Noah Rothman, a National Review senior writer and frequent guest on Fox News, may be the Conservative Inc. equivalent of a medieval feudal lord awash in multiple fiefs. In addition to his post at the flagship neoconservative magazine and his Fox appearances, Rothman is also a frequent New York Post columnist and served as Commentary’s online editor. One fateful afternoon, I happened to catch Rothman on Fox interrupting one of Will Cain’s paeans to President Trump to remind his host that he wouldn’t be satisfied with Trump’s Iranian intervention until our chief executive returned us to the Bush II foreign policy. According to Rothman, we should do the Iranians a favor and bestow upon them some variation of the present American government. Unless my TV audio suddenly went dead, it seemed that neither Cain nor his guests expressed any disagreement with this expression of neocon doctrine.

Although I’m too old to begrudge Rothman his professional success as a neocon fixture, for me he typifies what’s wrong with what my friend Jack Kerwick calls “the big con.” Rothman is miles behind all the conservative thinkers I recall from my youth in intelligence, education, and anything resembling conservative principles. His book attacking the so-called “New Puritans” is an over-advertised rip-off of earlier tirades against progressive ideology—most notably the better-written diatribes produced by H. L. Mencken, who seems to have become a politically incorrect figure for Rothman’s movement.

Another book by Rothman making fun of the demand for “social justice” is a vintage example of the conservative establishment supporting the antidiscrimination state while trying, in vain, to keep it in bounds. That may be like King Canute ordering the sea waves not to surge forward. Rothman applauds the progress of the government-directed civil rights regime until it began to upset him. Dana Perino of Fox News fame praises the book in a blurb for its value in “giving a real workout to your brain.” In her case, I’ve no doubt that’s true.

Hey, but let’s not be cynical! Rothman is a Jewish suburbanite from New Jersey, who obviously feels strongly about Israel, and whose views on that matter would please the Murdoch family, who keep the Fox News performers in clover. Rothman also sounds like Michael Gerson or Peggy Noonan on the need to export “our democracy” abroad. Like his colleagues, he can also imitate profundity without making sense. Thus, in a prolix interview in June 2019, he dropped this gem:

But social justice is no longer a purely left-wing concept. The social justice left and the social justice right mirror each other in a lot of ways. The paralyzing victimization narrative—the notion that you need to erect racially conscious institutions to affect negative social pressure downwards—social leveling—is the sort of thing shared by fringes both on the race conscious right and the social justice left. Both are going at each other in the streets.

It’s not at all clear how those he criticizes on the right are for “social justice” or “social leveling.” But this charge does fit the neocon symmetry whereby those who disagree with them—be they from the right or the left—are from two extremes that effortlessly merge somewhere.

Just before the passage quoted, Rothman opines that the Catholic view of justice is like the one on the left. Since the centuries-old Catholic view seems to be that of Thomas Aquinas, which is largely derivative from Aristotle, it is hard to figure out what Rothman is talking about. For both Aquinas and Aristotle, justice is about establishing right relations (orthopraxis) between the individual and community. It is certainly not about leveling social differences or having a managerial state redistribute income.

Indeed, ancient and medieval philosophers assumed the existence of hierarchy as a natural aspect of human relations, a situation to which individuals were expected to conform. Since neither Zohran Mamdani nor Aquinas accepts Rothman’s notion of democratic capitalism, perhaps we are supposed to believe that both are somehow for “social justice.”

I’m also struck by Noah’s defense of our “forever wars,” a subject on which he expatiated in Commentary in June 2021 and then again in August of the same year in National Review. The gist of his National Review article, which I forced myself to read after appropriate medication, is that we should stop bellyaching “about forever wars” and get on with prosecuting these armed conflicts. This is apparently our mission as a world power, which other conservative opinion-givers outside of the neocon camp are reluctant to accept. Particularly striking in Noah’s polemic is this observation about America’s 20 years of military intervention in Afghanistan:

What did we get out of an exercise that cost America over 2,400 lives and nearly $1 trillion? First and foremost, zero major foreign-directed terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in the generation that has elapsed since September 11. That’s no small feat, and it did not happen by accident. Of course, the geostrategic obligations of the only nation capable of sustained power projection anywhere on earth do not always align with the desires of its electorate. Americans are tired of the mission.

Allow me to observe as someone who is far from a total isolationist, that before the George W. Bush administration and the ascent to power of Rothman’s buddies there were also no devastating attacks on the American homeland. Might it not be argued that the pursuit of Rothman’s foreign policy contributed to the terrorist assaults that did happen, such as at Ford Hood, Orlando, San Bernardino, and the Boston Marathon, to name a few?

It is also mind-boggling (except when encountering neocons) that Rothman finds no American military commitment since the Vietnam War that he doesn’t judge as just peachy, including the two decades during which a large American force was involved in combat in Afghanistan. The world is somehow a safer place (possibly for his donors) when American troops are strung out all over the globe. Perhaps the electorate whom Rothman scorns may have a point here.

In 2021, Rothman was still going after Trump for his remarks about ending “the era of endless war.” It’s remarkable that his movement, the conservative establishment, which claims to have given up neocon gibberish in favor of something else, can never quite kick this addiction. In Rothman’s case, one misses even the appearance of being drug-free.