His election, and then his resounding reelection, was a rebuff to the political world that Susan had inhabited for more than twenty years, the world that seemed victorious during the feminist meeting with Norman Mailer. In that world, said Norman Podhoretz, “the right wing did not exist. It wasn’t even on the radar.”11 In those days, the enemy of radicalism was not conservatism but liberalism, and “the fights were all sectarian.” The event of Reagan proved how much those battles had blinded the Left to a resurgent Right, and rendered them unprepared for people just as opposed to liberalism as
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