danger: the danger they would be worn down and jaded before they ever had the chance, or the spiritual wherewithal, to take on the chills and spills of real adulthood.” she wrote.

“Put those feelings and ideas all together, and they amounted to what would one day come to be called neoconservatism.”

She was not one to mince words:

Calling herself an “ardent ideologue,” she faulted affirmative action for causing “massive seizures of self-doubt” among Black people. She attacked gays as reckless and irresponsible, and alleged that they had removed themselves from “the tides of ordinary mortal existence.”

Feminism was her special target. “The Libbers,” as she called them, “had created a generation of self-centered and unsatisfied women ‘hopping from marriage to marriage,’ resenting their children for limiting their personal freedom and pressuring themselves to have careers they might not have wanted.

The real agenda of feminism was to leave a woman “as unformed, as able to act without genuine consequence, as the little girl she imagines she once was and longs to continue to be,” Decter wrote.

Not surprisingly, she made enemies:

Her opinions were not left unanswered.

The poet and activist Adrienne Rich once wrote that Decter suffered from “a strange lack of information about the unfilled needs, let alone the enormous destructiveness, of the social order which she so admires.” Responding to a 1980 article by Decter about gay people, Gore Vidal remarked that “she has managed not only to come up with every known prejudice and superstition about same-sexers but also to make up some brand-new ones.”

Decter, Vidal added, “writes with the authority and easy confidence of someone who knows that she is very well known indeed to those few who know her.”

Gone at 94, after a life that had impact on the course of Western civilization that continues to this day.