The recent death of Midge Decter at the age of 95 had me running back to her 2001 memoir, An Old Wife’s Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War. Essays about the woman, sometimes known as the “godmother of neoconservatism,” after her death from both left and right argued that she was indeed much more of an important figure in the history of conservatism than is let on and largely focused on her life of action. Joseph Bottum, who worked with her at First Things, noted that while some called her a “force for good” and emphasized the “good” part, he thought the emphasis should be on “force.”[i]
And so she was, forming the Coalition for a Democratic Majority with her husband, Norman Podhoretz, to move the 1970s Democratic Party back to anti-Communism. While it did not finally succeed in that task, and she and her husband became Republicans, it did influence the party in various ways. Her post-Democratic institution, the Committee for a Free World, could be deemed more successful as the end of the 1980s saw the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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