Midge the Magnificent

May 13, 2022 | Free Beacon

I first met Midge Decter during the mid-1980s through neoconservative publishing circles in New York, a world as distant from today’s as it was, in turn, from the time of the Second World War. Though no one back then knew it, those years would turn out to be the sunset of the so-called small magazines, and with it, the end of the New York intellectuals—whose ranks, ironically, we had all moved there to join. “We” were a tight band of interns and journeymen, orbiting around small but influential journals like The Public Interest and Commentary, the American Spectator and The New Criterion, wider venues like the Wall Street Journal, Time, and book publishing houses, and other places where thinking and scribbling helped to pay the rent.

Back then, before the internet ushered in the Götterdämmerung of many things literary, those felt like glory days. This was true above all for the young men and women who had landed in these places by dint of political contrarianism—especially those recently graduated from elite campuses, where political conformity had pushed them out of stifling academia, and into the freer intellectual life of Manhattan. “In New York you can be a new man,” goes a rap in Hamilton, and that’s exactly what young, lower-case new-right types felt in the city during the mid-1980s. At that moment, Reaganism had surpassed punk for cool, and neoconservatism in its classic sense—meliorative, questioning, bookish—was ascendant, and spreading.

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