Peggy Noonan sells a Hollywood fabrication to launder the donor class’s 1976 political failure as patriotic romance. Her Wall Street Journal column, published June 11, 2026, is a five-act sentimental exercise in substituting movie mythology for the material reality of the American working class ahead of the semiquincentennial. I drafted versions of this exact piece for the Journal’s page for more than a decade. The mechanism hasn’t changed. This column walks through her technique deployments as they appear.
We’ve recently been touching on themes connected to personal biography and the observations of Russian diplomats. This week we go full “hoke,” in a piece about a little bit of hokiness that, 50 years ago, America saw right through and embraced to its deepest heart.
This is the pre-emptive confession — the rhetorical equivalent of a magician showing you the empty hat before pulling out the rabbit. It makes the trick feel honest. Noonan opens by naming her own move before critics can: she’s going “full hoke.” The confession is the motte (“I admit it’s sentimental”); the column to follow is the bailey (“and therefore the sentimental claim is true”). We operators called this “the pre-bunk” — disarm the objection by stating it first, then proceed as if stating it resolved it. The audience gets to feel sophisticated for recognizing the hoke while still receiving the hoke’s payload. The setup is the permission for everything that follows.
The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a transcendent moment in the political history of man, comes in a few weeks. Do we sense the mounting excitement? I do not, not yet. But we should all be gentle about it and treat it as something with meaning, and also maybe use it as a corrective for our kids and the young people in our lives. They haven’t seen America publicly loved a lot the past few decades.
This is the manufactured-urgency pivot — Bandura’s moral justification plus the wound-and-bandage move. The operation is launched inside the first three paragraphs: America is unloved, the young are deprived, the anniversary is a “corrective.” None of this is argued — it’s asserted as shared premise. The function is to create a deficit of national affection and position the column as its remedy. The reader who feels the deficit is now receptive to whatever fills it. The reader who doesn’t is positioned as part of the problem — one of those who hasn’t been “gentle” enough, who withholds “love.” We called this “the warm-bath prelude” in the editorial-page workshops: the opening segment designed to soothe the audience’s anxiety about a fracturing political economy by replacing it with a shared emotional cue. The trick is to make the reader feel they are failing their country by not cheering loudly enough, so they will happily consume whatever myth is offered to fill the silence.
As Walker Percy wrote in his 1961 novel, “The Moviegoer,” movies can reflect and express a people’s spiritual condition. His protagonist, small-town stockbroker Binx Bolling, would go to the movie house, follow the images on the silver screen, and feel he was escaping the malaise, the everydayness, of his life: “The fact is, I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie.” They may be artificial but make everything seem realer.
Here’s Walker Percy. Here’s Binx Bolling. The literary citation is doing zero argumentative work — the point that movies can express a people’s condition is a truism — but it’s doing heavy credentialing work. The reader gets to feel that agreeing with Noonan is participating in serious literary culture rather than receiving a sentimental op-ed. Walker Percy is the seal on the envelope. This is the erudition-as-permission move, the Journal house style at its most practiced: the elite-coded reference that makes the elite reader feel the populist feeling is intellectually respectable. We used to call it the intellectual shield. The effect is to tell the reader that if you look too closely at the movie’s economic or racial mechanics, you are the malaise-ridden cynic trapped in the everyday, rather than the clear-eyed patriot who accepts the artificial image as “realer” than the truth. Notice, too, how the Percy drop depends on the opening paragraph’s “salon” gesture — Noonan set the frame of an ongoing, high-minded intellectual conversation before she ever got to the movie. By the time she quotes Percy, you’ve already been recruited into the frame where a Walker Percy citation feels earned, not pretentious.
Movies, like people, have a historical context, and Rocky’s was Watergate, Vietnam, a bad economy, high inflation. People were feeling stupid to have believed all those things they believed in World War II. And the little movie came along and lifted everyone’s spirits, reminded us of the romance in the realism.
The austerity-thrift archetype — the Journal’s signature move. Noonan recasts the stagflation and institutional betrayal of the mid-1970s — the exact moment the donor class began its campaign to deregulate finance, bust the labor unions, and externalize the costs of corporate governance — as the rugged, necessary backdrop for a feel-good sports movie. The move is Bandura’s distortion of consequences. Right then, the Journal was drafting the playbook for the 1978 Revenue Act and championing the hollowing-out of collective bargaining as “market flexibility,” tying the movie’s emotional payoff directly to the wealth transfer being prepared at the editorial desks. The working-class misery of 1976 becomes an aesthetic ingredient for American triumph. The actual material failure becomes a romantic prelude to a cinematic victory, and the working class gets the emotional satisfaction of watching someone else punch through the very structural barriers the column’s parent publication actively built. The column asks the reader to find the “romance in the realism,” which is operator code for accepting your own economic erosion because it makes for a good underdog story.
But what most captured the Spirit of ’76 wasn’t murals of Revolutionary War marchers with drums and flags or the “Bicentennial Minute” on CBS-TV. It was a movie, the biggest Hollywood grosser of the year. Everyone went. The tag line on the original poster said it all: “His whole life was a million-to-one shot.”
“Rocky” was hokey, sentimental, dealt freely in stereotypes. But it summed up, without even trying, what a spectacularly new thing in history America was, because the meaning of the movie was the American promise: Anyone can come from anywhere and become anything.
The mook from the mean streets can become a champ. That’s all. It’s the oldest story in America.
The manufactured-nostalgia engine, now at full deployment. For readers who don’t remember: Rocky was a movie released in 1976. Noonan is asking you to feel the Spirit of ’76 through a film made by a Hollywood studio to make money — and then to treat that commercial artifact as proof that the American promise is real. The “oldest story in America” framing converts a screenplay into a documentary, a fable into evidence. In the foundation-circuit shop where we built these, we called this “the memory that never was” — you supply the audience with a past they feel they remember, even if they weren’t there. The past is invoked, given a specific date, attached to a specific cultural object, and then the feeling that object produces is treated as information about the country rather than information about the movie.
And then the bootstraps documentary frame kicks in:
They started filming in January 1976; the no-name actor who wrote the script, Sylvester Stallone, would star. They shot it quickly and for just more than $1 million — it was rough and scrappy filmmaking, handheld cameras and insufficient permits and permissions.
The movie’s production story — low-budget, scrappy, no-name star — is being enlisted as further evidence of the American promise. The movie is about a longshot; the movie’s production was a longshot; therefore the longshot thesis is doubly confirmed. But this is a category error dressed as narrative: the fact that a studio made a profitable low-budget film is a fact about the movie business, not a fact about social mobility. The conflation — movie myth plus movie production equals American truth — is the spine Noonan’s whole piece walks on.
Aspects of our racial theatrics were well in place, were well-worn clichés, 50 years ago.
That sentence is doing four things at once — the multiple-audience-targeting analytic, executed in a single line. For the skeptical reader: “See, I’m not naive about race.” For the nostalgic reader: “Even with the theatrics, the promise was real.” For the conservative reader: “Racial grievance is theatrical, not structural.” For the Journal’s editorial board: “We can acknowledge race without ceding ground.” It’s elegant. And it is a minimization maneuver that uses Bandura’s advantageous comparison and euphemistic labeling to sanitize the film’s actual function. The racially coded narrative of the white ethnic underdog reclaiming the heavyweight title from the flamboyant, wealthy Black champion — a core anxiety of 1976 white working-class identity politics — is dismissed as harmless “clichés.” The acknowledgment of race is the permission to proceed without engaging race. Having mentioned the “racial theatrics,” Noonan is free to tell the story of Rocky Balboa as a universal story about anyone from anywhere, without examining who the “anyone” was and who was supplying the “anyone” their shot. In the page workshops, we called this “taking the heat out of the wire.” You name the uncomfortable reality, you label it a cliché, and you rush to the sentimental climax before the reader can examine the structural inequality you just named.
Creed enters the arena the night of the fight dressed as George Washington, on a big white horse, throwing dollar bills at the crowd. The crowd adores him.
Notice what Noonan does here and what she doesn’t do. She describes Creed throwing money — performative wealth, audience-bought, vaguely corrupt. She does not note that Creed, the Black champion, is the one who gave Rocky his shot, the one whose showmanship created the opportunity for the white underdog to rise. The architecture of the film — Black excellence as the platform for white ascension — is present in the description but absent from the analysis. Reading the piece, you’d never know the Black character was the engine of the white character’s rise. And the way Noonan tells it, Creed is denied even the interiority she lavishes on Rocky — he’s a prop on a horse, a “showman” throwing money, while Rocky is granted the full moral monologue about self-worth and survival. That stripping of interiority is the mechanism: the “anyone” of Noonan’s American promise is structurally allocated to the white underdog; the Black champion exists only as spectacle to enable his rise.
The night before the fight he confesses to Adrian, “All I wanna do is go the distance.” If he’s still standing at the end, even if Creed has busted his head open, “I’m gonna know for the first time in my life that I weren’t just another bum from the neighborhood.”
Here’s the core of the Rocky myth: the goal isn’t to win, it’s to endure. The American promise Noonan is selling isn’t victory — it’s survival. “Going the distance” while broken and bleeding is framed as dignity. That’s the austerity-thrift archetype with the serial numbers filed off: suffering is character, surviving is winning, and the fact that you didn’t get what you were promised is reframed as proof the promise was kept. In the Journal’s economic editorials, this same structure appears as “layoffs are discipline the workforce needed.” In Noonan’s film criticism, it appears as “Rocky was a champion because he was still standing.” Same frame, different register. The suffering produced by the system is the proof the system works.
There are finer moments in American cinema, more brilliant, more profound and poetic, but there is no greater moment in American cinema. And if you aren’t moved by it, there is something wrong and you must investigate your sodden heart.
This is the dissent-proofing clause — the close-out move. If you disagree, the problem is in you. Your heart is “sodden.” You are incapable of being moved. The rhetorical function is to make disagreement a character defect rather than an analytical position. If you point out that a Hollywood movie is not a documentary about American mobility, you are a person with a defective heart rather than a person who noticed a category error. This is the permission structure’s final lock: the audience that resists isn’t wrong, it’s broken. This was one of my signature moves in the cable years — the pivot from argument to diagnosis, the treatment of the interlocutor as patient. I know it when I see it.
Anyone from anywhere can become anything. Life is hope. (Let Brunson try a 3, Anunoby will tip it in!) And the most crazily hopeful of all lives are lived, still, here. Why do you think the immigrants come?
Pause on the basketball line. That (Let Brunson try a 3, Anunoby will tip it in!) isn’t random color — it’s a weaponized authenticity move. Noonan drops a hyper-specific, present-tense Knicks/Celtics play-by-play into a paean about romantic realism to manufacture the feeling of being inside unscripted, living history. The contrast is the point: the movie is “hoke,” staged, a commercial product — but the game she’s watching is real, spontaneous, happening right now. The parenthetical launders the myth through sports fandom: if you’re the kind of person who yells at the TV during a Knicks game, you’re automatically enrolled in the column’s emotional universe, your real-time excitement transferred onto the 50-year-old fiction. It’s a sleight of hand that makes Noonan’s romance feel lived-in rather than written, an authenticity-by-association trick that bypasses your analytical defenses and deposits you inside her feeling before you’ve decided whether the feeling is warranted.
Then the “why do you think they come” switcheroo. The immigrants come because America has jobs, because the dollar is strong, because there are family networks and supply chains and labor demand. They come for reasons that have nothing to do with whether Rocky is a true story or whether the American promise is available to them when they arrive. But Noonan’s rhetorical move treats immigration as proof of the promise rather than as evidence of global labor markets — and does it in a sentence structured to make you feel heartless if you point out the distinction. This is the Journal’s donor-class populism at its most refined: cite the people who absorb the system’s worst costs as evidence the system is working, without ever asking whether it’s working for them.
Creed enters the arena… The judges call a split decision.
And here in the melee in the ring, in his great moment, Rocky doesn’t boast or dance, turns away from the mics being thrust in his face. He just stops, and bellows out the word that means most to him.
The mouse of a woman who believed in him, who helped him, a nobody just like him, mouse to his mook.
Because the point of everything is love, the central fact. Because love, for a person, a people, God, is all that matters and in the end all that’s left.
This is the ultimate collective-ego soothing mechanism. The column’s entire analytical thread collapses into affect. Noonan substitutes the resolution of material deprivation — Rocky still works for a mob loan shark, still lives in a crumbling row on a South Philly block, and will suffer severe neurological decline in the actual narrative sequel — with the warm bath of “love.” The operator’s-eye view here is the clearest because it is the easiest trick: “love” is the rhetorical endpoint because it costs the donor class absolutely nothing. It doesn’t require a living wage, it doesn’t require accessible healthcare, it doesn’t require the donor class to surrender a fraction of the concentrated wealth they extracted during the very decades Noonan is nostalgically sanitizing. It requires only that the audience cry at the right moment and accept a rent-to-wage burden that has tripled since the premiere as character-building scenery.
The old parchment proclaims we are all equal, free, and deserve a shot. That’s the romance of this old place, and must stay the realism. This coming big birthday let’s just remember. And remind.
The “let’s just remember” closure — the sentimental imperative as policy substitute. The column closes by asking you to “remember” and “remind.” Not to examine. Not to measure. Not to check whether the promise was kept or for whom. The act of feeling the myth becomes the substitute for testing the myth. And that feeling — warm, patriotic, slightly teary — is exactly the state in which the reader is most receptive to whatever the Journal’s editorial page wants to sell next. The “love of country” Noonan prescribes is, in practice, a demand that you look at the parchment and not at the ledgers.
So here is what this column, taken together, actually amounts to.
Noonan has constructed a sentimental proof that America delivers on its promise, using as evidence a fictional film whose own plot undermines the claim — a white man gets a gift from a Black champion, endures a beating, and is declared triumphant for surviving. The column’s real work is not the argument about Rocky. The real work is the production of a feeling — national affection, nostalgic warmth, the lump in the throat — and the conversion of that feeling into a permission structure. Once the reader is feeling the myth, the reader is not asking where the promise went, who took it apart, or whether the donor class whose interests the Journal’s editorial page defends — and whose op-ed page this column runs on — had a hand in dismantling the mobility the myth describes.
That’s what “love of country” means in Noonan’s register. Not love of the people. Love of the parchment. Love of the movie. Love of the feeling the movie produces. And the feeling is the cover. The feeling is what lets you look at a country where the million-to-one shot is now closer to a billion-to-one shot for the working class and say, with a straight face and a Walker Percy citation, that the romance is the realism. The romance is not the realism. The romance is the brochure for the policy. The brochure, in this case and many others, was written to obscure whose interests the policy actually serves. The Journal’s digital paywall runs $39 a month to keep the lights on; the donors don’t buy tickets anymore, they sell them.