Holman Jenkins launders election-fraud grievance into nostalgia for smoke-filled rooms. The occasion is Holman W. Jenkins Jr.’s October 14 Wall Street Journal column, “Barney Frank: Impeach ‘Woke.’” I sat in rooms adjacent to those Jenkins is mourning for two decades and wrote the columns this kind of apparatus ran on. The column deploys at least a half-dozen distinct techniques across its seventeen paragraphs; this column walks through them as they appear.
Oh, for the days of the smoke-filled rooms. Party elders once settled on state governors and army generals as presidential nominees. These were men whom they had been able to observe closely for decades attending to the public’s business.
— paragraph 1
The catalogue files this under appeal to tradition and the bad-faith version of frame-engineered relabeling: take a term that was once an indictment and launder it into a term of endearment. “Smoke-filled room” was coined as an insult. It named the 1920 Republican convention, the suite at the Blackstone Hotel where the nomination was cut before the delegates arrived, the boss system that traded the public’s business to the highest bidder on the public’s behalf. The men who coined it meant it as a diagnosis of a disease. Jenkins means it as the menu.
The page’s stated principles have long included opposition to “infringements on individual rights, whether they stem from attempts at private monopoly, labor union monopoly, or from an overgrowing government.” A party-boss cartel that settles the most consequential selection in American politics in a back room is a monopoly. The page once named that kind of concentrated power the enemy. A generation later, a member of the same board publishes a column pining for it. That is not the page’s values at work; that is the values gap doing its job — the stated values protect the space in which the actual preferences operate.
Operators in the cable years talked about this kind of passage as “the brochure” — the artifact that signaled to the reader what kind of apparatus they were being addressed by and what kind of coalition they were being invited into. The brochure’s audience-management function: nostalgia is the conscience-soothing instrument. The reader who misses the smoke-filled room gets to feel they are missing statesmanship, not capture. They get to feel the populist eruption is a degradation of democracy rather than a symptom of capture the room had spent decades producing. This is what the editorial board has been doing since the postwar consolidation of its posture. The operators’ word for it, when they are not on the page, is the racket. The column is the racket wearing a cigar.
Listen to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tell the New York Times that history doesn’t care whether you’re ready—it seizes upon you to do, er, the thing you always wanted to do anyway, like Medicare for All and an expansive national minimum wage, never mind whether these things are timely in an age of overflowing debt and gathering international dangers.
Donald Trump, of course, is the apotheosis of the president as self-realizer. If he had died at his moment of supreme achievement after his 2024 return to power, he would have entered the pantheon. His subsequent presidency? Not a ticket to the pantheon.
— paragraphs 2–4
Two moves share this excerpt. First, the strawman — the selectional variety the catalogue logs most carefully: take the most expansive version of a position, strip the context, refute the stripped version. The “er” in “to do, er, the thing you always wanted to do anyway” is the sneer made typographical — the gentleman’s gesture that the position is beneath enumeration. Note what has not happened: no argument has been engaged. A genuine debate about the fiscal limits of a welfare state in an era of debt would be a real column. Instead the “er” does the refuting.
Second, the hagiography — and observe the asymmetric language management running under it. The apostolic vocabulary — “apotheosis,” “pantheon,” “supreme achievement” — is unmarked, deployed at full earnestness; the out-group’s vocabulary would arrive in scare quotes because the out-group’s terms always do. A defeated emperor gets “apotheosis”; a congresswoman gets “er.” The load-bearing relabel is “self-realizer” — the therapy word that converts the most consequential rule-breaking of a generation into personal growth. The Luntz discipline would recognize it instantly: find the word that makes the reader feel the subject is not dangerous but fulfilled. And the “not a ticket to the pantheon” clause is the caveat that exists to be quoted — the motte that lets the writer deny the bailey. The bailey is the paragraph before it: the man was an apotheosis, and his enemies’ upchuck made his movement. The motte is one clause pretending to even-handedness. This is hagiography with a thesaurus, and the thesaurus is the point: the reader is asked to receive “apotheosis” as reportage.
What holds the two together is the contempt-register conflation. AOC and Trump are both placed in the same diagnostic frame — the “self-realizer” who seizes history for the thing they always wanted. By the time Jenkins finishes, the reader who is contemptuous of Trump is also contemptuous of AOC, and the contempt moves between them as if they were the same kind of object. They are not. One is a sitting congresswoman with a policy platform; the other is the president the page spent decades building. Putting them in the same frame is the move. Operators called the “AOC-and-Trump-in-the-same-shell” device a Tuesday-afternoon construction: the contempt register on the progressive was load-bearing; the Trump contempt was the cover that licensed the AOC contempt without engagement. The page wanted the reader to feel contempt for the left, and any contempt-register move on Trump was the price of doing business. The “would have entered the pantheon” line is the backhand compliment — Trump, the page’s handiwork, being chided for not being better at Trump. This is contempt-laundering: Jenkins launders contempt for the left through contempt for Trump, and both contempts travel together in the same paragraph.
I immediately recognize an irony in the argument I’m about to make. His two latest Democratic opponents were products of the now smoke-free room. The smoke-free room made a big comeback in the establishment’s decade-long battle to keep one man, Mr. Trump, out of the presidency. Mr. Trump’s prolonged war was never really against any other candidate. It was against a collective establishment upchuck.
As reporters Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman document but don’t explain in their book, Mr. Trump’s subordination of the GOP happened not while he was in power. It happened during the interregnum, when his enemies were in power.
Only then did MAGA become a genuine mass movement, as sociologists define the term, rather than just a cult of enthusiasm for one politician that manifested itself on Election Day.
The real congealment likely happened in the days before and after Jan. 6, 2021. In a representative news database, MAGA received 9,985 mentions in the first two years of the first Trump presidency. In the single year of 2024, it received 65,345 mentions. By then, Americans had seen things they never saw before. The press lying in conjunction with the national security state. U.S. intelligence officials meddling in domestic politics. The Covid coercions. The extralegal creation of mass mail-in voting in 2020. In 2024, a conspiracy to reinstall a visibly senile incumbent over the heads of his own party’s voters.
— paragraphs 5–8
This is where the argument’s spine stands bare, and it is the omission you can see through. The catalogue names the mechanism as Bandura’s attribution of blame, the last of the eight moral-disengagement moves and the one with the longest service record in the liberty-frame apparatus: when the documented actor cannot be defended, make the documented actor the victim and make the resisters the cause. “Mr. Trump’s prolonged war was never really against any other candidate. It was against a collective establishment upchuck” — an establishment that tried to keep the man out of the presidency caused everything that followed. The insurrection is not the responsibility of the man who summoned it; it is the responsibility of the people who did not want him president. “Upchuck” is doing enormous work here, a bodily noise standing in for the Constitution.
The “document but don’t explain” is the tell within the tell: the reporters’ book is good enough to cite for its facts and bad enough to dismiss for its explanations, because an explanation would name the actual engine of the subordination — and the subordination is the sentence’s background, never its event. The movement “congealed” in the days around Jan. 6 — note the verb, a neutral-sounding phase transition, like ice forming. The most violent breach of the Capitol in two centuries becomes a stage in a growth curve. That is euphemistic labeling at full specification — WSJ §4.1, the signature relabel that converts an event into its opposite. And “as sociologists define the term” is the expert-consensus gesture with no expert attached: no study, no name, no citation, just the lab coat. The back-room word for prose of this kind was the brochure. This is the brochure for the movement, written by an editorial board member, and what it sells is the blame-shift: the riot’s cause is the people who tried to prevent the riot, and the riot itself is sociology.
The middle paragraph is the Gish gallop at full specification — Eugenie Scott’s name for the debate tactic of piling claims faster than they can be checked. Count: the press lying in conjunction with the national security state; intelligence officials meddling; the Covid coercions; the extralegal mail ballots; the conspiracy to reinstall a visibly senile incumbent. Five indictments, any one of which would require a book-length evidentiary apparatus, delivered in a newsreel that takes six seconds to read. Each is asserted as established fact, with no source, no name, no hook the reader could pull. And in the middle sits the garnish: 9,985 and 65,345, plucked from “a representative news database,” which is the page’s way of saying trust us on the math. A rise in news mentions of a word is evidence that the word appeared in the news more often. That is the data equivalent of a shrug, deployed as the empirical foundation for a “genuine mass movement.”
This is also the four-audience hand at its cleanest — WSJ §4.3, the multiple-audience-targeting analytic, run inside one paragraph. The populist base gets the grievance liturgy in full sentence fragments, handed down as truth; the wealthy reader gets the reassurance that the movement’s enemies are the institutions, not capital; the technocratic reader gets the database numbers, which look like evidence long enough to be quoted; the political class gets a usable story about the press and the intelligence apparatus. One paragraph, four audiences, zero overlap. The fragments could not survive the scrutiny the technocrat would demand; the numbers would not move the base; the base’s fury would embarrass the technocrat. The paragraph works because no audience ever sees it being read by the other three. And the list’s final item is the tell. “A conspiracy” is the piece’s own word, not a source’s, not in quotes. The one claim in the column that would need the most proof is the one claim the author delivers as his own finding.
What the account omits — and the omission is the account — is the propaganda operation that built MAGA. The leaked message-discipline memos. The Frank Luntz focus-group-tested vocabulary. Bandura’s eight mechanisms of moral disengagement deployed at scale by the apparatus Jenkins declines to name. The cable apparatus that ran the documented conspiracy theories. The documented media-conservative lineage of custody: Pat Buchanan to Rush Limbaugh to Roger Ailes to Fox News to Breitbart to Cambridge Analytica to Steve Bannon — verifiable as a chain of media-conservative custody from the 1970s forward. Separately, the interpretive claim is that the editorial board’s own operations had been preparing the soil for that lineage since the Powell Memo — the supply-side messaging work, the consolidation of posture, the sign-off of the propaganda apparatus’s preferred vocabulary into the only vocabulary the page’s preferred coalition could think in. The two claims do different jobs; the column’s force lives in the first, and the second is what the apparatus cannot allow itself to acknowledge.
The page’s historians cannot explain Trump’s mass movement without explaining the apparatus that built it; Jenkins himself cannot explain it; the Swan-Haberman book Jenkins cites as documentation is a documentation of the same apparatus Jenkins is declining to name. The omission is not a gap in the account; it is the account. This is the big lie, as Arendt analyzed the term: not a falsehood asserted but a falsehood manufactured by omission, structured to destroy the audience’s capacity to distinguish the truth from the page’s preferred reading of it. The lie is not what is asserted. The lie is what is left out.
The last honest mistake arguably was Hillary Clinton’s overbetting on the Upper Midwest in 2016. Then something abnormal began. Chuck Schumer famously put it into words: A politician is unwise to make an enemy of the intelligence apparatus.
— paragraph 9
This is the demarcation move. The column splits American political time into a normal period — the period of Clinton’s campaign-managerial mistakes — and an abnormal period — the period of “something abnormal.” The “last honest mistake” is the last event that can be described in campaign-managerial language; everything after is something that has to be described in apparatus-language. The Schumer line is the apparatus quoting itself on its own power. Schumer is one of the page’s preferred coalition’s senior operators; the quotation is the coalition acknowledging, in a form the column can carry, that the intelligence apparatus is the structure inside which Democratic politicians operate.
The demarcation does work the column needs done. By locating the abnormal at the post-2016 inflection, Jenkins can describe everything from 2017 forward as the period when the apparatus was under attack, and everything before as the period when the apparatus was consensual. The page’s preferred coalition’s own work during that pre-2017 period — the Powell-era posture consolidation, the supply-side messaging work, the lineage from Buchanan through Ailes — is thereby relocated to the “before” period, where it does not need to be defended, only described. The apparatus’s own complicity is what the demarcation is designed to keep on the “before” side of the line.
I’ve documented here the lack of courage and honesty of the press, the paralytic silence of certain of today’s Democratic hopefuls about what happened in these years.
— paragraph 10
This is apparatus citing itself. The “I’ve documented here” is the column pointing to its own prior columns as the proof of the press-honesty thesis. The press-honesty thesis is, on this column’s own evidence, the prior columns Jenkins has written to defend the editorial board’s preferred coalition. The apparatus does not need an external witness to its own courage; it has Jenkins’s prior columns. The apparatus is the witness to itself. The “paralytic silence” construction is the contempt-register move on the page’s preferred coalition’s own members who have not signed off on the apparatus’s preferred periodization — the apparatus cannot afford its own coalition to be ambivalent about who did what to whom.
Prosecutor Jack Smith continues noisily to champion the merits of the prosecutions that Mr. Trump thwarted by being re-elected. A more interesting version of Mr. Smith would reflect on his own role in causing that re-election.
— paragraph 11
The catalogue knows this move by its oldest name: the tu quoque, whataboutism in its purest form — when the case against the principal is documented, indict the enforcer. Jack Smith brought the prosecutions; therefore Jack Smith caused the re-election; therefore the re-election is the prosecutor’s fault. Observe the sentence’s architecture: the defendant never appears as a doer. “The prosecutions that Mr. Trump thwarted by being re-elected” makes the defendant the grammatical engine of the sentence and nowhere a subject — and the voters who did the re-electing are erased entirely. The causal chain runs Smith → prosecutions → re-election, with the man who was re-elected, and the electorate that re-elected him, written out of the story. That is displacement of responsibility, Bandura’s fourth mechanism, run by the book: move the blame up the chain to the enforcer so the principal holds none. The Schumer reference two paragraphs earlier does the same work in miniature. Every actor who pushed back — the press, the agencies, the prosecutors, the party — is converted into a culprit. The prosecutor did not cause the conduct that brought the charges. The institutions did not cause the assault on the institutions. The column’s ledger has an entry for everyone’s fault except the man whose conduct filled the ledger. This is not analysis; it is the con’s bookkeeping, with the principal’s name written in the “did nothing wrong” column.
In popular books in the 1970s, the Washington Post’s David Broder and Britain’s Henry Fairlie warned us that we would regret our turn toward a populist, primary-style presidential selection process.
I wrote myself in 2016 that a Trump election would end up demystifying the kind of presidency we had given ourselves. Here we are. Every administration faces unhappy midterms. Not every administration faces its lame duckhood dragging behind it acts that may end in mass allegations of criminality against its members and mass pardons issued by the president.
— paragraphs 12–13
The catalogue names this pair as twin appeals to credentialed consensus, and they are doing different work but the same job. First, the Broder-and-Fairlie gambit: anchor the 2026 grievance in the warnings of credentialed voices from a half-century ago. Two named journalists, one American, one British, both dead now, are invoked to establish that the populist turn was foreseen and foreseen to be regretted. Broder and Fairlie did not have to be right; they had to be credentialed. They were. That is the only credential the move requires. Worse: Broder and Fairlie were inside the apparatus Jenkins is mourning; their books are documented insider anxiety about what the apparatus was preparing to do. The column is citing insider anxiety from inside the apparatus as if the insider anxiety were external validation. The page is citing itself from 1970.
The Jenkins-of-2016 self-quote is the same move with the credential standing in for the writer himself. A columnist who predicted in 2016 that a Trump election would “demystify” the presidency returns in 2026 to declare the prediction fulfilled. The catalogue names this the seer-recap closer: write yourself into the prophecy, then cite yourself as its witness. The analyst’s vantage is the prophecy; the analyst’s evidence is the analyst. The reader is asked to receive the column’s present-tense grievances as the vindication of a forecast, and the forecast as the warrant for the present grievances. It is a closed loop with only the writer inside it, and the writer is the credential.
And then, in the same paragraph, the criminality-and-pardons claim: “Not every administration faces its lame duckhood dragging behind it acts that may end in mass allegations of criminality against its members and mass pardons issued by the president.” The sentence performs what it accuses. It asserts mass criminality without naming a single criminal act, then asserts mass pardons without naming a single pardon. The structure is the evidence: the column that complains about unspecified criminality cannot itself specify any. The pardons — a presidential power exercised at the close of a term — are converted into evidence of the criminality the president pardoned. The pardons are not in dispute; the criminality they supposedly pardon is the column’s own construction. The Gish gallop’s final entry in this section is the criminality itself, asserted as a fait accompli in the same breath as the prediction of its discovery.
Having downgraded the party machinery, having enshrined the president as a self-realizer, having empowered a zany activist class (often called political hobbyists) in both parties, we’ll never fully revert to the smoke-filled room. But a great republic still needs a stable elite. And every instinct suggests that how Democrats and Republicans in Congress cope with the coming impeachments will be key in finding a new equilibrium.
[…]
The late Barney Frank’s posthumous book came out last month, “The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy.”
He meant “woke,” about which the gay and liberal Frank is more damning than any Pete Hegseth screed. Starting next month, Democrats may find themselves with real power to begin undoing the damage they so myopically contributed to.
— paragraphs 14, 15, 17
And here, finally, the column says what it is for. “A great republic still needs a stable elite” is the thesis, stated without irony by a member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, and it is the most honest sentence in the piece. The catalogue logs the shape as the threat-inflation closer — WSJ §4.13 — the closing that inflates the stakes to the civilizational so the frame travels, but the inflation here is doing rarer work. It is the statement of interest. The grievance liturgy was the cover charge; this is the ask. The base was told its fury was righteous and its enemies were the institutions; the elite reader is now told the institutions must be re-staffed, and the “coming impeachments” are the hiring hall. The impeachments are not a constitutional event; they are the mechanism by which the new stable elite gets selected. The “zany activist class (often called political hobbyists)” is the enemy both parties may unite against.
What we wrote when we meant to say “class capture” but needed to say “stable elite.” The construction was a habit of speech; the page used it whenever it needed to make a captured-class arrangement sound like republican statecraft. “Zany activist class” relabels progressive organizing as zany. “Political hobbyists” relabels rank-and-file political engagement as pasttime. The euphemism layer is the entire sentence. The reader who absorbs it gets to feel that what they have lost is republican competence, not capture — that restoring elite gatekeeping is the corrective, not that elite gatekeeping is what produced the conditions the column is lamenting. The reader does not get to feel the alternative reading.
The “woke” closer runs the scare-quote trick in its most precise form. The quotes let the page’s readers believe the page is above the word even as it adopts the word’s full indictment — and the citation for the indictment is a dead man’s book. When I sat on that side of the page, the move was known as the corpse witness: the dead cannot clarify, qualify, or object, and that is what makes them the perfect witnesses in this genre. Barney Frank’s posthumous “Hard Path to Unity” is the ideal exhibit: a leading light of the old coalition, dead, beyond reply, invoked to prove that the old coalition’s own confess the old coalition’s guilt. The lineage of the whole performance runs from Lippmann’s “bewildered herd” and Bernays’s engineering of consent through the Powell Memo and the Mont Pelerin rooms to this sentence: the smoke-filled room is the ancestral home of the opinion industry, and a board member of its leading house has just asked to buy it back. The “woke” is the cover charge; the stable elite is the product; the deadline — “starting next month, Democrats may find themselves with real power” — is the urgency mechanism. The piece is an application for admission, submitted in advance so the applicant’s card is on the table when the next room assembles.
So here is what the column actually is, taken together: a shakedown memo with a nostalgia problem. The piece is an application for admission, submitted in advance so the applicant’s card is on the table when the next room assembles. Every constituency is addressed, and no one is accused, and in the entire seventeen paragraphs exactly one figure did nothing wrong — the man who spent four years testing whether the offices of the United States would hold him, rewritten here as the victim of an upchuck.
The label the column cannot escape is the one it wrote for itself. Jenkins wants the smoke-filled room back. He says so in the first sentence, and the whole apparatus — congealment, upchuck, coercion, conspiracy, woke — is the letter of recommendation. The smoke-filled room was never a metaphor. It was a room where the fix was cut, and the fix was the same then as now: power held by the few, sold to the many as protection, paid for by the many in everything else. What the column mistakes for social history is the face in the mirror — the elite’s own reflection, staring back from the grievance it feeds. The complaint about the smoke-free room is the smoke-filled room’s application for readmission. The operators had a shorter name for this move when they were not on the page. They called it the ask. The column has made the ask. The answer is no. It will still be no in the smoke-free rooms where the next ask is written, until the sentence “a great republic still needs a stable elite” stops being the thesis of a Wall Street Journal column and starts being recognized as the shakedown it is.
— Phukher Tarlson