Know Your Enemy - Midge Decter: Anti-Feminist Cold Warrior (w/ Moira Donegan & Adrian Daub)

Matt and Sam join Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub to discuss the life and work of the late Midge Decter, a neoconservative icon and anti-feminist.

Duration: 1h 22m
Broadcast on: 27 Jul 2023
Audio Format: other

In this episode, Matt and Sam join Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub — co-hosts of the new podcast “In Bed With The Right" — for an in-depth look at the life, times, and work of the late Midge Decter, who died in 2022. Decter was inspired by a distinctly conservative, mid-century American reading of Freudian psychology, mobilized in defense of traditional family hierarchies, which made her an important link between neoconservatives and the religious right — unsurprisingly, she helped found or served on the boards of numerous conservative organizations, including the Heritage Foundation, Committee for the Free World, and the Independent Women's Forum, among others. Her essays, books, and memoirs represent an anguished counter-revolt against the sexual liberation movements of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and her trajectory from (ostensible) New Deal liberal to anti-feminist Cold Warrior proves a perfect subject for Know Your Enemy. Decter also was married to Norman Podhoretz (another subject of KYE lore) and the mother of John Podhoretz, current editor of Commentary magazine. A quarrelsome, Jewish conservative with a lively writing style and a fascinating, emblematic life story: what could be better?

Further Reading:

Midge Decter, An Old Wife’s Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War (2002)

—The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women's Liberation (1972)

— Always Right: Selected Writings of Midge Decter (2002)

— Liberal Parents, Radical Children (1975)

— Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait (2003)

— “The Boys on the Beach,” Commentary, Sept 1980.

— “Socialism & Its Irresponsibilities: The Case of Irving Howe,” Commentary, Dec 1982.

— “Documentation: Sex Education on Trial—What They’re Teaching Our Children,” Crisis Magazine, Dec 1, 1998.

John Podhoretz, A Son’s Eulogy for Midge Decter (1927-2022), Commentary, May 12, 2022.

R. R. Reno, “My Memories of Midge Decter,” First Things, May 11, 2022.

Jeet Heer, “Farewell to Midge Decter, the Bigot on the Beach,” The Nation, May 13, 2022.

Ronnie Grinberg, “An overlooked conservative writer helps explain Trump’s enduring appeal,” Washington Post, May 20, 2022.

Douglas Martin, “Midge Decter, an Architect of Neoconservatism, Dies at 94,” NYTimes, May 9, 2022.

Adrienne Rich, “The Anti-Feminist Woman,” NYRB, Nov 30, 1972.

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

All right. Welcome listeners to episode 76 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sippman, your podcast co-host, and I'm here with my great friend Sam at the Bell. Hey, Sam. Hello, Matt. How are you doing today? I'm good. It's always a good day when I get to record with you, Sam. And we just wanted to record a quick intro for a really fun podcasting experience we had recently. We teamed up with a new podcast called In Bed with the Right. And we recorded an episode on Midge Dector, the grandmother of neo-conservatism. Her second husband was Norman Padorets, who we did an episode on Wayback When, a key figure in neo-conservatism. And we really dove into this one. Yeah, so the hosts of In Bed with the Right, which is a new podcast from the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. The hosts are Moira Donnegan and Adrian Daub. Moira is a great thinker on feminism and gender and sexuality and a writer that people have probably seen her byline all over the place for many, many years. And Adrian is a professor at Stanford of comparative literature and German studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences, but with a focus on gender and sexuality as well. So the podcast that they're hosting is, you know, it's similar to us as they acknowledge at the beginning. They're taking conservative thought very seriously from a left-wing perspective, but it's really focused on right-wing thought about gender, sex, and sexuality, which made Midge Dector into a great subject for one of their first episodes, because she wrote so much about feminism and against feminism and about gender and the family. And it was so fun to be a part of it. Yes, Adrian and Moira were both great natural podcasters, I think. When they proposed this, it was like, yes, in fact, we would have done an episode on Midge eventually, but it was a lot more fun doing it with them because of, you know, their expertise and what they brought to it. So we had a lot of fun doing it. They were great. And listeners, we think you'll like this one. Yeah, we all read a lot of Midge Dector together. Everybody put the work in. We did the work. Sam and Matt do the work. So we do housekeeping? Yes, as always, we're grateful to our partners at Descent. One thing they do for us, they sponsor the podcast, but if you subscribe to know your enemy at our Patreon, that's at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. For $10 a month, you not only get all of our bonus episodes, but you get a free digital subscription to Descent. And for $5 a month, of course, you get access to all of our bonus episodes. We have some good ones coming out, including one of the righteous gemstones. And of course, if you listen to our last episode, episode 75, you know, we recently survived some legal troubles. So now's a great time to support your enemy and Descent by subscribing. Please do. As always, you want to thank our intrepid producer, Jesse Breneman, who I will add joined on the third mic for our episode on the righteous gemstones and evangelical mega church Christianity. And we also want to thank Will Epstein, who does the music for the podcast. All right, let's get to our conversation with our friends from in bed with the right about the late great Midgetechter. Enjoy. So I'm excited to be with Matt Sittman, Sam Adler-Bill, and Adrian Dowd to talk about Midgetechter, the so-called grandmother of neo-conservatism. She's like really kind of a fascinating figure. Her writing is sporadic. She was sort of in magazines for a while, but she was actually born in Minnesota in 1927. She was born in Midge, Rosenthal, the third daughter of a pair of, you know, Zionist Jews who were New Deal Democrats. And, you know, she had sort of this early passive liberalism that was that like liberal consensus in the first couple decades of the 20th century, but she moved to New York as a young woman. She never finished college. And she sort of found herself cultivating like conservative intellectual milieu, especially at commentary and then later at her birth. So I'm excited to like sort of dive into her career, because I think she seems, for one thing, like she was really overshadowed by her second husband, conservative memoirist, Norman Pot Horitz. But she has her own body of work that I think is actually more influential that she gets credit for. I wanted to say two other things about her parents that I learned before we go beyond biography here. This is Sam, by the way, for listeners. Her parents Harry and Rose Rosenthal, like you said, they were Zionist, but I learned from one of the eulogies from Midge's funeral that her son John Pot Horitz gave that they founded

Transcription truncated.

Matt and Sam join Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub to discuss the life and work of the late Midge Decter, a neoconservative icon and anti-feminist.