Midge Decter is an author and intellectual who is haunted by a sense that she, and others in her generation, are responsible for America’s decline stemming from the children of the 60s.
She had the courage to see the error of her liberal ways and moved rightward during the Vietnam War. Rethinking the worldview that was taking the country dangerously off course, Decter became a leader in the conservative movement and was more than capable of discrediting the left’s righteous feigns of compassion as they undermined American cultural and political institutions.
A wonderful conversationalist who has a balanced sense of living large, Decter casts a wide net over the public square in this exclusive video interview for The Daily Caller. Lamenting that people her age “raised a generation of Americans, idealistic youths who refused to defend their country, who set fire to their universities and who really felt a deep sense of entitlements,” and she now sees those seeds causing immense political and cultural damage.
The first 10 minutes of this 27 minute video interview touches upon her views of “the disaster” that was the feminist movement. Decter says feminists came to suburban white women with the message that they were “a bunch of slaves they said to the luckiest, healthiest, richest, most privileged, young women who had ever walked the face of the earth.”
“If somebody tells you, you are a slave” or victim, then, she says, it is natural for women to then ask society to “give me something.”
Decter reminds us that Betty Friedan, the author of “The Feminine Mystique” and “the fairy godmother of the movement,” once described a woman living in a suburb as a “returning soldier with injuries to her brain. That’s in her book of hers.”
Decter says, “Womens Studies is a racket, is what it is. It’s an opportunity for people not qualified to teach and students who don’t want to work to study.” At the end of the process, she thinks the students are unemployable and thus likely to get angry. Yet, “being angry is their stock and trade.”
Decter grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, and she came to New York City, a city she fell in love with, “as a hotheaded young Zionist” to learn Hebrew.
On President Obama, she said, “He doesn’t like this country and its government. We elected Obama because he was a black man, and it was time to do that and he was the one. Little did we know how radical he was. His legacy may be the election of a Republican government for as far as the eye can see.”
Decter ran for several years the Committee for the Free World, a non-profit that linked journalists, academics and intellectuals who were fighting communism. Her last book, published in 2002, was “An Old Wife’s Tale.” But her greatest pride is found in her family.
Mrs. Thomas does not necessarily support or endorse the products, services or positions promoted in any advertisement contained herein, and does not have control over or receive compensation from any advertiser.