The death of Midge Decter, coming at a time when freedom again hangs in the balance, is a moment to savor a woman of valor. It’s hard to think of a public intellectual who, by the sheer force of her will and wit and prose, cut a swath through the struggles of her time with quite the verve and warmth with which Midge Decter emerged in the last quarter of the 20th century. How we need her ilk at this hour.We didn’t know her well, but every encounter we had with her impressed us. The first was in the 1970s, when she was at Basic Books and we were shopping a tome on how America was winning the battle of ideas over whether communism or capitalism was a better choice for the Third World. What we remember was how trenchant she was in dissecting our proposal. We hadn’t encountered anything quite like it.Born at St. Paul, Minnesota, the daughter of a merchant, Decter was a woman of the left before, in the 1970s, she rallied to the standard of the right in reaction to what she described as the “national self-hatred that had spread like typhus from the sixties radicals into the major institutions of culture.” She would come to decry feminism, which she called “a kind of legal onslaught against men.”Decter — and her heroic husband, Norman Podhoretz — emerged among a group of intellectuals who, though they had started on the left, recognized during the Carter years that the Democratic Party was faltering and who reacted by helping to put up the big-tent Republicanism of Ronald Reagan, himself a former Democrat who had come to realize the same thing. She saw things with exceptional clarity and brooked no weakness.Once over a small dinner with friends at a restaurant in Manhattan, Midge laced into us for waffling over the neoconservative alliance with the Christian right. She demanded to know whether we understood what it was about. “Israel!” she boomed. After dinner, our group of six spilled onto the sidewalk, where Irving Kristol leaned over and said, “Don’t worry. She’s done that to a lot of us.”We both appreciated Midge’s clarity. Her long campaign carried into the 21st century. Over 55 years, she wrote 67 pieces for Commentary magazine. She won a National Humanities Medal in 2003. She once described how she “wept for joy” when the Berlin Wall finally fell. Reflecting on the success of her cause, she wrote that “by going to cultural war” we “seem to have made far more noise in the world than our sheer numbers would have suggested.”Looking back we perceive Decter’s crowning moment as the Committee for the Free World, which helped America prevail over the Soviets. She also understood, as her friend Ruth Wisse has reminded us, that the internal threat from cultural elites who “blamed America first” was no less mortal than our external threats. She once told Amity Shlaes — and no doubt others — “there comes a time to join the side you’re on.”
