Thankgiving for Midge Decter: Thanks Mom

Unbeknownst to Midge Decter, until last year, although having children of her own to raise, she has been my spiritual mother since I was 20. Midge Decter’s writings, on the nexus of culture and politics, the guide of the values we have at home to those we practice in the world, are rooted in the life experiences and concerns of a Jewish mother for the survival and success of her family. America is Midge Decter’s extended family.

As I was completing college, I was moved by what Midge Decter -- then editor of Harper’s Magazine -- wrote there in April 1968:

“Ideas are powerful things, requiring not a studied contemplation but an action, even if only an inner action. Their acquisition obligates a man in some way to change his life, even if it is only his inner life. They demand to be stood for. They dictate where a man must concentrate his vision. They determine his moral and intellectual priorities. They provide him with allies and make him enemies. In short, ideas impose an interest in their ultimate fate which goes far beyond the realm of the merely reasonable.”

Instead of continuing to the graduate school that had admitted me, I enlisted in the Marine Corps, my priority “beyond the realm of the merely reasonable” having to be my personal contribution to our mission in Vietnam.

As my regular readers know, that led to my organizing the Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace in 1971, to rebut the outrageous charges made by John Kerry and his small band of fake and disaffected Vietnam veterans, trumpeted by an anti-war media, that we were a criminal country with blood-lust crazed troops. John O’Neill joined me. Thirty-three years later, we and Vietnam veterans arose from our middle-age like Minute Men to finish the internment of Kerry’s lies and deceptive presentation of himself, to avoid the national disaster of this mendacious maggot in the Oval Office. By those who know, our Vietnam veterans’ revolt is credited with the decisive margin for the 2004 election.

It was then, through a mutual friend I was graced to meet during the campaign, that I sent Midge Decter an email about her quote from 1968 and its effect on my life. She responded, overgraciously, but only as a proud mother can, that my contribution saved the country. A son was never prouder.

Her husband, Norman Podhoretz, the Don of Neoconservatism and diviner of sense to a generation of intellectuals and, even, into the White House, is better known. However, Midge Decter’s sense is closer to the core of sensibilities that have led and documented a generation’s movement from centrist liberalism to the core of America’s leading defenders.

From the post-WWII example of the Congress for Cultural Freedom of intellectuals around the world banding to combat the surge of Soviet threat, Midge Decter formed and led the Coalition for a Democratic Majority in the 1970’s, and then the Committee for the Free World.

Midge Decter’s activist life began in 1972, as she wrote in her memoir. (Excerpt here.)

“McGovern’s candidacy signaled the capture of the Democratic Party by the hard left, who had taken control of it through a lethal combination of radical opposition to the war in Vietnam, the radicalization of the civil rights movement, and women’s liberation.”

By 1980, she and fellow liberals “had by then lost all interest in saving the Democratic Party, not only because it had not changed but because we had....For in the end you cannot defend American democracy without defending the economic system that is its necessary underpinning. And you cannot truthfully defend that system without accepting a number of other propositions, perhaps the principal one being that government should be restricted from interfering in lawful economic activity.”

Midge Decter felt responsible for what had happened to America, as only a mother can:

“For me in particular, what I had seen moving in the culture of this country beginning in about 1965 had been like an arrow aimed at my nervous system: because the preparation of this explosion from the decade before was something I myself had had a hand in. Or if it seems too self-aggrandizing for me to put it that way, I will just say that the preparation for the sixties explosion was something I had all too carelessly embraced, as a way, it strikes me now, of continuing to assert my membership in the gang of bad kids who refused to mind their mothers. My children were small then, and I had recklessly failed to make any connection between the fun of playing around in my head with certain profoundly radical ideas about life and their future well-being. By the time the older ones reached adolescence, it began to dawn on me that there were marauders out there just waiting to ruin their chances of enjoying a satisfying adulthood. Those marauders were also out to bring down the country that was so generously giving them houseroom, and all around me were fine liberal people hemming and hawing and surrendering. Put it all together, the politics and the culture, and it spelled warfare.”

In May 2004, Midge Decter updated her maternal reflections:

“Many people think the need of so many Americans to feel they are doing good is childish, but I for one love and admire my fellow ordinary Americans for it. The question now, however, is, how do they, or how will they, feel about Iraq? And the answer, I am afraid, is not yet in. The antiwar forces here at home who accounted themselves, and rightly, the real victors in Vietnam are out and about once more exhibiting their strength, or at least their capacity to make a good deal of noise. (Three days into the Iraq war they were already joyfully proclaiming it lost.) How much power these forces have left is yet to be determined. At least this time they are meeting serious opposition, both in the White House and in the culture itself.

On November 21, Midge Decter addressed the Heritage Foundation. Only the sweeping multi-generational insight of a mother could date the beginning of our culture war as July 8, 1839, the birthdate of John D. Rockefeller.

“The result, as we know and experience for ourselves down to this day, was a positive explosion of wealth: the private wealth of Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and their fellow adventurers, to be sure, but way beyond that, there was the wealth, the belief in self, the venturesomeness, inventiveness, openness to the new that before too long came to be characteristic of the country as a whole.”

The response of our chroniclers of popular history:

“Were these men in their own time blessed, celebrated, honored for their achievement by America’s thinkers and writers? Need I ask? Look in any history book; and look at the writings of the time: These men were then, and have continued to be, designated the “Robber Barons”—with no admiration, let alone gratitude, intended.”

And who were these chroniclers?

“The designated cultural authorities of a century ago were made up of a combination that will not seem so very unfamiliar to anyone in this room: the high-born of old pedigree, the elite colleges, the literary establishment, and those institutions of the press that took their cue from their presumed betters.”

Such coastal looks down the nose from a culture of snobbery at those who accomplish grandly spread to those who accomplish daily decency:

“Anyway, back to the late 19th–early 20th century: The cultural elite grew as the country grew, and expanded its range of targets. The “Robber Barons” began to share pride of place as villains and vulgarians with certain other kinds of Americans, particularly those living in the small cities of the Middle West, whose life was now being depicted in celebrated novel after celebrated novel as petty, mean, spiritually impoverished, and ultimately a kind of living death.”

The saving grace for America from these pampered elitists?:

“It is, after all, one of the saving blessings of this society that the overwhelming majority of people tend to go about their daily lives caring for their own families and neighborhoods and minding their own business.”

With the failure and collapse of the Soviet Union, the socialist elitists’ counter-American instincts finds new deities:

“In the end, of course, the stench of Soviet Communism was too much for all but the most die-hard, and they found a variety of substitutes for their totalitarian heroes in a spate of movements: the anti-war movement, for instance, or the Greens or all the others whose driving purpose has been to cripple the American economy for the sake of some higher virtue.”

The tension mounts, as these counter-cultural elites expand their power in academia:

“Still, the wild expansion of the academy has been successful enough to create a serious cultural crisis. For a century and a half, it has been the case that the arbiters of culture have refused to bless the American system, both its government and its economy. That is to say, the country went one way and its privileged aristocracy and thinkers and artists went another.”

As Midge Decter concludes her lecture to her children, “The Never-Ending War: The Battle Over America's Self-Meaning”:

“Thus, without the resistance to the will to power of the country’s cultural elite—the resistance that is supplied by most people’s blessed habit of tending to their own business along with the conscious resistance of the country’s determined and active patriots—you—we might be, as they say, in the soup.”

Who does she look to, to lead the future of America’s resistance to the self-loathing poisoning by such counter-culturalists:

“But I remind myself, on the other hand, that there are those kids in Iraq, who are reintroducing into the public consciousness the virtues of bravery and determination and love of country so long forgotten by a people grown stale in its blessings and privileges. May their tribe increase.”

This mother of sense, mine for almost 40-years, now extends her apron of motherly blessing and lessons to the next generation of America’s defenders. Just as those who served extend our faith, solidarity and hands to them.

With Midge Decter as their spiritual mother, a latter day lady of liberty, how can they go wrong! Thanks Mom.