00:00:00.000And she turned to him and she said, I don't understand how it happened that I became this
00:00:04.200great champion of the family. I hated my family.
00:00:19.440I'm Moira Donegan. I'm Adrian Dobb. And whether we like it or not, we are in bed with the right.
00:00:24.360You know, we've talked to you, just the two of us, for much longer than we had intended to.
00:00:28.860But 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.
00:00:36.800And 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 Dechter.
00:00:47.920And for this episode, we are joined by our great friends of the podcast, Know Your Enemy.
00:00:52.680They're kind of like our intellectual cousins.
00:00:55.200Their names are Matt Sitman 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.
00:01:06.800And they're really great guys. We had a wonderful time talking to them about Midge Dechter, 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.
00:01:25.200Yeah, maybe you should say a little bit more about them.
00:01:27.620Matt Sittman is an associate editor at Commonweal, which is a Catholic lay magazine that covers religion, politics, and culture.
00:01:34.340Like Sam, I believe he's also a regular contributor to Dissent, and he is the co-host with Sam Adla Bell of Know Your Enemy.
00:01:43.880He'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.
00:01:53.920And they're also, I have to say, both of them, sweetie pies.
00:05:06.160Yeah. I could not let a second go by without revealing that Midge Dechter's parents founded the Zionist summer camp that Bob Dylan and the Coen brothers attended.
00:05:17.840Yeah. Well, I agree. She's probably unfairly overshadowed by her husband, second husband, Norman Podoritz, as a writer. But, you know, I want to put on my ex-conservative hat here and just kind of mention that, you know, Midge Dechter, her role in the conservative movement, it's hard to overstate how important she was, I think.0.90
00:05:37.840Not only her writing, working for a place like commentary, writing about the kind of controversial issues she did, feminism, radical children, campus, protests, in addition to being a real cold warrior.
00:05:51.760But if you kind of scratch the surface of any conservative institution, there's a decent chance she might show up.
00:05:59.660So 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 at 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 and be on panels.
00:06:25.360She 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.
00:06:48.300So both her writing and her kind of stature is 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.
00:07:04.640Yeah, 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.
00:07:19.920And then she sort of moved from magazines and periodical writing into the think tank world and became a real fixture.
00:07:28.580And particularly she became, I think, ultimately a source of fusing these two strands of like social conservative thought, right?
00:07:38.020She became the bridge between like a secular Freudian social conservatism and then a like more Christian conservative social conservatism.
00:07:46.840You know, she talks about in her memoir, An Old Wife's Tale, she talks about going to her first Heritage Foundation event and realizing that this is a bunch of people who are from, you know, quite different backgrounds from her, right?
00:07:57.540These are not people who grew up as New Deal Jewish Democrats.
00:08:02.540But she's like, but nobody was saying anything that seemed unfamiliar or untrue to me.
00:08:07.420There's this great Midge Dector quote.
00:08:08.900She goes, at a certain point, you have to decide to be on the side you're on.
00:08:13.680I think that's like a great, like little distillation of the neocon trajectory, right?
00:08:19.680And in fact, she, I think it was in kind of like 80s era, her work with the Heritage Foundation, and maybe it was in the context you were just referencing, Moira.
00:08:30.480Dector said at one point, she's like, just drop the neo from neoconservatism.
00:08:34.900I'm just a conservative, which is to say she joined the side she was on.
00:08:38.280Which is sort of interesting, because unlike a lot of neoconservatives, like most prominently, like Norman Podhoretz, 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? What is neo about Mitch Decker's neoconservatives?
00:09:00.380Well, 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 we're 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.
00:09:23.880But 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.0.77
00:09:33.480As 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.0.91
00:09:43.000I think it's important her parents were Zionists. So being a Zionist in the 1920s and teens was not like being a Zionist today.0.64
00:09:51.360it was a much more kind of radical position. And of course, many of them were socialist Zionists
00:09:56.300too. I think when she came to New York, basically, she convinced her parents to let her leave0.59
00:10:02.560Minnesota. Well, she originally wanted to go to University of Chicago, her parents didn't want
00:10:06.500her to go to University of Chicago. One wonders how different her trajectory would have been,
00:10:09.920perhaps not very different. But she did go to University of Minnesota for a while,
00:10:14.220she was dissatisfied. She convinced her parents to let her go to New York, in part by saying,
00:10:18.520I'm going to go study Zionism and Judaism at the Jewish Theological Seminary at New York
00:10:23.580University. And so she kind of trapped her parents. They had to let her go because she was
00:10:27.540being faithful to them by abandoning them. And at that time, the Jewish Zionist New York0.53
00:10:34.460had a lot of contact with sort of radical and socialist tendencies. And she met her first
00:10:38.380husband, Moshe Dechter, in that time. And he too was a kind of Zionist radical of some sort.
00:10:46.200He ended up becoming much more well-known for advocating on behalf of Soviet Jews and as an opponent of communism.
00:10:53.580But 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.
00:11:15.540Her 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.
00:11:34.420And 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, it 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?
00:11:55.920Yeah, I mean, I think it's super interesting to think about the fact that like, yeah, we want a conversion narrative here, right? I mean, Norman Ford Horace'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.
00:12:15.180She's just kind of, as you say, where it was a hereditary liberal.
00:12:18.000There's a passage in Old Wives Tale where she says, added to this litany, or perhaps
00:12:23.140in my case, the very first item on it was my recognition that living as I had been and
00:12:27.780where I had been, I've been subjecting my own children to danger, a danger that they
00:12:32.860would be worn down and jaded before they ever had the chance or the spiritual wherewithal
00:12:37.240to take on the chills and spills of real adulthood.
00:12:40.140Put these feelings and ideas all together and they amounted to it one day come to be
00:12:44.940called neoconservatism so she really kind of seemed she casts herself i mean this is way later
00:12:50.520but she seems to cast herself really as having been jolted out of that milieu and into neoconservatism
00:12:57.480by having children by her family which is kind of an interesting tension because you know when
00:13:02.420we left off biographically she had moved to new york city she had married moshe dechter she drops
00:13:08.280out of theological seminary she actually never gets a college degree she and moshe do what you
00:13:13.460did, which was they moved to the suburbs. They had two kids, two daughters, and they moved to0.89
00:13:17.700the suburbs and she left the workforce. And she was raising her two children for a while in a
00:13:25.360suburb, which she describes as like, you know, alternately, she wants to defend the suburban
00:13:31.860nuclear family lifestyle that emerged post-war from its assault by the cosmopolitans. But also
00:14:05.700And 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 first marriage to Moshe Dexter did not make her happy, but she's very sort of intellectually defensive of these institutions and these customs that she personally rejects.
00:14:26.520Yes. I mean, the line about it being some of her comments being almost like a Betty Friedan 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 is this all there is, you know, but you're so right about her defense of kind of the suburbs.
00:14:51.380And even I just noticed reading An Old Wife's Tale, her memoir, how often she would reference like ordinary people and how kind of distasteful and wrongheaded she found like new class.
00:15:05.900This gets some way into like to what extent she was a liberal.
00:15:08.900It'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.
00:15:19.460But 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 and 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.
00:15:37.920And that line, ordinary Americans, she just – it's just striking how often that shows up.
00:15:42.240Yeah, it's a load-bearing phrase to be sure.
00:15:46.060I 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 Podoretz writes that he once asked her, why did you marry him? And she says, because he made me feel like shit.
00:16:06.040Oh, 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.1.00
00:16:23.780I wanted to say one other thing about this kind of defensive suburban American-ness 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, it's interesting because she was a secretary there first in the 1940s and in the late 1940s, I think.0.89
00:16:44.580And their son, John, is the current editor of Commentary.
00:16:47.020Just to put that on the table. Yeah. A family business for sure.
00:16:50.600I think for listeners, for clearly illuminating this specifically Jewish liberal post-war identity, but which is 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.
00:17:07.660It 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.
00:17:24.100They 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.
00:17:44.820Yeah, I think it's really important context to point out that this is the post-war era where the Nazis have really kind of discredited race science and put this new taboo on anti-Semitism in the US.0.77
00:18:01.580And it provides an outlet for Jews to sort of rapidly become an unquestioned kind of whiteness that hadn't really been true before the war in the same way.
00:18:11.900And 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.0.72
00:18:26.080It'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.
00:18:40.820Yeah, like created an opening for a kind of conservative Judaism that didn't really exist when Midge Decker was a kid.
00:18:47.400Yes. 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.
00:19:08.880And, you know, there's a place for someone like you who is 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.
00:19:28.080Commentary was a place that permitted that.
00:19:29.580Yeah. 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.
00:19:43.940But she's like, so we were for civil rights and this and that. But really, for her, it was about the anti-communism. That was, like, central to the commentary mission in her description of it.
00:19:54.760One thing that I thought that was interesting, I mean, jumping ahead a slight bit, I mean, 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.
00:20:14.360You know, Gore 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, the class issue and the Jewish identity sort of didn't seem to come apart really, which of course, by that time they readily could.
00:20:38.140But 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.0.96
00:20:47.660Yeah, 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.
00:21:00.420And that's just like that was associated in the American mind with Jews in the 50s and 60s. But somebody like Vidal never really lets go of that association is not.0.51
00:21:11.560But I think this like newly acquired status is also a decent perspective from which to understand like the anxiety behind Dechter's conservatism, because like, you know, when she and Pod Horetz later, like both oppose affirmative action for like African American students entering university, right?
00:21:30.380And their perspective is very much like us and our Jewish peers and like Podhorts 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.
00:21:54.000It'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 approach to the family. She's like, I have just finally achieved a middle class, non-working white femininity that was not available to my mother. And now these feminists want to take it away from me.
00:22:20.200And she also, I think it's so like, you know, we're at this point where in Dechter's life where she actually is a single mom for two years.
00:22:33.200And 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,
00:22:45.020she describes him as like a goofy younger guy who she had played the like older wise married friend
00:22:51.960to right when they were in school together and they start this correspondence of letters i believe
00:22:56.940he's in the army norman pod horitz yes and the letters become more and more flirtatious and by
00:23:02.280the time he returns from the army they are in a relationship and pretty quickly married so she's
00:23:08.280only single for two years from 1954 when she gets divorced to 1956 when she marries norman pod
00:23:16.540horitz and they quickly have i believe two children together right yes a daughter and then the son
00:23:23.720john pod horitz who's who's now all grown up and the editor of of commentary so to speak yeah and
00:23:29.880at least uh somewhat um but when she has her children with norman pod horitz what's really
00:23:40.060fascinating to me is that she realizes that it costs their family more money yeah for her to go0.92
00:23:46.800to work because child care is so expensive and she does not like somebody who has been a single
00:23:53.660mother like a single breadwinner for these two dependent children does not question that at all
00:24:00.060she's like okay great and she kind of like claps her hands and leaves the workforce for a while
00:24:05.000yeah and there's this there's a bunch of these moments you guys alluded to some of them earlier
00:24:09.020where she like does encounter psychic violence of of patriarchy just injustice gendered injustice
00:24:17.200in the workforce, you can almost see her apprehending how unstable and unsustainable0.63
00:24:24.040it's going to be for her. She eventually does go back to work because she says she's so bored
00:24:27.640sitting at the playground in the park watching her kid day after day. But she doesn't seem to
00:24:33.100extrapolate a structural critique from her personal dissatisfaction the way that the0.68
00:24:37.520second wave feminists were beginning to do at this time. Yeah. It struck me just as Adrienne1.00
00:24:43.080was pointing to about, or I don't remember which of you it was pointing to about affirmative action.
00:24:47.200There 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 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.
00:25:08.020And 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.
00:25:27.340I 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.
00:25:48.720i will say that when i read her the essay that first made her famous liberated woman which was
00:25:56.700sort of a like parody of women's liberation that she wrote in commentary and i believe like 1971
00:26:04.140it was like you know not her first public writing but you know it's like a lot of her essays it
00:26:10.220extrapolates a long hypothetical about an imaginary person who is very annoying right so um like mid
00:26:18.500Dector writes in commentary about the liberated woman who is a middle-class white woman born at
00:26:24.560the end of the second world war. You know, she's pretty, she's privileged. She gets to go to0.96
00:26:28.420college. She has access to birth control. And then she starts working in media and is confronted by0.97
00:26:35.340like sexism in the media industry. And it like, it's at this point where like me as a woman whose
00:26:41.140biography matches this almost exactly like i start to go like hey you know it's a it's a little
00:26:49.280on the nose and she is in a way like very perceptive but she uses her perceptiveness
00:26:55.620almost totally towards cruelty and i think this might yeah this might be a good moment to sort of
00:27:02.220by way of explanation go into a little bit of context about i think the influence of freud
00:27:08.060on both Dector's milieu among these New York intellectuals
00:30:57.300There had been all these social advances of women into the public sphere
00:31:01.020in the 1920s and 30s, and then even more so in the 40s
00:31:03.920when a lot of men left the paid workforce to go into the war.
00:31:06.860And 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.
00:31:35.180And 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.
00:31:44.720Which is what Friedan was reacting to, right? This retrenchment of gender roles in the post-war era with the therapeutic as sort of a handmaiden to it.
00:31:52.760Right. You know, we keep coming back to Friedan and she really is like Dector's, like, photonegative inverse in some ways.
00:32:02.440Yeah, 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. Friedan 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.0.56
00:32:30.360and the feminine mystique is a reaction to that 50s Freudianism that you can see Dector as like
00:32:37.680a popular avatar of that establishment thought and like Friedan as the backlash. Yeah. Can I add0.99
00:32:45.300one point here? And it kind of follows from Adrian's reference to Gore Vidal's response
00:32:52.840to Midge Dector's infamous essay, The Boys on the Beach. And this is one of the more anti-Semitic
00:32:58.600moments in that essay, I think. But he describes Dechter, I think he uses the word waddle,
00:33:04.720like waddling toward the homosexual, but with Freud in one hand and Leviticus in the other.0.74
00:33:09.160A couple of podoruses waddling. Yeah.0.97
00:33:11.800Yes. Yeah. But it's interesting, Sam, when you were describing like the Freudianism of that
00:33:16.680period and kind of the givenness of certain things, including gender roles, you know,
00:33:21.960when you think about her trajectory and where she ends up in one of her essays,
00:33:26.880There's a collection of her essays called Always Right that we read some of.
00:33:31.140And, 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.
00:33:39.340Yeah. And and in one of these essays, it's kind of interesting essays called Is Conservatism Optimistic or Pessimistic?
00:34:15.740she could make, if it's not exactly a transition, why she could go to a Heritage Foundation event
00:34:22.540and say, I felt pretty at home, or people were saying things that were in line with my
00:34:26.560expectations. It's interesting just how conservative that Freudism was that you're
00:34:31.000describing and how it also can kind of, it makes kind of her interactions with the religious right
00:34:38.700more palatable for her or facilitates them in some way.
00:34:42.940Right, which is also another way of saying that the Americanization of Freud was a Christianization of Freud, or really Protestantization of Freud, right?
00:34:52.440I 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 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.
00:35:09.480Where superego was, it shall be, instead of the other way around.
00:35:36.700I 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 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.
00:35:56.900I mean, a lot of these people or at least their teachers are Jewish analysts who flee the Nazis, you know, and so and they come to America where obviously they want to assimilate in some way.
00:36:10.600But in particular, what they don't want to do is be associated with politics and to be seen as radical.
00:36:16.440And 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?
00:36:31.780Do you really want to change the world or is there something wrong with you and you need to reconcile yourself to it?
00:36:37.740I 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 physician's offices in Manhattan.
00:36:51.540And 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.
00:37:08.700But, you know, there's some ambivalence in Dector and not just in, you know, her personal hypocrisy in the sense that, you know, 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.
00:37:27.280She 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 Dechter. But then in her writing about sex and sexuality, in addition to the very crude, very literal Freudianism, like I can't tell you how many times Dechter 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.
00:37:57.280emphasize the superiority of vaginal over clitoral orgasms. And I was like, wow, people really,
00:38:04.160and like, you're not even joking. Like people really did that.
00:38:07.360That was like an American Freudian shibboleth. Supposedly you go to your Freudian psychoanalyst,
00:38:12.420send your wife to the Freudian psychoanalyst, and they would tell her,1.00
00:38:15.220if you don't have an orgasm while you're having vaginal sex, that's your problem.0.99
00:38:18.420That was something that the men wanted their wives to hear.0.99
00:38:22.480Yeah, and they're very literally, but Dector also does not have an antagonistic attitude towards male sexual drive, right? She actually speaks of it almost admiringly and feels quite ambivalent about the sexual revolution. And I mean truly ambivalent, not 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.
00:38:52.480for male sexual pursuit right but she thinks that in order for it to be disciplined and to become
00:38:58.840part of like an upright moral life it has to be met with female sexual resistance and she sort of
00:39:04.560moralizes and simultaneously also eroticizes that dynamic in this way that i find like you know both1.00
00:39:12.160suddenly familiar and like very creepy because like the logical end point of prizing both
00:39:22.160like male sexual aggression and female sexual resistance is just rape apologia is right yeah
00:39:28.240and she really gets there in the new chastity did anybody did anybody else subject themselves
00:39:34.180to this book am i the only one who read the new chastity i did not parts of it i couldn't make
00:39:38.820it through i subjected myself to liberal parents radical children yes and the rumsfeld book so
00:39:43.900that's as far as you read the rumsfeld book and i think you've done your your penance i think we
00:39:47.960can absolve i read just the um like the atlantic essay that it was the book was based on which i
00:39:55.640think i got a lot of the gist of it but yeah the beast with two backs is like particularly
00:40:02.000first of all like the title of the book the new chastity refers to lesbianism right because yeah
00:40:08.420for all of her homophobia directed at men in things like the boys on the beach which i do want0.92
00:40:14.560i get to because i think it's a fascinating text her real kind of like almost obsessive homophobia
00:40:20.580is directed towards lesbians who she sees as you know people who have failed the freudian task of
00:40:29.640reconciling the masochism of women's heterosexuality and this is like kind of a like a version of of
00:40:36.820homophobia against women that like you'll still encounter like well why can't you hack it why0.97
00:40:41.540aren't you uh subjecting yourself to what we all agree is the torture of sex with men you just want
00:40:48.160a soft life you know you just want to be held and and comforted and not like experience the real0.57
00:40:54.020what like sexual life is really about right yeah you've withdrawn from the real world which is men
00:40:58.920into this like childlike fake world of women uh and in the beast with two backs which is the second
00:41:03.860of i think four essays in this book she really she frames sexual force as sort of good for women0.87
00:41:13.180to experience it's like edifying yeah or at least a fact a fact of life or something like that yeah
00:41:19.700i remember that passage it's profoundly disturbing but it's also like very very similar
00:41:25.720to a lot of like a lot of this could have been written in 2018 in response like as like as a
00:41:31.900me too has me too gone too far like a piece from a like an ex or boomer woman on the new york times1.00
00:41:38.180opinion page you know there's um there's a degree to which dechner's anti-feminism and her template
00:41:44.540of anti-feminism as like a pragmatic and thereby honorable stance for women to take is something
00:41:50.820that is very much still alive and i think you know that's one of the besides you know the marriage of
00:41:56.120the freudian and christian conservative approach to social issues that she like kind of forged
00:42:01.840I think her particular like revisionist Freudian misogyny is quite alive today and it reminds me
00:42:10.360quite a bit of like the cancel culture moral panic and I wanted to talk to you about this
00:42:16.000yeah about like more in the meat of her work and the echoes of today yeah well I just wanted to say
00:42:21.360one thing about that the part of that book that I read I totally agree that one of the things that
00:42:27.360cannot be lost is that it's very erotic and i think people miss this about people can miss this
00:42:32.220about later on christian conservatism even if it's nominally anti-sex there's an erotics at work
00:42:38.880in a lot of that work too totally yeah absolutely but i just wanted to underscore that because i
00:42:48.520think that like at some point we'll want to connect what the hell is going on with her
00:42:52.480anti-feminism with her sort of hagiography of Donald Rumsfeld and her sort of attachment to0.99
00:43:00.020sort of like American hubris in the world, Cold War, muscularity and masculinity. I think the
00:43:06.000erotic charge of this anti-feminist writing, which we might just also just call heteronormative
00:43:11.280writing, it's just a spirited defense of a kind of stasis heteronormativity, that that has some
00:43:16.940connection later on with her foreign policy oh yeah yeah matt sent me the uh screenshots from
00:43:22.740the introduction to the remsfeld book that she wrote and i want to say like 2005 or something
00:43:26.680and it was quite disturbing it was before the iraq war went south it like uh you know in a
00:43:32.740widely recognized sense it might have been like 2002 or three before it went south yeah
00:43:38.340i was gonna say in that one month it was it's 2003 is the copyright yeah i just looked at the
00:43:45.200Okay, yeah. First off, I wanted to point to the lesbian point 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 Parents' Radical Children, one of the threats that's always at the horizon is that the daughters might turn out to be lesbians.
00:44:06.120It's 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.0.96
00:44:15.600And so I think Moore is exactly right.0.66
00:44:17.420I think it appears to be that the very possibility of lesbianism seems to have kind of gotten the ball rolling here in the first place.0.65
00:44:24.560But 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, you know, working in publishing at the time.
00:44:34.680I think it's probably about the time at basic books, but I don't remember the exact point in the memoir where it happens.
00:44:40.220But basically, she sort of talks about these younger and more enlightened women that she kind of shares a workspace with.
00:44:49.280And you can really tell, like, you know, I underlined every part of that because it could be published right now.
00:44:56.260It's this way of framing societal shifts and 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?
00:45:27.680She frames the experience that norms are shifting away from the kind of Freudian moralism that
00:45:34.580she's familiar with as basically either a sign that some kind of groupthink is taking
00:45:41.160over or that there's actually a conspiracy afoot.
00:45:53.540yeah this might be a great place to like shift to liberal parents radical children because
00:46:07.880something that I've noticed in Dector's work is that even though she's the same age as
00:46:14.400the people she's critiquing she's actually like five or six years younger than for Dan
00:46:19.080But 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 moral lassitude. Like Matt, do you have any thoughts on this?0.97
00:46:39.860Well, 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 Jewish grandma.
00:47:01.720And the grandmother kind of identity for her, I feel like, has been there for a long time.
00:47:07.080You know, she kind of has that kind of old-fashioned view, among other things.
00:47:12.240And in this book, Liberal Parents, Radical Children, I mean, there's not that much to say about it.
00:47:17.360It was published in 1975, but it's just kind of an amazing harumph, you know?
00:47:24.240So just almost – you couldn't stereotype this book or kind of parody it because it is a parody.
00:47:34.720I mean I would just – for listeners, these are the chapters.
00:51:30.560And I feel like liberal parents, radical children, that's happening.
00:51:33.600She 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?
00:51:43.600So the timing – that mid-'70s timing is really interesting.
00:51:46.060And 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.
00:51:58.800I 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.
00:52:08.740And 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.
00:52:19.060But she's also very preoccupied with indicting the parents for being, you know, too permissive and sort of indulging.
00:52:27.540yeah and that like basically like these sort of indulgent parents observe their children acting
00:52:32.560out and instead of forcing them to become adults you know which would mean resigning themselves to
00:52:37.160their responsibilities and to learn gratitude i mean i think this is such a crucial concept for
00:52:42.380her and this sort of generational conflict for her gratitude she's always like the worst thing
00:52:45.700a person can be is ungrateful and instead of these parents forcing their kids to be grateful
00:52:50.180you know to reconcile themselves to reality to give up on sort of a utopian dream of changing
00:52:55.120the world the parents that she's sort of satirizing sort of thought like well maybe they're right you
00:53:00.680know maybe we're wrong maybe we should assuage you maybe we should make you more comfortable
00:53:03.980more satisfied how do we respond to these grievances instead of just telling them you
00:53:08.240know your grievances are just childish and get over it yeah i mean i think sam you're pointing
00:53:12.240to something where she's actually i think she's even there's a beautiful passage in an old wives
00:53:17.300tale where she sort of is very critical of the idea of generation and generational difference
00:53:22.000in general and says like you know children are not to be created by journalists yeah it's like
00:53:26.240you're not supposed to be different from your parents and it's so fascinating that in some way
00:53:31.380the fault of both the parents and the children and liberal parents radical children is that they
00:53:37.260seek to put difference between them or try to learn from each other there's a i'll just read
00:53:41.260one passage here this is about i believe this is the uh the sexual libertine one it's about the
00:53:47.060mother. The mother was disquieted by the idea of a woman's commune. She could not summon the nerve
00:53:52.760to say it. She had so often in the past years suffered the accusation of dirty-mindedness,
00:53:57.600but such an arrangement as her daughter had outlined smacked to her of lesbianism.
00:54:01.960Be that as it may, however, she found herself reverberating almost against her will to the
00:54:06.780girl's ideas. Yes, she knew what these young women were talking about. This is the fear that
00:54:12.500one might recognize something in that portrait that the new generation offers. And this is
00:54:16.760something that they're just counted by it it seems and also seems like she was herself so tempted by
00:54:21.780right we've talked a few times about her recognition of particularly the feminist complaint
00:54:28.300as one of having like an emotional resonance that she very quickly and very forcefully
00:54:34.580rejects on the intellectual level yeah do you guys want to get into the boys on the beach
00:54:38.540yeah i think that might be time take it away adrian oh my god i mean i don't know what to
00:54:43.440say about this thing. It's just, it's kind of amazing. I mean, it combines all the things we've
00:54:48.320been talking about, right? So this is the 1980 essay and commentary that, I'd say, creative
00:54:54.580meditation on the gay rights movement. And also a sociological investigation of Fire Island.
00:55:00.880Of Fire Island, that's right. The beach in question is, yeah, Fire Island.
00:55:03.980Yeah, that's the beach. Fire Island, before it became, I guess, totally, basically a gay beach0.99
00:55:09.440and sort of vacation spot, she's describing a period of time where there was a significant
00:55:14.460kind of straight contingent of what she was won. And so she's on Fire Island and kind of noticing
00:55:19.860the emerging mores and behavior of gay people, gay men, especially in the 70s and early 80s.
00:55:27.160Oh, I thought this was even earlier. I thought she was writing from the 80s about a pre-Stonewall
00:55:31.220time. About the 60s? Yeah, about the 1960s. That's what I thought too, if you're honest.
00:55:34.380Yeah. 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. It's an immensely long text for an essay. And she really goes into great detail of what these men must be like.0.97
00:55:55.840she portrays very little curiosity about you know or any any evidence of having really
00:56:00.260done interviews you know or even spent much time and the result is really kind of amazing the
00:56:06.180vidal text about it which is as we said deeply problematic in its own right um does have this
00:56:11.580very interesting thing where he sort of points out that in the end she comes away with a bunch
00:56:15.660of old prejudices about gay men and invents a couple of new ones to her credit um that no one's
00:56:22.320ever heard of before. And I think, unfortunately, that gets it kind of right, that it's a really
00:56:26.600fantasmagoric imagination of what these men must have been thinking about someone like her. There's
00:56:32.140quite a lot of the men she imagines. The one thing they can't do is not take note of Midge Dichter.
00:56:37.960They have an opinion. They are aggressive towards her in some way, even if she can't put her finger
00:56:43.900on it. It's important to her what they must think of her. And Vidal, I think, does express the
00:56:50.640same suspicion i had which is what what if they they were getting busy and they really didn't0.84
00:56:56.140give a shit um you know and that is the one possibility that essay seems to not be able
00:57:00.920to imagine which i thought was really really kind of interesting and telling she feels herself0.99
00:57:04.500interpolated by the gaze the gaze of the gaze my husband was asking me about this essay and i and
00:57:11.980i said that basically it's the essay version of that scene in arrested development where lucille0.74
00:57:16.120Luth says, these gays are always so dramatic, makes me want to set my hair on fire.0.56
01:02:02.500If it's her daughters, you know, they might be tempted into this, you know, childish pantomime of a relationship by hanging out with gay men and becoming these, like, fag hags who are insulated from, you know, the travails of heterosexuality.0.99
01:02:18.600And 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.0.99
01:02:30.880i did love that passage about the straight husbands and this yeah since you get a lot in
01:02:35.780her writing about feminists as well is that like heterosexuality is it's not it's not that it's0.88
01:02:41.100without virtues but she's like very attuned to the suffering and that it imposes but thinks that it
01:02:47.400has this dignity to that suffering right she's like this is we do this is what we do because
01:02:52.260it's the right thing to do and if you don't want to do it it's because you're undignified and and
01:02:57.460kind of a coward yeah and a child yeah a child and and then somebody willfully remaining a child0.79
01:03:04.120past the time at which it was you know it was time to get married and have a baby yeah it's0.96
01:03:10.640this is not about the gay guys on fire island but to that point moira there's one line i did want to
01:03:16.960relay from her memoir an old wife's tale where it's so funny because it just jumped out at me
01:03:22.360because she's talking about Michael Kinsley, who was an editor at the New Republic. And she says
01:03:27.200this, a few years ago, a very clever young man named Michael Kinsley, who was then an editor
01:03:31.320at the New Republic, wrote a column in that magazine, which first made me laugh and then
01:03:35.640made me feel very, very weary. And it was about kind of how his parents' generation, it was easier0.81
01:03:41.760to buy a house, settle down, etc. And then she concludes this paragraph in this way. She writes,
01:03:48.460It seemed not to have occurred to Mr. Kinsley Fields that his father might now then have dreamed of being footloose in a somewhat shabby apartment of the kind his son was now complaining about.
01:03:59.680And I just thought that was a great encapsulation of some of what Moyer was just describing, you know, the kind of burdens of heterosexuality.
01:04:09.720Right. And there's always a like that. That is not a diagnosis of ingratitude on the part of Kinsley's father.
01:04:17.560Right. 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.
01:04:28.000And then when women complain, she's like, well, what are you complaining for? Why aren't you more grateful?
01:04:32.280I 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.
01:04:43.120You know, like the pragmatism, the 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.
01:05:00.080Like, there is, like, the faintest shadow of something genuinely aspirational in Dector, like, in a lot of conservative writing, especially from this era, right?
01:05:09.300But it's, A, it's, like, asymmetrically implied, right?
01:05:12.960Like, it is very much different for women than for men.
01:05:17.040But 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?
01:05:27.580Like she does not think of the struggle against patriarchy as like a brave facing of reality.
01:05:33.600She does not think of like the black nationalist tradition as something that is, you know, requires a lot of integrity and sacrifice.
01:05:40.820She only sees this in the nuclear family.
01:05:43.720I mean, one way of putting this kind of subsumption or subservience would be also just assimilation, right?
01:05:50.420There's one more quote I wanted to read from The Boys on the Beach.1.00
01:05:53.500particularly under the aegis of their new movement homosexuals have spoken a great deal about0.91
01:05:58.420accepting their homosexuality but accept it in the sense and here it comes of acknowledging the0.81
01:06:03.880comedy of one's entanglement with a reasonable amount of good humor and getting on with one's0.89
01:06:08.860business is precisely what they've never done on the contrary they have during the old fire
01:06:13.880island days figuratively and later literally every possible way made a gigantic issue of it
01:06:19.020Like, what she's saying is, like, get on and assimilate, right?
01:06:23.700But 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.
01:06:32.140But 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?
01:06:40.680Men, straight men, don't have to do that in Mitch Dector.
01:06:43.100Yeah, yeah. No, it's an 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.
01:07:03.400But 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.0.67
01:07:15.280Before 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.
01:07:32.600Matt, do you want to sort of take us out?
01:07:35.140Sure. Well, I mean, one thing we haven't talked about as much is her kind of career as an anti-communist.
01:07:41.800I 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.
01:08:07.280And 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 in the 90s.
01:08:23.780and then in the George W. Bush administration, it is interesting because, you know, I was thinking
01:08:28.940now that even kind of referencing the Bush administration, I think Dector's a hugely
01:08:33.160important figure in the history of the post-war right. We've identified a number of reasons why
01:08:38.120that's so. But from today's vantage point, I mean, I don't think we've mentioned that she died just
01:08:43.380about a year ago, last May in 2022. She does seem like a relic of a past age. How she would fit into
01:08:51.100the Trump era. You know, I don't know. Her husband, Norman Fedoritz, was kind of anti-anti-Trump and
01:08:57.020then a little more straightforwardly Trumpy, I think. And I don't know if she ever made any
01:09:01.840public comments during the Trump era. But it does seem because she's so identified with
01:09:07.240neoconservatism, even if she at the end of the day kind of rejected that label, she still
01:09:12.560nevertheless feels to me like definitely a figure from a different era. And I think that really is
01:09:17.180the case with the third age of neoconservatism. I mentioned the first two, but the third really
01:09:22.220is the next generation, one of whom is her son, who wrote speeches for Reagan and George H.W. Bush,
01:09:27.800you know, was a contributor to the Weekly Standard. Bill Kristol, the son of Irving Kristol,
01:09:31.720another kind of neocon of Midge Dector's generation. His son, Irving Kristol, was a
01:09:36.800major part of this. And so she was someone who was kind of attentive to, like, what was America's
01:09:43.840ambition and purpose in the 90s right like after we had won the cold war what what was the purpose
01:09:49.420of conservatism what was the new kind of charge and task and so it is very interesting especially
01:09:55.700in light of everything we've been commenting on in terms of gender and you know her solicitude
01:10:01.580towards men that from this kind of last era of her life maybe the really essential document is
01:10:08.120this book she wrote about donald rumsfeld and it's called rumsfeld a personal portrait again i
01:10:13.220mentioned it was published in 2003 so it's kind of you know at the height of bush you know bush's
01:10:19.420high water mark the worst news from the war in iraq was received when it was possible to still
01:10:25.780be kind of cheerleaders for people like bush and rumsfeld this book is just remarkable and i think
01:10:31.640it ties together a lot of what we've been discussing and in particular i did send these
01:10:38.100screenshots to moira but the book begins the prelude she says it was a warm autumn evening
01:10:43.880in 2001 and we were dining al fresco on a terrace overlooking new york central park
01:10:49.160a woman i'd known for many years a handsome elegant and well-connected member of the city's
01:10:53.860cultural and artistic community was seated across from me and as dinner wore on the name of donald
01:10:59.120rumsfeld came up in conversation as it would from then on so many times oh rumsfeld she practically
01:11:06.460cooed i just love the man tell you the truth i have his picture hanging in my dress oh my god
01:11:11.640i was startled and then she goes on to say that um you know uh basically she was talking to all
01:11:20.520these women who found rumsfeld sexy and this book is so strange because it's filled with pictures
01:11:25.940and all the early ones are him in like his wrestling uniform in high school uh you know
01:11:31.140in his military uniform it's really a strange just like object as a book because it's it's both
01:11:37.440kind of a defense of an aggressive american foreign policy and rumsfeld's role in it but
01:11:43.740also this kind of pay on to his like sexy manliness there's like there's like a fold-out
01:11:48.800yes i do want to invite any listener who's too young to remember just to google donald rumsfeld
01:11:57.020and just, you know, enjoy the frisson.
01:12:00.840Keep in mind who we're talking about, yeah.
01:12:02.740Yeah, that sent me these and I was like,
01:13:53.720Yeah, and the feminists and the gays and the upstart minorities have all been engaged in this project of undermining the authority and the virility and the dominance of the Donald Rumsfelds of the world.1.00
01:14:06.060And not only is that bad for kind of the ideal heteronormative social order, but it's bad for our American hegemony.0.94
01:14:16.020American military hegemony is undermined by the sort of emasculation of the American man.
01:14:22.680One question, how much older was Dector than Rumsfeld?
01:14:28.040We were talking about generations earlier.
01:14:29.580Is this a kind of, I mean, sure, the book is super horny for Rumsfeld, but like is it?
01:17:41.700And so Trump doesn't back down when the minority mobs come and try to take him down.
01:17:47.240I 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 has been a real constant unifying forth for Mitch Dechter 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.
01:18:14.820And Trump is not a family man. He's not making any sacrifices to the needs of heterosexual honor. But he is certainly somebody with a very strong faith in his own masculine prerogatives and a very intense awareness of the power of masculine performance.
01:18:37.740And I think in essence, 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.
01:18:48.680So also someone who is absolutely hypersensitive to the failure to sublimate by anyone else, by any other group, but absolutely recalcitrant about any sublimation asked of him.
01:19:00.960yeah it's almost it's there's like kind of a like profound irony for me as a feminist that i feel
01:19:06.680like freud got us dechter and got us this like masculinity cult that led to trump and now freud
01:19:13.700has to get us out of trump uh and it's like it's a terrible trap but um yeah but such is life
01:19:20.820thank you guys so much i learned a lot i had a really like a lot of fun mince is like a crank
01:19:28.000but she's also she's fun really kind of funny in this cruel way she is funny and you know i didn't
01:19:34.400i didn't hate spending time with her even though she drove me fucking insane yeah yeah no i agree
01:19:39.660when you said earlier that there was sort of a grudging respect or something for her i felt that
01:19:45.320too even the the essay we dwelled upon the boys on the beach you know for all its homophobia and
01:19:50.800kind of you know amusing uh observations you might say like she still like wrote this really
01:19:57.600long essay in 1980 about fire island there's something kind of i don't know interesting
01:20:04.560about that and there's something almost honest and uh straightforward about it like she's going
01:20:10.500to talk about fire island and even if it's uh violate certain taboos or you know political
01:20:16.600correctness whatever she's going to write about it and she's not a bad writer either absolutely
01:20:20.840not that's the other thing it's it's it's often a real joy to read her and to just kind of
01:20:27.140disagree and be mad yeah yeah she um she in that fire island essay she wrote about like
01:20:35.060old queen humor where she talks about the specific yeah like the specific mean observation
01:20:42.660that is like kind of untranslatable you can't like come up with a hypothetical example but
01:20:48.340in context it's always like very devastatingly funny and makes you feel like you're in a club
01:20:53.500with this gay man uh and that struck me as very true to dechter's own style of writing she's0.69
01:21:00.120always trying to get you into like this club of hatred for somebody else which has like i think
01:21:06.360you know for me at least like a real guilty appeal and it strikes me as as similar to you
01:21:13.080know what trump does on a much bigger more vulgar scale oh that's so interesting this is why i'm0.94
01:21:17.960always saying on i'm always saying on the podcast that trump is our unfortunately our first gay
01:21:22.600jewish president but in the same vein there was a great line she gave to her son john and sort of
01:21:32.100introducing some of the humor and what what kind of keeps us coming back to midge john her son
01:21:39.180reported that at some point they were at one of these family values conferences that she was always
01:21:44.520having to go to and she turned to him and she said i don't understand how it happened that i
01:21:49.560became this great champion of the family. I hated my family. That's Midge Dechter,
01:21:57.680a land of contrast, contradictions at least. All right, let's wrap it up there.
01:22:02.520Thank you so much. Thank you, guys. Thanks.
01:22:09.100In Bed with the Right would like to thank the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research
01:22:12.920for generous support. Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio. Our theme music is by
01:22:17.640Katie Lau. Our producer is Megan Kalfas. For this episode, we owe a huge thanks to Ronnie
01:22:24.820Grinberg of the University of Oklahoma, who lent us a lot of her research and time to help us
01:22:29.820understand the weird world of Mitch Dechter.