Recalling the life and many achievements of the writer and editor Midge Decter, who passed away on Monday at the age of ninety-four, Tevi Troy calls attention to her active engagement in political affairs. Decter in 1972 helped to establish the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, which aimed to rescue the Democratic party from its more radical elements. In 1981, she founded the Committee for a Free World, dedicated to combatting Communism. At the root of both projects, writes Troy, was Decter’s opposition to the hard left:

This left, with its rejection of tradition and authority, made her uncomfortable. As she wrote in Commentary in 1982, “The refusal to be bound by rules, any rules, turned children against their elders, impelled them to don rags and roam the country simulating poverty, destroy their brains with drugs, burn books, and rage against the very idea of responsibility, social, intellectual, or personal.”

She was also a staunch anti-Communist. As she would write, Commentary’s “true animating passion was a deep hatred for Communism in any and all of its manifestations.” She felt that the Democratic Party of the 1970s was wavering on that principle. Unlike many of her fellow neoconservatives, she had never had a Marxist phase. “The only grand posturing of my teens,” she once recalled, “had been a declared intention to die on the barricades in Palestine” [fighting Arab aggression]. To her, the George McGovern Democrats of the early 1970s no longer upheld the liberal anti-Communist banner she held dear.

In his own remembrance, Yuval Levin praises Decter as a “a powerful and penetrating writer” and seeks to identify the threads connecting her social criticism with her political ideals:

Her essays could see right to the core of the failures of the modern left—often long before those failures become apparent as a practical matter to everyone with eyes to see. Her early collections, The Liberated Woman and The New Chastity, from the early 1970s, are full of insights that our society would take decades to grasp, but which Decter could see in real time because she took the radicals’ unseriousness seriously and understood where their moral recklessness would lead.

The need to take responsibility for what was breaking down in our society was a theme to which she would recur for decades—refusing to let Americans get away with blaming the degradation of our culture on anyone but ourselves.

For me, perhaps the most powerful articulation of the point came in an extraordinary essay that was my first exposure to Decter—a piece called “A Jew in Anti-Christian America,” published in First Things in 1995, when I was a college freshman. It’s not her greatest or most lasting piece of writing, but it combines autobiography, social analysis, and startling insight in her characteristic “force for good” style. You should read it today. In it she argues, among other things, that the radicalism she had warned of in the 70s had evolved into a combination of arrogance and nihilism that she described as the philosophy of “why not?” and “so what?”

For some time, opponents of U.S support for Israel have been urging the White House to end the war in Gaza, or simply calling for a ceasefire. Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby consider what such a result would actually entail:

Ending the war immediately would allow Hamas to survive and retain military and governing power. Leaving it in the area containing the Sinai-Gaza smuggling routes would ensure that Hamas can rearm. This is why Hamas leaders now plead for a ceasefire. A ceasefire will provide some relief for Gazans today, but a prolonged ceasefire will preserve Hamas’s bloody oppression of Gaza and make future wars with Israel inevitable.

For most Gazans, even when there is no hot war, Hamas’s dictatorship is a nightmarish tyranny. Hamas rule features the torture and murder of regime opponents, official corruption, extremist indoctrination of children, and misery for the population in general. Hamas diverts foreign aid and other resources from proper uses; instead of improving life for the mass of the people, it uses the funds to fight against Palestinians and Israelis.

Moreover, a Hamas-affiliated website warned Gazans last month against cooperating with Israel in securing and delivering the truckloads of aid flowing into the Strip. It promised to deal with those who do with “an iron fist.” In other words, if Hamas remains in power, it will begin torturing, imprisoning, or murdering those it deems collaborators the moment the war ends. Thereafter, Hamas will begin planning its next attack on Israel:

Hamas’s goals are to overshadow the Palestinian Authority, win control of the West Bank, and establish Hamas leadership over the Palestinian revolution. Hamas’s ultimate aim is to spark a regional war to obliterate Israel and, as Hamas leaders steadfastly maintain, fulfill a Quranic vision of killing all Jews.

Hamas planned for corpses of Palestinian babies and mothers to serve as the mainspring of its October 7 war plan. Hamas calculated it could survive a war against a superior Israeli force and energize enemies of Israel around the world. The key to both aims was arranging for grievous Palestinian civilian losses. . . . That element of Hamas’s war plan is working impressively.