Episode 2: Midge Decter with Matt Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell

she turned to him and she said, I don't understand how it happened that I became this great champion of the family.

I hated my family.

I'm Loira Donegan.

I'm Adrienne Daub.

And whether we like it or not, we are in bed with the right.

You know, we've talked to you, just the two of us, for much longer than we had intended to.

But for this episode, we talked for much longer than we intended to to two amazing people about our first sort of single thinker that we wanted to deal with.

And I'm very excited that our first episode, our first focus is going to be none other than the grandmother of new conservatism or maybe grandmother of current conservatism in general, Midge Decter.

And for this episode, we are joined by our great friends at the podcast, Know Your Enemy.

They're kind of like our intellectual cousins.

Their names are Matt Sittman and Sam Adler Bell.

And their podcast, like ours, treats conservatism as a serious intellectual project that we need to take seriously and understand in order to combat it.

And they're really great guys.

We had a wonderful time talking to them about Midge Decter, this kind of cantankerous, funny, embittered, weird 20th century thinker who started writing anti-feminist tracks before there really was much of a feminist movement to speak of.

Yeah, maybe I should say a little bit more about them.

Matt Sittman is an associate editor at Commonweal, Commonweal, which is a Catholic lay magazine that covers religion, politics, and culture.

Like Sam, I believe he's also a regular contributor to Dissent, and he is the co-host with Sam and LaBelle of Know Your Enemy.

And Sam is a writer in New York.

He's written a lot of really interesting book reviews and criticism for the New York Times, New York Magazine, The New Republic, The Baffler, Dissent, all over the place.

And they're also, I have to say, both of them, sweetie pies.

Absolutely.

I should say, you'll also notice they're absolute pros.

I'm not.

And so their audio is going to sound great.

And I'm going to sound like I'm in a paper bag.

And that's partly because I was in Berlin, do my defense, and Berlin famously, you know, doesn't have internet.

So that was, I'm kidding.

I was just, I didn't have a good headphone.

And so I'm going to sound like I'm in a cave.

And I speak kind of little in this episode, partly because the audio issues were clear to us as we were recording this.

But, you know, I think they sound great.

And I'm really thrilled that we got to hear as much from them as we did.

What we lack in technical savvy, we make up for in just like absolute golden retriever-like enthusiasm because I think we had so much fun.

We had a lot of fun.

I mean, this is cut down from an even longer conversation.

And yeah, we could have gone on for hours, and we did, but we could have gone on for more.

So, Midge was a new thinker to me.

Maybe she'll be a new thinker to you.

She kind of tends to get overshadowed a little bit by her husband, Norman Pot Horitz.

But I was really surprised by how much resonance I saw in her work from the 1960s and 70s to conservative thinking about sex and gender today.

So, hopefully you'll learn something.

I learned a lot and please enjoy.

So I'm excited to be with Matt Sitman, Sam Adler-Bill, and Adrienne Dowd to talk about Midge Decter, the so-called grandmother of neoconservatism.

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 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 a like conservative intellectual milieu, especially at Commentary and then later at Harper's.

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 memorist Norman Podhoritz.

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 Zionists, but I learned from one of the eulogies from Midge's funeral that her son, John Podhoritz, gave, that they founded a Zionist summer camp in the Midwest in Wisconsin, which both Bob Dylan and the Cohen brothers attended.

Oh my God.

Yeah,

I could not let a second go by without revealing that Midge Dector's parents founded the Zionist summer camp that Bob Dylan and the Cohen brothers attended.

Yeah, well, I agree.

She's probably unfairly overshadowed by her husband, second husband, Norman Pedoritz, as a writer.

But, you know, I want to put on my ex-conservative hat here and just kind kind of mention that, you know, Midge Decter, her role in the conservative movement, it's hard to overstate how important she was, I think.

Not only her writing, working for a place like commentary, you know, writing about the kind of controversial issues she did, feminism, radical children, campus protests, in addition to being a real Cold Warrior.

But if you kind of look at, if you kind of scratch the surface of any conservative institution, there's a decent chance she might show up.

So one of her more famous affiliations was, she was co-chair of the Committee for the Free World, which was an anti-communist think tank founded in 1981.

But she was co-chair with Donald Rumsfeld.

She was a founder of the Independent Women's Forum.

She was on the board of trustees of the Heritage Foundation.

She was a president of the Philadelphia Society, which is kind of a group of conservative intellectuals who meet a couple times a year to kind of debate.

be on panels.

She was once president of it, and that's where I first, I heard her speak actually.

I think it was in 2004 at a Philadelphia Society meeting.

She was an editor at Basic Books in addition to her, you know, magazine writing where she, in her memoir, which we'll talk about in a bit, she mentions publishing George Gilder's Wealth and Poverty, Robert Bork's The Anti-Paradox Trust, multiple books by Thomas Sowell.

So both her writing and her kind of stature as intellectual, but also just the number of institutions she helped build and was a part of and lent her kind of credibility to, And especially as a woman on the right, I think she often played that role too in these institutions.

Yeah, this is something I also wanted to talk about with her because, especially, sort of, you know, she had this big intellectual push in what I would call like the first half of her life.

And she really came into her own intellectually in the 1960s and 70s, even though she was writing before that.

And then she sort of moved from magazines and periodical writing into the think tank world and became a real fixture.

And particularly, she became, became, I think, ultimately a

source of fusing these two strands of like social conservative thought, right?

She became the bridge between like a secular Freudian social conservatism and then a like more Christian conservative social conservatism.

You know, she talks about in her memoir, An Old Wives Tale, she talks about going to her first heritage foundation event and realizing that this is a bunch of people who are from quite different backgrounds from her, right?

These are not people who grew up as New Deal Jewish Democrats.

But she's like, but nobody was saying anything that seemed unfamiliar or untrue to me.

There's this great Midge Dector quote.

She goes, at a certain point, you have to decide to be on the side you're on.

Right.

Wow.

Wow.

I think that's like a great, like little distillation of the neocon trajectory, right?

And in fact, she, I think it was in kind of like 80s era, her work with the Heritage Foundation, and maybe it was even the context you were just referencing, Moira.

Dector said at one point, she's like, just drop the neo from neoconservatism.

I'm just a conservative, which is to say she joined the side she was on.

Which is sort of interesting because unlike a lot of neoconservatives, like most prominently, like Norman Podhoritz, right, her second husband, she doesn't really seem to have had a like early public-facing liberal phase.

So Sam, do you want to give us a little background?

about like her entrance into conservatism and what is neo about Mitch Dector's neoconservatives?

Well, I'll start into that, but I want to hear from everybody because I think it is interesting.

Like often when we talk about neoconservatives, we are telling a sort of conversion story, a sort of story of a political trajectory from either the liberal left, the socialist left, the communist left to neoconservatism.

And it's usually we're talking about Jewish intellectuals.

We're probably talking about New York City.

Several of those things are true.

She's a Jew and it ends up in New York City.

But yeah, like Moira, you said, like, there's no like essays by Midge Dector written in a particularly liberal, certainly not socialist or radical vein.

As we mentioned earlier, there's a sort of like kind of knee-jerk liberalism of a Jew from the Midwest who comes to New York City in the 1940s.

I think it's important.

Her parents were Zionists.

So being a Zionist in the 1920s and teens was not like being a Zionist today.

It was a much more kind of radical position.

And of course, many of them were socialist Zionists too.

I think when she came to New York, basically she convinced her parents to let her leave Minnesota.

Well, she originally wanted to go to the University of Chicago.

Her parents didn't want her to go to the University of Chicago.

One wonders how different her trajectory would have been, perhaps not very different.

But she did go to the University of Minnesota for a while.

She was dissatisfied.

She convinced her parents to let her go to New York in part by saying, I'm going to go study, you know, Zionism and Judaism at the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York University.

And so she kind of trapped her parents.

They had to let her go because she was being faithful to them by abandoning them.

And at that time, you know, the Jewish Zionist New York had a lot of contact with sort of radical and socialist tendencies.

And she met her first husband, Moisha Dekter, in that time.

And he too was a kind of Zionist radical of some sort.

He ended up becoming much more well known for advocating on behalf of Soviet Jews and as an opponent of communism.

But sort of like, I think we have to keep in mind that the sort of milieu of Jewish New York in the 1940s and 50s is one where a sort of, whether it's post-war liberalism as the kind of mainstream of the entire society, whether it's being a sort of Jewish intellectual, New York intellectual, among whom there were socialists, communists, and so on, her liberalism was something that she sort of seemed to inherit.

But I think what's important, and I want to talk about more with all of you, is I think Moira pointed this out before we started recording, that like even in the 1950s, she's already embracing a kind of conservatism when it comes to social values to the family and so part of the reason that it seems weird to describe her as changing sides is that that part of her ideology this conservative notion of the nuclear family of masculinity of femininity that never changes and if anything becomes more pronounced when she perceives a sort of threat to that vision in the guise of the women's movement.

Do you want to talk about some of that?

Yeah, I mean, I think that it's super interesting to think about the fact that like, yeah, we want a conversion narrative here, right?

I mean, Norman Vodhorus's memoir is called Breaking Ranks, right?

Like, she doesn't really break ranks.

The way she seems to describe it is it's an estrangement from her milieu.

She doesn't seem to have been like a particularly convinced liberal.

She's just kind of, as you say, was a hereditary liberal.

There's a passage in Old Wives' Tale where she says, added to this litany, or perhaps in my case, the very first item on it was my recognition that living as I had been and where I had been, I've been subjecting my own children to danger.

A danger that 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.

Put these feelings and ideas all together and they amounted to what one day come to be called neoconservatism.

So she really kind of seems, she casts herself, I mean, this is way later, but she seems to cast herself really as having been jolted out of that milieu and into neoconservatism by having children, by her family.

Which is kind of an interesting tension because, you know, when we left off biographically, she had moved to New York City, she had married Moshe Dector, she drops out of theological seminary, she actually never gets a college degree.

She and Moshe do what you did, which was they moved to the suburbs.

They had two kids, two daughters, and they moved to the suburbs.

And she left the workforce and she was raising her two children for a while in a suburb, which she describes as like, you know, alternately, she wants to defend the suburban nuclear family lifestyle that emerged post-war from its assault by the cosmopolitans, but also you can tell she hates it.

Like she talks about being like bored.

She's sitting on the stoop outside with all the other housewives.

There's a neighbor who's like.

clearly kind of being abused by her husband and they're all judging her.

It's very like, it is like a Betty Friedan parody of the suburban housewife existence.

And she's like, this is how normal people live and they are not dishonorable.

It just wasn't for me.

And that's sort of a recurring theme is where she like rejects this lifestyle of the suburban housewife.

She ultimately gets divorced and says that her.

her first marriage to Moshe Dector did not make her happy, but she's very sort of intellectually defensive of these institutions and these customs that she personally rejects.

Yes.

I mean, the line about it being some of her comments being almost like a Betty Friday parody, I was thinking of when she talks about her divorce, she says, you know, like a divorce sort of begins when you look in the mirror and say, this can't be the rest of my life.

Right.

You know, is this the right, is this all there is?

You know?

But you're so right about her defense of kind of the suburbs.

And

even I just noticed reading an old wife's tale, her memoir, how often she would reference like ordinary people

and how it's kind of distasteful and wrong-headed she found like new class.

This gets some way into like to what extent she was a liberal.

It's kind of striking how often like liberal, new class, like kind of an enlightened, educated type in New York City or its suburbs is for her,

sometimes those are interchangeable.

But she says, I'll just read from the memoir, this is from page 40.

She says, the attack against all those men who are working to support their wives and families with jobs in big corporations was the beginning of a more general assault in the culture against the way ordinary Americans had come to live in the post-war world.

And that line, ordinary American, she just, it's just striking how often that shows up.

Yeah, it's a load-bearing phrase, to be sure.

For sure.

I agree with what everybody's saying about Betty Friedan.

It's so incredible to read, even in the memoir, to read her saying, like, I was dissatisfied.

I looked in the mirror and said, like, is this all there is?

That she got a divorce, that she seemingly really despised her first husband.

John Podoritz writes that he once asked her, why did you marry him?

And she says, because he made me feel like shit.

Oh, wow.

Wow.

Yeah.

And so to have her sort of like in so many words expressing exactly the anxieties of the sort of early 60s second wave feminism.

And then in a few pages later in the same memoir saying, and that's when I started writing about how awful all these people were and how wrong they were, the feminists, is remarkable.

I wanted to say one other thing about this kind of defense of suburban Americanness in the post-war years.

I think she's actually the first of the Dector Podoritzes to have a job at Commentary Magazine, which, when you think about how closely associated Norman would be with that magazine later on, is interesting because she was a secretary there first in the 1940s and in the late 1940s, I think.

And their son John is the current editor of Commentary.

Yeah.

Just to put that on the table.

Yeah.

A family business for sure.

I think for listeners for clearly illuminating this specifically Jewish liberal post-war identity, but which is, you know, kind of on the cusp of or turning towards or already includes within it a kind of conservatism.

Commentary magazine was funded by the Jewish committee.

It was of the New York intellectual outlets, the most explicitly Jewish, but also that Jewishness was the people who were involved with it were very dedicated to kind of disavowing the radicalism with which Judaism had been associated in American life since the 1930s.

They were the most anti-communist because they didn't want everyone to keep thinking in the post-war years that all Jews were communists.

And sort of reconciling Jewishness to the kind of American suburban post-war ideal was something that the editors at Commentary were invested in.

And it was something that she liked about people like Robert Warshaw and Elliot Cohen.

Yeah, I think it's really important context to point out that this is the post-war era where, you know, the Nazis have like really kind of discredited race science and put this new taboo on anti-Semitism in the U.S.

And it provides an outlet for Jews to sort of, you know, rapidly become an unquestioned kind of whiteness, you know, that hadn't really been true before the war in the same way.

And it also provokes, because of its demonstration of like the horrors of anti-Semitism and where it could lead, I think like a profound anxiety to like protect and integrate into America on behalf of a lot of American Jews.

It's something to keep in mind, I think, that like both the end of World War II and the rise of Israel, and maybe like a little later we can talk about like the Israeli machismo that was demonstrated to people around like the 1967 war, like created an opening for a kind of conservative Judaism that didn't really exist when Mitch Dechter was a kid.

Yes, yes, yeah, I totally agree.

And I just think it makes sense to imagine her like trying to reconcile herself to her life in the suburbs and her life as a mother, later as a single mother in New York, finding herself in a magazine like Commentary, which might have felt like a good fit because it's like, you know, we're not attacking America.

We're Jews who love America and we're anti-communist.

And, you know, there's a place for someone like you who's already articulating this.

conservative social values, this family, you know, family values kind of Jewish conservatism, which was, you know, it's just sort of a new thing because it would be hard in an American idiom to sort of embrace kind of Jewish family values.

You know,

Commentary was a place that permitted that.

Yeah.

I want to just underscore, too, the anti-communism of commentary, because there is a point in her memoir when she's kind of first working at commentary where she says like, yeah, we were, she uses a strange phrase, ideologically liberal, whatever that means.

But she's like, so we were for civil rights and this and that.

But she really, for her, it was about the anti-communism.

That was like central to the commentary mission in her description of it.

One thing that I thought that was interesting, I mean, jumping ahead a slide bit, I mean, we can, we'll cover the boys on the beach later, but she talks about the new class and when you guys are talking about the kind of worry about the suburbs, question of sort of middle class, that class identity and race somehow do interlace.

Well, not just for her in that description.

You know, Gor Vidal then writes this kind of response

to that essay, which is pretty anti-Semitic.

Well, actually, flagrantly so.

And he reads...

new class just to mean Jews.

I thought that was really fascinating that like, so even in 1980, 81, 81, the class issue and the Jewish identity sort of didn't seem to come apart really, which of course, at that time, they readily could, but Vidal reads it just as a statement of, I mean, he basically stages it as, you know, gay guys and Jews on a beach, basically.

That's what, that's what he, how he reads it.

Yeah, well, it's like, you know, these smart Jews who got to go to school, university, and excel and then get these jobs in writing and professional life and as pencil pushers and cultural iconoclasts and stuff.

And that's just like that was associated in the American mind with Jews in the 50s and 60s.

But that somebody like Vidal never really lets go of that

association is not surprising.

But I think this like newly acquired status is also a decent perspective from which to understand like the anxiety behind Dector's conservatism.

Because like, you know, when she and Pod Horitz later like both oppose affirmative action for like African-American students entering university, right?

And their perspective is very much like us and our Jewish peers and like Pud Hortz specifically like went to CUNY because he couldn't get into Harvard because there was a quota, right?

And like we had to fight into this middle class and we finally made it into this establishment and we are finally recognized as you know intellectual elites.

And now the elites are going to turn around and let.

just anybody in you know it's this sense of like we finally achieved status and now it's going to be devalued by giving it to black people.

And I think you can trace that sort of anxiety also in her like approach to the family, right?

She's like, I have just finally achieved like a middle class, like non-working, like white femininity that would, that was not available to my mother, right?

And now these feminists want to take it away from me.

And she also, I think it's, so like, you know, we're at this point where in Dector's life where she actually is a single mom for two years.

She divorces Moshe Dector, she moves back to the city, and she, because she's not being supported by a man, goes back to work at Commentary, which is when she strikes up a correspondence with an old friend of hers from the Jewish Theological Seminary, who had been this kind of like, she describes him as like a goofy, younger guy who she had played the like older, wise, married friend to when they were in school together.

And they start this correspondence of letters.

I believe he's in the army, Norman Pod Horitz.

Yes.

And the letters become more and more flirtatious.

And by the time he returns from the army, they are in a relationship and pretty quickly married.

So she's only single for two years from 1954 when she gets divorced to 1956 when she marries Norman Pod Horitz.

And they quickly have, I believe, two children together, right?

Yes.

A daughter and then the son, John Podhoritz, who's now all grown up and the editor of Commentary.

So to speak, yeah.

And she,

you know, at least somewhat.

But when she has her children with Norman Pod Horitz, what's really fascinating to me is that she realizes that it costs their family more money for her to go to work because childcare is so expensive.

And she does not, like somebody who has been a single mother, like a single breadwinner for these two independent children, does not question that at all.

She's like, okay, great.

And she kind of like claps her hands and leaves the workforce for a while.

Yeah.

And there's this, there's a bunch of these moments.

You guys alluded to some of them earlier where she like does encounter psychic violence of patriarchy, just injustice, gendered injustice in the workforce.

You can almost see her apprehending.

how unstable and like yeah unsustainable it's going to be for her like she eventually does go back to work because she says she's so bored sitting at the playground in the park yeah watching her kid day after day.

But she doesn't seem to extrapolate a structural critique from her personal dissatisfaction the way that the second wave feminists were beginning to do at this time.

Yeah.

It struck me just as Adrian was pointing to about, or I don't remember which of you was pointing to about affirmative action.

There is this kind of, to use an overused phrase, but a Freudian one, narcissism of small differences, where she sort of sees her own grievances like represented in some of the complaints of, say, second wave feminists feminists, or, say, the civil rights movement, or, say, sort of later on, like people who are advocating for affirmative action on behalf of non-whites.

And she sort of sees like a kernel of what she also experienced.

And then she has this kind of reaction that moves her in the other direction, a kind of like, I went through that, but you're complaining too much, you know, or it's annoying to her or sort of offensive to her to see representative on a larger stage some part of herself that she wants to disavow.

You know, I mean, she doesn't want to be the injured complaining woman or the injured complaining minority.

And so over and over again, it seems like the closeness of her own experience to what might be the collective experience of some kind of left or liberatory movement, that closeness is actually what annoys her so much.

I will say that when I read her the essay that first made her famous, The Liberated Woman, which was sort of a like parody of women's liberation that she wrote in commentary in, I believe, like 1971.

It was like, you know, not her first public writing, but, you know, it's like a lot of her essays, it extrapolates a long hypothetical about an imaginary person who is very annoying, right?

So

like Midge Dector writes in commentary about the liberated woman who is a middle-class white woman born at the end of the Second World War.

You know, she's pretty, she's privileged, she gets to go to college, she has access to birth control, and then she starts working in media and is confronted by like sexism in the media industry.

And it like, it's at this point where like me as a woman whose biography matches this almost exactly, like I start to go like, hey,

you know, it's a, it's a little on the nose.

And she is in a way, like very perceptive, but she uses her perceptiveness almost totally towards cruelty.

And I think this might, this might be a good moment to sort of, by way of explanation, go into a little bit of context about, I think, the influence of Freud on both Dector's milieu among these like New York intellectuals in the post-war era in New York, and also on Dector's vision of like sex, gender, and the family in particular.

And like, Sam, I kind of wanted to ask you about this because I feel like you've got the most ammunition here.

It's Freud time.

Hand it over to Sam.

Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe.

No,

I think Maura has as much as I do at this point about this in particular, but I'll start, how about?

Which is definitely that in the 1950s and in the New York intellectual milieu, these Jewish writers and intellectuals, I mean, Freud was everywhere for them in the sense of like, this was the time when everyone was writing about, you know, these long essays about new novels and modernism and kind of making sense of the war and in terms of Freudian categories, like incorporating Freud into a kind of searching modernist literary and intellectual milieu in New York.

But it was also the time where institutional Freudian therapy reached its kind of apotheosis in America.

There's a leaking, I think, between this kind of institutionalized psychotherapy and the kind of more like radical or kind of critical uses of Freud in the art world.

And I think the sense that in the art world it was totally liberatory and not at all conservative is probably wrong.

But the thing about that institutional Freudianism of the 1950s, people call it revisionist Freudianism sometimes, but really it's just like, it's the encounter between Freud and America.

It's kind of reconciling the necessities of the American, you know, sort of work and mental health system.

to Freudian psychotherapy as a solution.

And so it was very conservative.

It had conservative ideas about what a man is, about an idea of what a woman is, about how a woman should be, about what the family is, and that it's all about kind of a person has to, if they are well-adjusted and well-formed, they escape childhood and into maturity and they accept the world as it is.

So, I think, like, in terms of how this was later criticized by the second wave feminists, think about like Betty Draper in Mad Men and Don sending her to seemingly quite orthodox Freudian psychotherapist.

And the idea is that he's hoping that he's going to tell her, like, don't worry, your life is okay.

Reconcile yourself to your womanhood.

Being this compliant, well-adjusted caregiver is actually your natural state.

And everything else that's making you anxious is a distraction from that.

You know, it was really a way of reifying bourgeois morality at a moment where, although we think of the 50s as a time where bourgeois morality was at its height, it was actually like

coming undone.

And like everyone felt, you know, many people felt this anxiety, right?

And Freudian psychotherapy in that kind of conservative vein is as it was deployed in many, you know, physicians' offices all over the country, but especially in New York City,

was this

thing that was totally compatible with what Midge Decter then started to articulate in terms of her defense of the family, of the nuclear family of womanhood and traditional masculinity.

Is that,

have I given us enough to go on?

Yeah, I mean, I might.

I might jump in and talk about how, you know, the gender order that we think of as being very, very solid in 1950s white suburban middle-class families of a Fordist

male breadwinner accompanied by a

sort of domestically confined wife and mother caregiver was actually the product of a decades-long ideological project that you know, sort of emerged in the aftermath of the first wave feminist movement and the attainment of suffrage.

You know, there had been all these social advances of women into the public sphere in the 1920s and 30s, and then even more so in the 40s when a lot of men left the paid workforce to go into the war.

And there was a real, like, kind of deliberate, large-scale rejection and attempt to reverse that progress.

And as Sam sort of mentioned, you know, Freudianism was one instrument that created like a veneer of scientific legitimacy around gender traditionalism, right?

Not just this is how it has always been, but this is how it is sort of scientifically correct to be.

And there was really an imposition of like a like a gender superego on women who were sort of made subject to this version of revisionist Freudianism.

Which is what Fridan was reacting to, right?

This retrenchment of gender roles in the post-war era with the therapeutic as sort of a handmaiden to it.

Right.

You know, we keep coming back to Fridian, and she really is like Dector's like photo-negative inverse in some ways.

Yeah, yeah.

Yes.

Her proximate other.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They are like, they're both Jewish girls born in the 1920s in the Midwest to like lefty Jewish people and they both become enamored of Freud.

Fridianne finishes her college degree and goes to graduate school and sort of in

her extended professional training as a psychologist, really comes to reject Freud and comes to reject the revisionist Freudianism and the feminine mystique is a reaction to that 50s Freudianism that you can see Dector as like a popular avatar of that establishment thought and like Freidian as the backlash.

Yeah.

Can I add one point here?

And it kind of follows from Adrian's reference to Gourvadal's response.

to Midge Dector's infamous essay, The Boys on the Beach.

And this is one of the more anti-Semitic moments in that essay, I think.

But he describes Dector, I think he uses the word waddle, like waddling toward the homosexual, but with Freud in one hand and Leviticus in the other.

A couple of podorites waddling, yeah.

Yes.

Yeah, but it's interesting, Sam, when you were describing like the Freudianism of that period and kind of the givenness of certain things, including gender roles, you know, when you think about her trajectory and where she ends up, in one of her essays, there's a collection of her essays called Always Write that we we read some of and you know there are these moments where she's like at a conference with gary bauer this like hard right family research council conservative christian yeah and and in one of these essays it's kind of an interesting essay it's called is conservatism optimistic or pessimistic she says this she says a true conservative then believes that this imperfect and imperfectible creature who must vacillate forever between singing with the angels and stampeding with the animals needs laws and traditions and ordered expectations of life for the fulfillment of his moral, which is to say his human nature.

And so I feel like as she, you know, became more of a part of the conservative establishment, especially in like the Reagan 80s, like part of the reason she

could make, if it's not exactly a transition, why she could go to a Heritage Foundation event and say, I felt pretty at home, or people were saying things that were in line with my expectations.

It's interesting just how conservative that Freudism was that you're describing and how it also can kind of makes kind of her

interactions with the religious right more palatable for her or facilitates them in some way.

Right, which is also another way of saying that the Americanization of Freud was a Christianization of Freud or really Protestantization of Freud, right?

That's interesting.

Yeah, interesting.

That like, I mean, in some way, I think part of what makes Dichter's Freud a little illegible today is that we have the 60s Freud, that we have the late or late 60s Freud, where we, you know, where sublimation is kind of bad, where, you know, repression is not good, you know, whereas this is the sort of mind of the moralist, Freud.

Where superego was, it shall be, instead of the other way.

Exactly.

This is the Freud of kind of civilizational attainment as one large effort, one Herculean effort at repression in some way.

And good job to you for doing that, basically.

But that's often not our Freud anymore, right?

And I think she kind of retains that kind of early Americanized Freud.

So this is, yeah, this is not Marcuse.

This is Philip Reif.

It's Philip Reif, yeah.

I was going to say one other thing, and this obviously came up when we talked about Philip Reif's Freud too on the podcast, but one thing to keep in mind for the listeners about like who these psychoanalysts are who are doing this psychoanalysis on these women who their husbands are saying are frigid or aren't taking care of the kids or are wanting to go to work or whatever.

I mean, a lot of these people, or at least their teachers, are Jewish analysts who flee the Nazis.

And they come to America where obviously they want to assimilate in some way.

But in particular, what they don't want to do is be associated with politics and to be seen as radical.

And this is where the kind of high, this is the sort of high point of analytic neutrality in the American psychoanalytic tradition comes in because they're never gonna like if somebody comes in and says they're communists like

they're gonna be like well might that be some kind of infantile disorder?

Do you really want to change the world or is there something wrong with you and you need to reconcile yourself to it?

I mean, there was a quietism that some of these analysts and their students learned from the experience of a political upheaval and turmoil and genocide that they escaped into their physicians' offices in Manhattan.

And so that's also in the work and does kind of,

you can see sort of just kind of the atmospherics of that in Midge Dector's Freud and Midge Dector's sort of notion of Americanism and assimilation and sort of anxiety about radical politics.

But you know, there's some ambivalence in Dector and not just in

her personal

hypocrisy in the sense that she was a woman who got divorced.

She was a woman who pursued, I think like quite passionately at some points in her career, like public recognition for her intellect.

She was a woman who sort of admits to feeling dissatisfied and bored with, you know, a life composed primarily of motherhood.

And so there's sort of that contradiction of Dector.

But then in her writing about sex and sexuality, in addition to the like the very crude,

very literal Freudianism, like I can't tell you how many times Dector, in the course of my reading, like the Liberated Woman and the New Chastity, her book against the second wave feminist movement, like she really does

emphasize the superiority of vaginal over clitoral orgasms.

And I was like, Wow, people really, and like, you're not even joking, like, people really did that.

Um, that was like an American Freudian shibboleth.

Supposedly, you go to your Freudian psychoanalyst, send your wife to the Freudian psychoanalyst, and they would tell her, If you don't have an orgasm while we're while you're having vaginal sex, that's your problem.

That was something that the men wanted their wives to hear.

Hashtag science.

Yeah.

Um, and you know, very, they're very literally, but but Dector also does not have an antagonistic attitude towards male sexual drive right she actually uh like speaks of it like almost admiringly and feels like quite ambivalent about the sexual revolution uh and i mean like truly ambivalent not like ambivalent in the sense of uneasy she feels ambivalent in the sense of mixed because on the one hand she has a degree of admiration right for male sexual pursuit, right?

But she thinks that in order for it to be disciplined and to become part of like an upright moral life, it has to be met with female sexual resistance.

And she sort of moralizes and simultaneously also eroticizes that dynamic in this way that I find like, you know, both stunningly familiar and like very creepy.

Because like the logical

end point

of prizing both like male sexual aggression and female sexual resistance is just rape apology.

Is rape.

And she really gets there in the new chastity.

Did anybody, did anybody else subject themselves to this book?

Am I the only one who read the new chastity?

I did not.

I didn't read parts of it.

I couldn't make it through.

I subjected myself to liberal parents, radical children.

Yes.

And the Rumsfeld book.

So that's as far as...

You read the Rumsfeld book, and I think you've done your penance.

I think we can absolve that.

I read just the Atlantic essay that the book was based on,

which I think I got a lot of

the gist of it.

But yeah.

The Beast with two backs is like particularly,

first of all, like the title of the book, The New Chastity, refers to lesbianism, right?

Because

for all of her homophobia directed at men in things like The Boys on the Beach, which I do want to get to because I think it's a fascinating text, her real kind of like almost obsessive homophobia is directed towards lesbians who she sees as, you know, people who have

failed the Freudian task of reconciling the masochism of women's heterosexuality.

And this is like kind of a like a version of homophobia against women that like you'll still encounter.

Like, well, why can't you hack it?

Why aren't you subjecting yourself to what we all agree is the torture of sex with men?

You just want a soft life.

You know, you just want to be held and comforted and not like experience the real, what like sexual life is really about.

Right.

Yeah.

You've withdrawn from the real world, which is men, into this like childlike fake world of women.

And in The Beast with Two Backs, which is the second of, I think, four essays in this book, she really frames sexual force as sort of good for women to experience.

It's like edifying.

Yeah.

Or at least a fact of life or something like that.

Yeah.

I remember that passage.

It's profoundly.

disturbing, but it's also like very, very similar to a lot of, like, a lot of this could have been written in 2018 in response, like as like, as a Me Too, has Me Too gone too far like piece from a like an X or Boomer woman on the New York Times opinion page.

You know, there's, there's a degree to which Dector's anti-feminism and her template of anti-feminism as like a pragmatic and thereby honorable stance for women to take is something that is very much still alive.

And I think, you know, that's one of the, besides, you know, the marriage of the Freudian and Christian conservative approach to social issues that she like kind of forged, I think her particular like revisionist Freudian

misogyny is quite alive today.

And it reminds me quite a bit of the cancel culture moral panic.

And I wanted to talk to you, Adrian, about this, about like more in the meat of her work and the echoes of today.

Yeah.

Well, I just wanted to say one thing about that, the part of that book that I read.

I totally agree that one of the things that cannot be lost is that it's very erotic.

And I think people miss miss this about, people can miss this about later on Christian conservatism.

Even if it's nominally anti-sex, there's an erotics at work in a lot of that work too.

Totally.

Yeah, absolutely.

Matt.

But I just wanted to underscore that because I think that like at some point we'll want to connect what the hell is going on with her anti-feminism with her sort of hagiography of Donald Rumsfeld and her sort of attachment to sort of like American hubris in the world, Cold War, muscularity, and masculinity.

I think the erotic charge of this anti-feminist writing, which we might just also just call it heteronormative writing, it's just a spirited defense of a kind of stasis, heteronormativity, that that has some connection later on with her foreign policy.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, Matt sent me the screenshots from the introduction to the Rumsfeld book that she wrote in I want to say like 2005 or something, and it was quite disturbing.

It was before the Iraq war went south it like uh you know in a widely recognized sense it might have been like 2002 or three

before it went south yeah

i was gonna say in that one month

it was it's 2003 is the copyright yeah i just looked at the vote yeah okay yeah yeah first off i wanted to point to the lesbian point is is so well taken because when i mentioned that you know this concern for what she was transmitting to her daughters especially when that is raised in old wives tale and in liberal liberal parents' radical children, one of the threats that's always at the horizon is that the daughters might turn out to be lesbians.

Like, that's clearly very much on her mind.

That she might fail to transmit if she stuck with her milieu

would be, in fact, good old heteronormativity.

And so, I think Mora is exactly right.

It appears to be that the very possibility of lesbianism seems to have kind of gotten the ball rolling here in the first place.

But on the cancer culture point, yeah, I do want to point out there's this bit in Old Wives Tale where she kind of talks about

working in publishing at the time.

I think it's probably about the time at Basic Books, but I don't remember the exact point in the memoir where it happens.

But basically, she sort of talks about these younger and more enlightened women that she kind of shares a workspace with.

And you can really tell,

I underlined every part of that because it could be published right now.

It's this way of framing societal shifts in perception and diction and vocabulary and expectations and especially gendered expectations as kind of a mix of, you know, a mind virus, a kind of moral slackening, or even just a conspiracy, right?

It's like one of those three things.

And I was like, yep, as someone who just wrote a book on the cancer culture panic, like that's the menu, right?

You're taking every dish off the menu there.

And I think that's exactly right.

She frames the experience that norms are shifting away from the kind of Freudian moralism that she's familiar with as basically

either a sign that some kind of groupthink is taking over or that there's actually a conspiracy afoot.

Yeah, this might be a great place to like shift to liberal parents, radical children, because something that I've noticed in Dector's work is that even though she's the same age as

the people she's critiquing, she's actually like five or six years younger than Fredan,

but she has this kind of like get off my lawn, you damn kids, kind of sense that like things were

appropriate and sensible and like morally ordered at some point in the past, and they have been corrupted by a new generation's, yeah, moral lassitude.

Like, Matt, do you have any thoughts on this?

Well, I just want to say the way you just described her, I mentioned just a moment ago the kind of public conversation, like panel she did with Gary Bauer, the Christian right figure.

And she's describing this in the essay, like having this experience.

And she says, you know, here I was like with this Christian right-winger and an old old Jewish grandma.

And the grandmother kind of identity for her, I feel like, has been there for a long time.

You know, she kind of has that kind of old-fashioned view, among other things.

And in this book, Liberal Parents, Radical Children, I mean, there's not that much to say about it.

It was published in 1975, but it's just kind of an amazing harump, you know,

just

like

just almost, it's

you couldn't stereotype this book or kind of parody it because it's, it is a parody.

I mean, I'll just, for listeners, these are the chapters.

Chapter one, a letter to the young.

And then the next four chapters are all, it's very funny.

They're written as like

the life story.

of certain kinds of characters.

Like, it's not reportage.

It's not really drawing on many like studies.

In the introduction, she says, I will be presenting you here with a series of portraits of significant types among you, you meaning the radical children, as seen under the aspect of certain of the patterns of conduct by which you have distinguished yourselves as a generation, dropping out of school, using drugs, sleeping around, creating and defecting from a communal way of life.

And then she says, These portraits are not of real or particular individuals, though the experiences ascribed to their heroes and heroines are, as I believe, real experiences, as are the thoughts, ideas, and experience of their parents.

If such a question is at all of importance to you, it might be said that what I've undertaken to do is an essay in fictionalized sociology.

Just amazing.

Just to say, I'm kind of making this up.

I mean, I'm sure she was drawing on, you know, some stories she

probably her own kids.

But yeah, so after A Letter to the Young, the four chapters are The Dropout.

That's chapter two.

Chapter three is The Pothead.

Chapter four is The Sexual Revolutionist.

And chapter five is The Commune Art.

And again, all of those chapters are these kind of fictionalized accounts of like one person's life who i did find the pothead especially funny

because it like begins with like a young woman who like as a child felt better after taking cough medicine and like builds all the way to her becoming some kind of pothead it's like reefer madness but as fictional sociology yeah

yeah but i think it really gives a sense of if we're gonna you know talk about some of the second half of dekter's career and her her ultimate trajectory.

I think this is super fascinating because as again I mentioned it's published in 1975 and really

speaking of her liberalism and the depth of it or lack thereof especially and how she ended up like a Reaganite anti-communist identifying with the Republican Party.

One useful way to think about neoconservatism is there was a great book published by Justin Weiss, a French academic.

It was published in France in 2008 and then published here in translation in 2010 by Harvard University Press.

But it's a very useful kind of genealogy of neoconservatism because he describes kind of the three ages of neoconservatism.

And the first one was like the mid-60s, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glaser.

They're writing critiques of great society planners in like the public interest and sometimes commentary.

But the second generation, which I think really, or second age, I should say, that really I feel like fits Dector is that these were people who, what Vase, he describes them as reacting against, quote, the conquest of the Democratic Party by the forces of the new left.

And so they started this organization called the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, which was supposed to kind of win back the Democratic Party from the McGovernites.

And, you know, that was Dector.

You know, however thin her attachment to the Democratic Party, it was her reaction to the new left, to feminism, to kind of campus stuff.

There's that amazing passage in her memoir, An Old Wives Tale, about the protests at Columbia, because she kind of lived on the Upper West Side.

Like, that's how she, like, her formal move, right, even if we think it wasn't much of a move, if there was a real continuity there, that kind of second age of neoconservatism, which was like scoop jackson Democrats who, you know, wanted to try to save their vestigial party, but couldn't, and ultimately, you know, ran into the waiting arms of Ronald Reagan.

That's Decter.

And I feel like liberal parents, radical children, that's happening.

She published that just at the same time as they were basically trying to, people like her were trying to win the 1976 Democratic primary for Scoop Jackson.

Right.

So the timing, that mid-70s timing is really interesting.

And I think, again, acknowledging the continuity there, if there is some kind of formal

sense in which she takes the side she's always been on, you really kind of see it emerging here in the mid-70s.

I mean, we said this from the beginning that like her politics are forged in a sort of in-the-family dynamic and generational anxieties in every instance.

And this one is the, it's still,

you know, it's still the kind of like Pat Freudian, you know, the 60s as an Oedipal revolt kind of against the parents idea.

But she's also very preoccupied with indicting the parents for being, you know, too permissive and sort of indulging.

Coddling.

Yeah.

And that like basically like these sort of indulgent parents observe their children acting out.

And instead of forcing them to become adults, you know, which would mean resigning themselves to their responsibilities and to learn gratitude.

I mean, I think this is such a crucial concept for her in this sort of generational conflict for her.

Gratitude, she's always like, the worst thing a person can be is ungrateful.

And instead of these parents forcing their kids to be grateful, you know, to reconcile themselves to reality, to give up on sort of a utopian dream of changing the world, the parents that she's sort of satirizing sort of thought like, well, maybe maybe they're right.

You know, maybe we're wrong.

Maybe we should assuage you.

Maybe we should make you more comfortable, more satisfied.

How do we respond to these grievances instead of just telling them, you know, your grievances are just childish and get over it.

Yeah, I mean, I think, Sam, you're pointing to something where she's actually, I think, she's even, there's a beautiful passage in an old wife's tale where she sort of is very critical of the idea of generation.

and generational difference in general and says like you know children are not to be created by journalists yeah it's like you're not supposed to be different from your parents and it's so fascinating that in some way the fault of both the parents and the children and liberal parents, radical children, is that they seek to put difference between them or try to learn from each other.

I'll just read one passage here.

This is about, I believe this is the sexual libertine one.

It's about the mother.

The mother was disquieted by the idea of a woman's commune.

She could not summon the nerve to say it.

She had so often in the past years suffered the accusation of dirty-mindedness, but such an arrangement as her daughter had outlined smacked to her of lesbianism.

Be that as it may, however, she found herself reverberating almost against her will to the girl's ideas.

Yes, she knew what these young women were talking about.

This is the fear that that one might recognize something in that portrait that the new generation offers, and this is something that Dictor just cannot abide, it seems.

And it also seems like she was herself so tempted by, right?

We've talked a few times about her recognition of particularly the feminist complaint as one of having like an emotional resonance that she very quickly and very forcefully rejects on the intellectual level.

Yeah.

Do you guys want to get into the boys on the beach?

Yeah, I think

that might be time.

Take it away, Adrian.

Oh my God.

I mean, I don't know even what to say about this thing.

It's just, it's kind of amazing.

I mean, it combines all the things we've been talking about, right?

So this is the 1980 essay and commentary that I'd say creative meditation on the gay rights movement.

And also a sociological investigation of Fire Island.

Oh, Fire Island, that's right.

The beach in question is, yeah, Fire Island.

Yeah, that's the beach.

Fire Island, before it became, I guess, totally basically a gay beach and sort of vacation spot, she's describing a period of time where there was a significant kind of straight contingent of what she was one.

And so she's on Fire Island and kind of noticing the emerging mores and behavior of gay people, gay men, especially in the 70s and early 80s.

Oh, I thought this was even earlier.

I thought she was writing from the 80s about a pre-Stonewall time.

About the 60s.

Yeah, about the 1960s.

That's what I thought too, to be honest.

Yeah.

So she once again uses the tried and true methodology of imagining shit about people she didn't bother to talk to.

The same method of liberal parents, radical children.

I mean, it's an immensely long text for an essay.

And she really goes into great detail of what these men must be like.

She betrays very little curiosity about, you know, or any evidence of having really done interviews, you know, or even spent much time.

And the result is really kind of amazing.

The Vidal text about it, which is, as we said, deeply problematic in its own right,

does have this very interesting thing where he sort of points out that in the end, she comes away with a bunch of old prejudices about gay men and invents a couple of new ones to her credit that no one's ever heard of before.

And I think, unfortunately, that gets it kind of right, that it's a really fantasy imagination of what these men must have been thinking about someone like her.

There's quite a lot of the men she imagines, the one thing they can't do is not take note of Midge Dector.

They have an opinion.

They are aggressive towards her in some way, even if she can't sort of put her finger on it.

It's important to her that what they must think of her.

And

Vidal, I think, does express the

same suspicion I had, which is what what if they were getting busy and they really didn't give a shit?

And that is the one possibility that SA seems to not be able to imagine, which I thought was really, really kind of interesting and telling.

She feels herself interpolated by the gaze.

The gaze of the gays.

My husband was asking me about this essay, and I said that basically it's the essay version of that scene in Arrested Development where Lucille Bluth says, these gaze are always so dramatic, makes me want to set my hair on fire.

It's that for 12,000 words.

Yes.

Just to like quote the essay, one line that kind of follows from that and amused me was she's talking about the big parties that would be thrown.

Not like the mid-afternoon cocktail party, but the grander soirees with themes and costumes, you know.

And here's the line from the piece.

She writes, We straits followed all these preparations, meaning for these parties, with suitable curiosity, but I do not remember that any of us ever expressed any serious regret at being excluded or ever took offense.

We knew without making any point of it that as the night wore on, the entertainment was bound to take a turn we would prefer not to witness.

And one of the other interesting things of the essay that I'd kind of be interested in some of your thoughts on is, you know, how attentive she is to the effect of straight men, married men, being around gay men and also the women who congregate around gay men.

and kind of her reasoning behind those things.

Her diagnosis overall seems to be that, again, of like prolonged and eternal adolescence.

Now, obviously, she describes fag hags quite a bit in this essay.

So, straight women, ostensibly straight women who hang around gay men.

And that's, of course, that's the oldest kind of diagnosis of that phenomenon in the book.

But like, she extends it to the entire community.

It's basically, it is essentially one long refusal to grow up.

So her Freudianism comes through here yet again.

But in some way, it takes...

And this is maybe a sign, as I think Mora's question was sort of indicating, that it's unclear when she's having these encounters.

Like, this might be the rumblings of the 60s, right?

The one thing is that it's not that these are sort of the lotus eaters and she's watching them and thinking, my goodness, these poor lost souls.

They are aggressive in their adolescence.

They're aggressive in their refusal to grow up.

These lost boys basically are ultimately pretty hostile to her set and to her very way of being, which I thought was really interesting.

And I do imagine that that must be writing in 1980 kind of a reflection reflection on the development of the 1970s of kind of

a more assertive civil rights kind of project on gays and lesbians.

She does some like quite brilliant, symptomatic, but brilliant kind of like reversals where it's in particular when she's talking about her perception of how the straight men and her, you know, the husbands feel.

She suggests that they feel emasculated by gay men, which is such a funny thing to say.

But she's saying that like because they are subject to the power of women, because they need women, then they're emasculated.

So she writes,

they, meaning the husbands, the straight husbands, feel mocked by the longing for and vulnerability to and even humiliation from women they have since boyhood permitted themselves to endure, while others, apparently just like themselves, slowly assert their escape from these things.

I mean, that's pretty fun.

I mean,

it's a very witty and big.

But I mean, obviously, it's like you're saying, it is the idea is that like our men, our husbands grew up and these men didn't.

Yeah, yeah.

And this is basically the lure of their, this is the lure of like, what if you hadn't?

This is the lure of

returning to a world of childhood in some way.

When exactly she had this encounter, I kind of want to nail down for a very simple reason because the children show up again.

And I do think it kind of matters because I wonder what she's really saying here.

So the essay can sometimes be kind of garden variety and homophobia, but this is the part that I I thought was like, you know, maybe hinting at something far darker.

This is towards the end of the essay, sort of as the Entente Cordiale between

the gays and Midge kind of breaks down.

In any case, our once-friendly neighbors were beginning to indicate to us in all sorts of ways, from a new shrillness of voice to the appearance of drag costumes in the afternoon, to a provocative display of social interest in our teenage children, that the place was getting too small to contain the tastes and wishes of both communities.

And I do think it matters when this is happening because who are the teenage children, right?

Like, is this John?

Because that would place it in the 70s, right?

Or is the story here like this has happened?

I thought this was happening in 1966 or something like that, which would suggest that the

daughters party with the gays.

Like, is this the problem

that they went to, that they went to the drag bunch and liked it?

Either

possibility could provoke profound horror to Mits.

Decker, right?

Like,

if it's her daughters, you know, they might be tempted into this

childish pantomime of a relationship by hanging out with gay men and becoming these like fag hags who are insulated from the travails of heterosexuality.

And if it's John, you know, he might also be

likewise seduced into a, you know, a pantomime where he does not have to face the reality that is embodied in her mind by like heterosexual life.

I did love that passage about the straight husbands and this sense you get a lot in her writing about feminists as well is that like heterosexuality is,

it's not that it's without virtues, but she's like very attuned to the suffering that it imposes, but thinks that it has this dignity to that suffering, right?

She's like,

this is what we do because it's the right thing to do.

And if you don't want to do it, it's because you're undignified and kind of a coward.

Yeah, and a child.

Yeah, a child.

And then somebody willfully remaining a child past the time at which it was, you know, it was time to get married and have a baby.

Yeah.

This is not about the gay guys on Fire Island.

But to that point, Moira, there's one line I did want to relay from her memoir, An Old Wife's Tale, where it's so funny because it just jumped out at me because she's talking about Michael Kinsley.

who was an editor at the New Republic.

And she says this, a few years ago, a very clever young man named Michael Michael Kinsley, who was then an editor at the New Republic, wrote a column in that magazine, which first made me laugh and then made me feel very, very weary.

And it was about kind of how his parents' generation, it was easier to buy a house, settle down, et cetera.

And then she concludes this paragraph in this way.

She writes, it seemed not to have occurred to Mr.

Kinsley feels that his father might now and then have dreamed of being footloose in a somewhat shabby apartment of the kind his son was now complaining about.

Right.

And I just thought that was a great encapsulation of some of what Moira was just describing, you know, the kind of burdens of heterosexuality.

Right.

And there's always a, like, that, that is

not a diagnosis of ingratitude on the part of Kingsley's father, right?

Like the other thing that I think I find very interesting about.

Dector is she has like kind of seemingly infinite patience with men's complaints about the burdens of heterosexuality.

And then when women complain, she's like, well, what are you complaining for?

Why aren't you more grateful?

I mentioned this and I did want to get to it at some point, but I think that you can see the outlines of something sincerely admirable in Midge Dector's moral vision.

You know, like the

pragmatism, a willingness to like confront difficult realities, like a willingness to, you know, subvert your own gratifications for a greater good or for the good of others or for the good of personal righteousness, whatever it is.

Like there is like

the faintest shadow of something genuinely aspirational in Dector, like in a lot of conservative writing, especially from this era, right?

But it's A, it's like asymmetrically implied, right?

Like it is, it is very much different for women than for men.

But also it's just buried beneath so much contempt.

for those that don't achieve it or who like seek out like difficulty and pragmatism elsewhere, you know, like she does not think of the struggle against patriarchy as like a brave facing of reality.

She does not think of like the black nationalist tradition as something that is, you know, requires a lot of integrity and sacrifice, right?

Discipline.

She only sees this in the nuclear family.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, one way of putting this kind of subsumption or subservience would be also just assimilation, right?

There's one more quote I wanted to read from the Boys on the Beach.

particularly under the aegis of their new movement, homosexuals have spoken a great deal about accepting their homosexuality, but accept it in the sense, and here it comes, of acknowledging the comedy of one's entanglement with a reasonable amount of good humor and getting on with one's business is precisely what they've never done.

On the contrary, they have during the old Fire Island days figuratively and later literally in every possible way made a gigantic issue of it.

What she's saying is like get on and assimilate, right?

As Maura is saying, the interesting thing is, and you can see why someone with her biography might think she's done that in multiple ways on multiple vectors.

But it's then so curious who gets exempted from this ability to acknowledge the comedy of one's entanglement with a reasonable amount of good humor.

Men, straight men, don't have to do that in Midge Dector.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, it's admirable for women and minorities to kind of acknowledge the danger and entanglement they have with people who have power over them.

And to

keep calm and carry on.

Assimilate, keep calm and carry on.

But there is no, as Moira has said, there is no requisite or sort of attendant obligation on the part of those who do not need to assimilate, who are already normative, ever, ever, ever, ever.

Before we wrap up, I think we should maybe turn to, you know,

what happened

to the neocons in the 90s and then their resurgence under W and what role Dector played in that turn.

Matt, do you want to sort of take us out?

Sure.

Well, I mean, one thing we haven't talked about as much is her kind of career as an anti-communist.

I had mentioned near the very start that she was co-chair with the Committee for the Free World, which was an anti-communist think tank.

It started in 1981 with, again, significantly Donald Rumsfeld was the co-chair with her.

And then it's kind of interesting, though, because they did close up shop after the Berlin Wall fell.

And she takes some pride in this like you know we had a task you know we wanted to win the cold war we did and so we closed up shop and she was someone who I would have to look this up to get the precise quotes but you know even when like Reagan was negotiating with Gorbachev in his second term toward the end of the 80s you know she was one of the people who I think was alarmed by that after the Cold War you know in the 90s and then in the George W.

Bush administration it is interesting because you know I was thinking now that even kind of of referencing the Bush administration, I think Dector's a hugely important figure in the history of the post-war right.

We've identified a number of reasons why that's so.

But from today's vantage point, I mean, I don't think we've mentioned that she died just about a year ago,

last May in 2022.

She does seem like a relic of a past age.

How she would fit into the Trump era, you know, I don't know.

Her husband, Norman Pedoritz, was kind of anti-anti-Trump and then a little more straightforwardly, Trumpy, I think.

And I don't know if she ever made any public comments during the Trump era, but it does seem because she's so identified with neoconservatism, even if she, at the end of the day, kind of rejected that label, she still nevertheless feels to me like definitely a figure from a different era.

And I think that really is the case with the third age of neoconservatism.

I mentioned the first two, but the third really is the next generation, one of whom is her son, who wrote speeches for Reagan and George H.W.

Bush, you know, was a contributor to the Weekly Standard.

Bill Kristol, the son of Irving Kristol, another kind of neocon of Midge Dector's generation.

His son, Irving Kristol, was a major part of this.

And so she was someone who was kind of attentive to

like, what was America's ambition and purpose in the 90s, right?

Like after we had won the Cold War, what was the purpose of conservatism?

What was the new kind of charge and task?

And so it is very interesting, especially in light of everything we've been commenting on in terms of gender and, her solicitude towards men, that from this kind of last era of her life, maybe the really essential document is this book she wrote about Donald Rumsfeld.

And it's called Rumsfeld, A Personal Portrait.

Again, I mentioned it was published in 2003.

So it's kind of at the height of Bush.

You know, Bush's high watermark, the worst news from the war in Iraq, was received when it was possible to still be kind of cheerleaders for people like Bush and Rumsfeld.

This book is just remarkable and I think it ties together a lot of what we've been discussing.

And in particular, I did send these screenshots to Moira, but the book begins, the prelude.

She says, it was a warm autumn evening in 2001, and we were dining al fresco on a terrace overlooking New York Central Park.

A woman I had known for many years, a handsome, elegant, and well-connected member of the city's cultural and artistic community, was seated across from me.

And as dinner wore on, the name of Donald Rumsfeld came up in conversation, as it would from then on, so many times.

Oh, Rumsfeld, she practically cooed.

I just love the man.

To tell you the truth, I have his picture hanging in my dressing room.

Oh my God.

I was startled.

And then she goes on to say that,

you know,

basically she was talking to all these women who found Rumsfeld sexy.

And this book is so strange because it's filled with pictures.

And all the early ones are him in like his wrestling uniform in high school,

you know, in his military uniform.

It's really a strange, just like object as a book because it's both kind of a defense of an aggressive American foreign policy and Rumsfeld's role in it, but also this kind of pay on to his like sexy manliness.

There's like a full-time pin-up

in the man of Donald Rumsfeld.

I do want to invite any listener who's too young to remember just to Google Donald Rumsfeld and just, you know,

enjoy the prestigious.

Never mind who we're talking about.

Yeah.

Yeah, Matt sent me these and I was like, now I have to go bleach my eyes.

It was just so,

you know, it reminds me a little of the second wave feminist who she hated had, you know, when I first encountered it when I was like in high school or college, what I thought was like a very crude critique of

like the military masculinity of Vietnam.

And they were like, oh, these bombs, they're just phallic symbols, make love, not war, et cetera.

And then, you know, Decter has kind of, and there was like a mini revival of this kind of rhetoric around the Iraq invasion, but like Decter has just kind of proven them right in like the grossest way possible by like making war a metaphor for like American like virile potency.

Yes.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

Well, I just want to kind of really put an exclamation point on it.

So that's how the book begins.

Here's how it ends.

And this isn't a long quote, but it's, it just, given everything we've talked about, this is really amazing.

She writes, the popular discovery of Donald H.

Rumsfeld spells the return of the ideal of the middle American family man, with all that such an ideal entails in the way of vitality, determination, humor, seriousness, and abiding self-confidence, along with protectiveness toward loved ones, neighbors, and country.

In the long run, this is so incredible, this change may well be more important to the fortunes of his country than the changes he will have wrought in its armed forces.

It seems certain that the picture of Donald Rumsfeld hanging on the dressing room wall of my fashionable dinner companion during the warm New York evening will not be taken down from there anytime soon.

With that invocation of the ideal middle American family man, I mean, that goes all the way back to her earliest writings that we discussed.

Incredible.

Yeah, and the feminists and the gays and, you know, the upstart minorities have all been engaged in in this project of undermining the authority and the virility and the dominance of the Donald Rumsfeld of the world.

And not only is that bad for kind of the ideal heteronormative social order, but it's bad for our American hegemony.

American military hegemony is undermined by the sort of emasculation of the American man.

One question,

how much older was Dichter than Rumsfeld?

We were talking about generations earlier.

Is this a kind of, I mean, sure, the book is super horny for Rumsfeld, but like, is it.

She's five years older than he is.

She's a little bit older.

Five years, so it's not,

it's not sort of, because this is all, it's, of course, also like the kind of the failson generation of neoconservatism, right?

Like, is this kind of like, does she have sort of a maternal, is this the kind of person who sort of lives out her legacy?

Better than John, you mean?

Maybe, I don't know, or like alongside John or something like that, right?

Like, there is this, but with both her and Norman, there's this kind kind of real, right?

Yeah.

Norman's breaking ranks starts with a letter to John, right?

To sort of say, like, here's why I did it.

And here's, like,

you know, it's, I think, answering the question, like, did you ever believe this stuff?

I guess, meaning liberalism or communism or whatever.

So, this kind of attempt to steer the young or the younger generation is so central to them.

I wonder if they, I wonder if she's, if she's thinking of him as a contemporary or as someone who's executing on something that the parental generation has sort of laid the groundwork for or something like that.

Yeah, I'm not sure.

I did want to say about the question of Trump for the Dector Podoritzes, I didn't find anything she ever said about Trump, which is a little bit surprising.

It does sort of suggest to me that she probably didn't love him.

You can imagine her having the kind of like, well, he's just such a shitty.

family man, you know, kind of position about him.

But Norman, who was who was anti-Trump to begin with and who sort of said he was anti-Trump because he reminded him of figures like Pat Buchanan or who Podoritz like fought with, you know, very, very aggressively over things like isolationism, nativism, anti-Semitism.

I mean, he, you know, Norman Podoritz accused Buchanan along with a lot of other neocons of being an anti-Semite.

He sort of said, initially with Trump, he reminded me of like basically Pat Buchanan without the anti-Semitism.

But then later on, when he kind of came around to his anti-anti-Trump position, he gave this interview with the Claremont Review of Books, which our listeners will know, a very Trumpy West Coast Straussian outlet.

He sort of comes around and why he comes around is he says that, you know, Trump, he fights back.

If you hit him, he hits back.

And then he says, when I was a kid, you would rather be beaten up than back away from a fight.

First thing in the world you could be called was a sissy.

And so like, despite any kind of like, you know, kind of these deeply ingrained ideological differences in terms of how they think America should.

operate in the world, you know, what they think about Jews, what they think about immigrants, what they think about sort of american capitalism norman at least has to respect that trump is a fighter and a viral man who doesn't want to be called a sissy

it's interesting too uh to think that the only other

correct me if i'm wrong you you two obviously know this monsieur much better than i do but the only other time i can think of norman putoritz writing about getting beaten up is in his uh essay about blacks do about uh about uh african americans right my negro problem and and ours it does feel like a bit of of a callback i don't want to i don't want to say that i don't want to i don't think that's a stretch align those two thousand stars you know 60 i don't think that's a stretch i mean who does he imagine getting beat up by on the on the playground it's it's the black kid and so trump doesn't back down when the minority mobs come and and and try to take him down i mean that's i think sam makes a really important point which is that beyond all these like policy and stylistic differences something that

unites a lot of different strains of the right and and has been a real constant

unifying force for Midge Dector throughout her career on the right is a real reverence for masculinity and like a deep, bone-deep faith in the importance of like masculine virility, right?

And Trump is not a family man.

He's not,

you know, making any sacrifices to the needs of, you know, heterosexual honor,

but he is certainly somebody with a very strong faith in his own masculine prerogatives, right?

And a very like intense awareness of the power of masculine performance.

And I think in that sense, you can say that he is a product of Dector's legacy.

He is

an emblem of something that she really helped to solidify on the American right.

So also someone who's absolutely hypersensitive to the failure to sublimate by anyone else, by any other group, but absolutely recalcitrant about any sublimation asked of him.

Yeah, it's almost, there's like kind of a like profound irony for me as a feminist that I feel like Freud got us

Dector and got us this like masculinity cult that led to Trump and now Freud has to get us out of Trump

and it's like it's a terrible trap but yeah, but such is life.

Thank you guys so much.

I learned a lot.

I had a really like a lot of fun.

Midge is like a crank, but she's also

really kind kind of funny in this cruel way.

She is funny.

And, you know, I didn't, I didn't hate spending time with her, even though she drove me fucking insane.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I agree, Moira.

When you said earlier that there was sort of a grudging respect or something for her, I felt that too.

Even the essay we dwelt upon, The Boys on the Beach, you know, for all its homophobia and kind of, you know, amusing observations, you might say, like, she still like wrote this really long essay in 1980 about Fire Island.

There's something kind of,

I don't know, interesting about that.

And there's something almost honest and straightforward about it.

Like she's going to talk about Fire Island.

And even if it's violates certain taboos or, you know, political correctness, whatever, she's going to write about it.

And she's not a bad writer either.

Absolutely not.

No, that's the other thing.

It's, it's, it's often a real joy to read her and to just kind of disagree and be mad.

Yeah.

Yeah.

She, um, she, in that Fire Island essay, she wrote about like old queen humor where she talks about the specific, you know, like the specific mean

observation that is like kind of untranslatable.

You can't like come up with a hypothetical example, but in context, it's always like very devastatingly funny and makes you feel like you're in a club with this gay man.

And that struck me as very true to Dector's own style of writing.

She's always trying to get you into like this club of hatred for somebody else, which has,

I think, you know, for me at least, like a real guilty appeal.

And it's, and it strikes me as similar to, you know, what Trump does on a much bigger, more vulgar scale.

Oh, that's so interesting.

This is why

I'm always saying on the podcast that Trump is, unfortunately, our first gay Jewish president.

But in the same vein, there was a great line she gave to her son, John, and sort of introducing some of the humor and what kind of keeps us coming back to Midge.

John, her son, reported that at some point they were at one of these family values conferences that she was always having to go to.

And she turned to him and she said, I don't understand how it happened that I became this great champion of the family.

I hated my family.

That's Midge Dector, a land of contrasts, contradictions, at least.

All right, let's wrap it up there.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, guys.

Thanks.

In Bed with the Right, we'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our theme music is by Katie Lyle.

Our producer is Megan Kalthas.

For this episode, we owe a huge thanks to Ronnie Grindberg of the University of Oklahoma, who lent us a lot of her research and time to help us understand the weird world of Midge Dector.