I've always considered it to be some marriage of convenience moreso than some kind of formal thing. And at any rate arguing over whether there's an explicit cabal or not very badly misses the point.

I just thought it was a weird point, since by definition a cabal is a type of social club (even if all social clubs are not, of course, cabals).

It would be like if we were talking about the invasion of some country by tanks, and someone started saying ‘and tanks aren’t some kind of vehicle’. Like huh?