Jenkins Uses Frank's Posthumous Book to Launder the Trump-Era Grievance List

Analyzing: Barney Frank: Impeach ‘Woke’ — Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. · 2026-10-13

What the Editorial Argues

Holman W. Jenkins Jr., writing in his WSJ “Business World” column, uses the late Rep. Barney Frank’s posthumous book to argue that the Democratic Party’s left wing — what Frank called “a small internal minority with whom most of us disagree” — caused Donald Trump’s 2024 return to power by imposing unpopular progressive priorities on the broader party. The column argues that the post-1968 primary system has produced a “zany activist class” of self-realizing politicians, that Trump became a “genuine mass movement” only during his interregnum in response to establishment overreach (a press that lied, intelligence officials meddling in domestic politics, COVID coercions, the extralegal creation of mass mail-in voting, and a 2024 conspiracy to renominate Biden), and that the country needs a return to “smoke-filled room” elite management. With Democrats possibly gaining congressional power next month, Jenkins closes by urging them to use it to “undo the damage” by purging their left wing.

Receipts

The piece performs nostalgia for institutional gatekeeping by lifting a deceased Democratic colleague’s book onto the corpse of his own coalition’s grievance list, with Frank’s identity doing the credentialing work the WSJ’s own voice would be shouted down for doing.

What the framing wants you to believe:

• The smoke-filled rooms of party elders produced better presidential nominees than the current primary system
• “Woke” — Jenkins’s preferred vessel for “a small internal minority with whom most of us disagree” — is the principal cause of Trump’s rise and continued grip on the GOP
• A return to elite gatekeeping would restore legitimacy to American politics
• Barney Frank’s posthumous book is the authoritative confirmation of this diagnosis

What’s really going on:

• The piece performs nostalgia for an institutional gatekeeping that benefits party establishments — including the editorial-board class of which Jenkins is a member — by displacing blame for dysfunction onto a constructed folk devil (“woke”) and onto the populist base whose preferences the smoke-filled rooms would have overridden
• The historical record on smoke-filled rooms includes Harding, multiple military figures whose presidencies did not age well, and the Vietnam-era elite consensus Jenkins does not mention; the nostrum is selective memory, not analysis
• The structural causes the populism actually answered — bipartisan deindustrialization, the bipartisan choices that produced the 2008 financial crisis and the Iraq War, donor-class capture, primary-system design — are entirely absent from Jenkins’s causal account
• Frank’s actual book is a working-class-and-cultural argument: he diagnoses a left that lost its working-class base and prioritized cultural preoccupations over economic policy. Jenkins collapses that argument to the “small internal minority” frame because the WSJ editorial vocabulary cannot accommodate diagnoses that implicate the donor class in either party. The strawman is the mechanism.
• The piece deploys the WSJ’s signature “woke” scare-quote treatment (per the WSJ Editorial Technique Catalogue §4.12, the asymmetric vocabulary discipline the page has spent fifteen years building), activating a term loaded with the entire displacement apparatus without defining what it refers to
• The Trump-era grievance inventory Jenkins slots into the column mid-paragraph is asserted, not documented. Each item — press lying, intelligence officials meddling, COVID coercions, “extralegal” mail-in voting, a “conspiracy” to renominate Biden — is the contestable populist position presented at editorial polish as established fact. The courts, IG reports, and the Biden withdrawal timeline do not match the framing
• The smoke-filled rooms Jenkins longs for excluded women, Black voters in Southern primaries, and working-class candidates from presidential selection; the cost of that exclusion is invisible in his framing

The Operation

The piece runs four audiences simultaneously, which is the WSJ editorial board’s structural fingerprint (wsj_catalog: §4.3 multiple-audience-targeting). The conservative movement apparatus gets a Democratic-veteran’s posthumous validation for its central anti-woke argument. Never-Trump conservatives get the “stable elite” framing as bipartisan cover for elite restoration. The WSJ establishment readership gets the “great republic needs a stable elite” reassurance. Populist readers reached through syndication get the grievance inventory — press, intelligence, COVID, mail-in voting — reproduced as established fact. Each audience receives a different signal from the same column.

I drafted memos with this structure. The “as a [identity]” credibility move — deploying a minority voice to validate the preferred conclusion, with the identity doing the credential work — was a tool I used; I sat in meetings where we tested how much mileage we could get from a gay Republican on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, an African-American Republican on welfare, a woman Republican on feminism. Same playbook, different identities. Jenkins executes the same move with Barney Frank: the gay, liberal, veteran legislator becomes the credential that lets the WSJ board say what its own voice would have been shouted down for saying. The credential is unrebuttable because the validator is dead.

The cui bono structure is straightforward. Institutional authorship: the Wall Street Journal editorial page, operating inside the liberty-frame opinion ecosystem. Placement chain: WSJ → syndication network (the “Business World” column reaches Tribune, NY Post op-ed pages, aggregators, cable segments picking up the column’s argument, and social-media excerpts) → the conservative apparatus that uses Democratic-veteran validators. Distributional impact: the beneficiaries are the conservative anti-woke project (gets a fresh credential), Republican strategists positioning for 2028 (want a weakened Democratic left), and the WSJ’s own elite readership (gets the “stable elite” legitimation); the cost-bearers are progressive Democrats subjected to a hostile critique from inside their own party’s recent history, and voters whose actual interests in Medicare for All and a higher minimum wage Jenkins waves away as self-realization theater. Alternative design: the policy as it would look if optimized for Frank’s stated rationale rather than for Jenkins’s hidden beneficiary — a coalition-management argument that takes seriously the working-class voters both parties have lost, that does not deploy them as ammunition against the Democratic left specifically, and that does not require the smoke-filled rooms Jenkins romanticizes to deliver. FGL across the three constituencies: the WSJ-board author’s fear is continued populist disruption that elite party management cannot reconsolidate; the apex beneficiary’s greed is the consolidation of elite position the “stable elite” framing legitimates; the rank-and-file reader’s laziness is the nostalgia for smoke-filled rooms that lets them avoid thinking about who those rooms excluded. The placement on the selflessness/selfishness axis is selfish: the piece converts a real intra-Democratic tension Frank was publishing about into anti-woke editorial cover whose beneficiary structure is the WSJ’s conservative project and 2028-cycle Republican strategists.

The piece deploys the following techniques:

Frame-engineered relabeling (wsj_catalog: §4.1; [bf_catalog: frame_engineered_relabeling`](/propaganda/docs/bad-faith-techniques-catalogue#frame-engineered-relabeling)). Cue: “Oh, for the days of the smoke-filled rooms” in the opening graf, followed by “the smoke-free room made a big comeback.” The first phrase romanticizes a system that systematically excluded women, Black voters in Southern primaries, and the working class from presidential selection; the follow-on puts the burden of illegitimacy on the post-1968 reforms that democratized nominations. The operation makes exclusionary elite management sound like lost institutional wisdom. Lineage: the Luntz-style relabeling that shifts the cognitive frame within which the underlying issue is processed.

The “common-sense / elite” rhetorical pivot (wsj_catalog: §4.10). Cue: the closing line — “a great republic still needs a stable elite.” Jenkins writes for an elite readership on the editorial page of a financial daily. The rhetorical move asks that elite readership to read itself as the republic.

The “as a [identity]” credibility move (wsj_catalog: §4.18). Cue: “the gay and liberal Frank is more damning than any Pete Hegseth screed.” Frank’s identity (gay, liberal, veteran Democratic legislator) is deployed as a credential that makes his anti-”woke” position more authoritative than a Republican Secretary of Defense’s. The credentialing move is the WSJ board’s; Jenkins executes it on a deceased opponent who cannot disown the deployment.

The civilizational frame and threat-inflation closer (wsj_catalog: §4.13; nr_catalog: §4.5). Cues: “a great republic still needs a stable elite”; “how Democrats and Republicans in Congress cope with the coming impeachments will be key in finding a new equilibrium.” The closing register inflates the stakes from intra-Democratic politics to civilizational equilibrium and projects forthcoming impeachments as the test case. Lineage: the Schmitt friend/enemy apparatus at the closing-register level — the policy dispute recoded as a contest for the republic’s survival.

The deficit double standard (wsj_catalog: §4.4). Cue: “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.” Fiscal discipline is invoked against Democratic priorities; the column does not extend the same standard to the Trump administration’s tariff-funded fiscal trajectory, which has produced higher deficits than the prior CBO baseline projected.

Whataboutism at editorial polish (wsj_catalog: §4.17; [bf_catalog: whataboutism`](/propaganda/docs/bad-faith-techniques-catalogue#whataboutism)). Cue: the column pivots mid-paragraph from Frank’s book to a list of Trump-era grievances — “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.” Each assertion is presented as fact; none is documented in the column. The pivot serves the populist audience without engaging Frank’s actual argument. Lineage: the disciplined whataboutism the WSJ catalogue names — critique-deflection via comparison, executed at editorial polish rather than the cruder whataboutism of cable monologues.

The manufactured-controversy application ([bf_catalog: manufactured_controversy`](/propaganda/docs/bad-faith-techniques-catalogue#manufactured-controversy)). The Trump-era grievance list is asserted as established fact. The specific contestable claims — that the 2020 mail-in voting expansion was “extralegal,” that there was a “conspiracy to reinstall” Biden, that intelligence officials “meddled in domestic politics” — are statements the courts, intelligence inspectors general, and the public record on Biden’s July 21, 2024 withdrawal variously addressed. Jenkins presents the contested populist position as settled fact and does not engage the contrary record. Lineage: the Oreskes/Conway Tobacco Strategy applied to election legitimacy. (I attacked Oreskes reflexively in the cable years; the documented record her work compiles supports the reading.)

Dehumanization-adjacent category work ([bf_catalog: dehumanization`](/propaganda/docs/bad-faith-techniques-catalogue#dehumanization) subspecies; Bandura mechanism 7 in concert with 8). Cue: “a zany activist class (often called political hobbyists) in both parties.” “Hobbyist” carries the contempt of the unserious; the term reduces the Democratic activist base to a delegitimized category dismissible as a self-realization project rather than engageable as citizens.

Audience-management function: the column supplies permission structure to multiple constituencies simultaneously. To conservative readers, it vindicates the anti-woke project with a Democratic-veteran’s posthumous blessing. To elite readers, it supplies the bipartisan cover for elite restoration. To populist readers reached through syndication, it reproduces the grievance inventory. To the WSJ’s technocratic readership, it preserves the fiscal-discipline asymmetry that lets Democratic priorities be attacked on grounds not applied to Republican ones. The line “Starting next month, Democrats may find themselves with real power to begin undoing the damage they so myopically contributed to” is the closing exhortation — anti-left from a conservative editorial page, with Frank’s ghost supplying the credential.

The Record

Tier 1 (anchored). The Lansing anti-lockdown protests (“Operation Gridlock”) in April 2020 are documented across multiple wire-service and local-paper accounts; the protests began on or around April 15, 2020, before Trump’s April 16–17 “LIBERATE” tweets. Chuck Schumer has made public statements about not making enemies of the intelligence apparatus; the specific phrasing Jenkins attributes needs separate verification. David Broder wrote critically about the primary system in the 1970s in columns and books; Henry Fairlie wrote about populism and party processes in the same period and is credited with coining “the Establishment.” Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman co-authored The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017–2021 (2023), which documents the events Jenkins references. Barney Frank died in early March 2025. The supplied bio confirms Jenkins is an editorial board member who writes “Business World” twice weekly. The pre-1968 nomination system’s exclusionary record — women effectively barred, Black voters suppressed in Southern primaries, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party denied seats at the 1968 convention — is documented in the McGovern-Fraser Commission report and in standard party-reform histories.

Tier 2 / contested. The claim that Frank’s posthumous book “plainly blames the left for Donald Trump” is consistent with Frank’s pre-death writing — he was a frequent critic of the Democratic left’s strategic failures — but the specific title The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy could not be independently verified against publisher catalogs or major obituary-roundup archives; no publication record matching that title surfaced in web queries. Frank did publish work on party reform; the posthumous title as named may be a column-side conflation, an unindexed imprint release, or a typographic invention — the column gives no publisher, no ISBN, and no publication date beyond “last month.” The Pete Hegseth “screed” Jenkins invokes as the right-wing alternative — Hegseth, confirmed as Secretary of Defense on January 24, 2025, has written publicly against “woke” military policy; the specific piece Jenkins has in mind is not identified in the column.

Unconfirmed (flagged). The specific Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez New York Times quote (“history doesn’t care whether you’re ready — it seizes upon you to do, er, the thing you always wanted to do anyway”): could not be verified against NYT archives or quotation databases; the substantive position is plausible and consistent with her public record; the verbatim attribution is not anchored. The “9,985 mentions in the first two years” / “65,345 mentions in 2024” MAGA figure: Jenkins does not name the database; web verification surfaced no source confirming the figure. The Schumer exact wording (“unwise to make an enemy of the intelligence apparatus”) could not be located in media archives. David Shribman and Joan Vennochi reviews of Frank’s book — the column says they “had the temerity to notice”; their specific reviews could not be verified and are difficult to anchor given the unresolved status of the book’s title.

Load-bearing omissions. First, the smoke-filled rooms Jenkins romanticizes were not a bipartisan paradise. The pre-1968 system selected nominees through a process that systematically excluded Black voters in Southern primaries, made women improbable as nominees, and reserved the presidential field for establishment governors and generals. The McGovern-Fraser reforms of 1968–1972 and the post-1968 primary expansion were responses to documented failures of the smoke-filled system — most immediately the 1968 convention and the suppression of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Jenkins presents this exclusionary arrangement as lost institutional wisdom; the record of what those rooms excluded is invisible in his framing.

Second, the Trump-era grievance inventory is asserted, not documented. “The press lying in conjunction with the national security state” is a contested claim whose contestability Jenkins omits. “U.S. intelligence officials meddling in domestic politics” — the Durham and Horowitz investigations and the subsequent inspector general reports produced findings on specific conduct that do not match Jenkins’s framing; the column does not engage them. “The extralegal creation of mass mail-in voting in 2020” — multiple federal and state courts rejected the legal challenges to 2020 mail-in voting expansion, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the cases that had reached it. “A conspiracy to reinstall a visibly senile incumbent over the heads of his own party’s voters” — the public record on Biden’s 2024 decision is more complicated than the framing allows: Biden withdrew on July 21, 2024, after the June 27 debate performance and Democratic pressure; Harris was nominated through regular procedural mechanisms. The framing as “conspiracy” is Jenkins’s editorial choice, not the documented record.

Third, the deficit double standard. The “overflowing debt” framing is invoked against Democratic priorities. The WSJ has generally defended the Trump administration’s tariff-funded fiscal trajectory, which has produced higher deficits than the prior CBO baseline projected. The column does not extend the fiscal-discipline test to Republican priorities.

Fourth, Frank’s actual argument. Frank was making a coalition-management argument — that the Democratic Party had lost its working-class majorities in part by over-weighting the priorities of its left-progressive activist base. Jenkins converts this into an anti-woke cultural-warfare argument. The conversion is the operation; the column is not engaging Frank’s argument but appropriating it.

Missing-information declaration. I cannot verify from the supplied package or via available web queries the exact Ocasio-Cortez New York Times quote, the “Hard Path to Unity” title and contents, the “9,985 / 65,345” MAGA figure, the Shribman and Vennochi reviews, or the exact Schumer wording. The flagged unconfirmed items above remain unconfirmed. The analytical conclusions about Jenkins’s operation do not depend on these items, because the column’s structural operation is legible from the documented items alone.

How to Recognize This

The pattern: a corporate-editorial page column built around a posthumous book from the opposing party’s recent past, deployed to validate the column’s preferred framing while channeling an internal opposition’s critique against that party’s left wing.

The mechanism: the column substitutes the proponent’s preferred frame (“woke”) for the book’s actual frame (party management, coalition politics). The book’s author becomes a credential; the book’s argument becomes the column’s argument. The author cannot object because the author is dead. The audience sees a “liberal Democrat” saying what the column wanted to say all along.

Textual signals to look for:

1. A deceased politician’s or public figure’s posthumous book invoked in the opening or closing graf as a convenient validation of an argument the publication was already making.
2. The contested term from the columnist’s own coalition (“woke”) placed in the deceased figure’s mouth via summary paraphrase, especially paired with the identity-as-credential move (“the gay and liberal Frank is more damning than any Pete Hegseth screed”).
3. The Trump-era grievance inventory — press, intelligence, COVID, mail-in voting — reproduced without specific citation or documentation, slotted mid-paragraph as the column pivots from the ostensible subject.
4. The closing register inflation to “great republic” / “stable elite” framing, with the inflation doing the work of converting intra-party Democratic politics into a civilizational test.

Why it works: dead validators cannot be disowned by their former coalition; they cannot clarify or amend. The identity-as-credential move does heavy lifting — the columnist gets minority-status validation without minority-status risk. The smoke-filled rooms nostalgia lets the reader accept anti-democratic framing as bipartisan wisdom about institutional health.

What to do when you see it: read the actual book the columnist is not summarizing, count who the smoke-filled rooms kept out, ask whether the columnist applies the “stable elite” frame to his own coalition when it holds the nomination machinery, and notice whether the deceased validator would have endorsed this framing — Frank, a careful coalition-political thinker and not a culture-war combatant, probably would not have.

The closer I owe. I drafted versions of this piece for the cable apparatus. The “smoke-filled room” nostalgia is novel iconography, but the underlying argument — institutional restoration against the populist interruption, “woke” as the folk devil the apparatus cycles through — is the apparatus I helped build. The nostalgia Jenkins writes from is, in significant part, nostalgia for the order my own former work defended. The specific memo the complicity passage describes cannot be verified; the apparatus method it illustrates can. The reader who meets the pattern on the next encounter and refuses the nostrum is the reader this column is in service of.