Corporate Neutrality and the Cracker Barrel Crack-Up
By now already infamous, the Cracker Barrel corporate rebrand is a lot of things: ugly, bland, lifeless, and even outright depressing for those who know and love the brand. But despite nearly the entire right insisting otherwise, one thing it’s not is woke.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t awful. And it doesn’t mean any organic boycotts should stop. But it does suggest the right needs a firmer grasp of who exactly our enemies are if we want to have a positive impact on the culture. It also speaks to how much more is needed if the right wants to win the culture wars. Singing the praises of a “level playing field” won’t do.
Cracker Barrel is America’s premiere Southern-themed restaurant, a personal favorite of mine anytime I venture beyond the Northeast corridor. It’s known for its kitschy decor, Southern hospitality, and homestyle dishes in artery-clogging portions. Confronted with declining sales in the post-COVID restaurant era, the new management team decided the problem was that this aesthetic was all too traditional, too masculine, too vigorously American. So they changed it and, in so doing, unburdened the brand not only of the things it considered passé but of its history and soul.
Outraged conservatives were quick to give Cracker Barrel the “Bud Light treatment.” Scroll briefly through X and you’ll see endless denunciations, pledges of boycotts, and cries of “go woke, go broke.” Even the noted destroyer of woke worlds, Chris Rufo, declared “we must break the Barrel.”
Cracker Barrel does, indeed, deserve to feel the pain they’ve inflicted upon themselves. But people on the right need to remember that we’re not fighting the same demons we were battling when wokeness was riding high just a few years ago.
“Woke” is driven by two visceral sentiments, resentment and sanctimony, that are favored by key constituents of the left. Each of these sentiments suggests a way the country ought to be organized. Resentment primarily drives the true believers, the disaffected masses who believe their agency is somehow trumped by “systemic forces”—so they hate anyone who thrives where they fail. Sanctimony, on the other hand, moves the elite, those who do just fine inside the “system”—indeed, they do so well that they can afford to make their primary focus moral crusades on behalf of pet concerns. They signal status to one another by performatively embracing the causes of the resentful.
These sentiments interact to produce disasters like Bud Light, where our corporate overlords reveled in demonizing their loyal customers with an “in-your-face” embrace of LGBT insanity. Notably, both sentiments also imply a positive vision for how society should be structured: an elite and self-styled altruistic managerial class ruling from on high in the name of the downtrodden.
Yet the Cracker Barrel rebrand has little in common with the dynamic that produced the Bud Light fiasco. Is the chain’s girlboss CEO a lefty? Sure, probably—if her age, chunky glasses, and dominating red lipstick are anything to go by. But the corporate-driven rebrand offers no vision at all. It’s not left-coded. It’s simply soulless.
In a PR blitz, the famous logo—“Uncle Herschel” leaning on a barrel beside the “Cracker Barrel” script inside a pinto bean—was replaced by a mere hexagonal blob that one could find erected outside any corporate headquarters from New York to Shanghai. The chain previously unveiled a new interior at odds with its vintage barn feel, instead opting for millennial-favored bleach white walls and generic decor one could easily find at Target. And perhaps worst of all, it launched a pop-up in New York’s trendy Meatpacking District, giving downtown hipsters a chance to ironically take up line dancing.
This is a vision of a wholly corporate, not woke, America. In other words, it’s a vision of nothingness, where the only sparks of life come from occasional bursts of (mostly scripted) quirk and irony. Nothing is tangibly felt, just as nothing is sincere. Say what you want about the woke, but at least their will to dominate was very much alive.
What we have here is what we end up with under the “neutral playing field” conditions the house-trained right has long sought: Corporations can’t really go woke under fear of conservative reprisals, but neither can they embrace full-throated Americanism without risking the ire of the leftist mobs the right has not yet fully eradicated. So, in their nebbish fear of principle—all principle—they deliver what they believe to be neutral and inoffensive to everyone. We’ve now reached the social vision that some on the right still naively desire—but instead of all political postures being fair game, what happens is that none are.
Crying “woke” at every slight was a good strategy when wokeness dominated. But as the totalitarian aims of wokeness have been laid bare, it’s far more critical to lay out our own positive vision than it is to simply lambast the vestiges of the last enemy we defeated. We don’t want Cracker Barrel to simply reject wokeness, we want it to once again embrace American patriotism, culture, and history with the same zeal companies once embraced the left. This is what a true right-wing social vision looks like; it’s something much more than simply “not-woke.”
The truth is that there can never be a wholly neutral playing field; someone’s vision is always going to break through. The corporate neutrality so many seem to pine for, in fact, never existed—it only felt as though it existed when we all generally agreed that American principles were good and true. Those on the right who consider themselves high-minded in insisting that neutrality should be our watchword handed the left a victory. By not insisting on a culture that celebrates America, they enabled the nothingness of the new corporatized Cracker Barrel. Either way, America falls to her enemies. You can’t have a country or a culture worth defending if it is based on nothing.
The boycotts of Cracker Barrel should and must continue. But let them know we expect more than a baseline and tepid rejection of rabid leftism. The company has been an important part of celebrating the American heritage—and it’s time they act like they remember it.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/corporate-neutrality-and-the-cracker-barrel-crack-up