Culture War Über AllesBy making the culture war central to its politics, the New Right is once again aping the Woke Left.
A lot of important things happened this week. The president met with European leaders and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House, just days after hosting Russian despot Vladimir Putin in Alaska, in an effort to engineer a resolution to the Russo-Ukrainian War. The Department of Justice raided the home of former Trump National Security Advisor and current Trump critic John Bolton in search of mishandled classified documents. The Gaza war is ramping up, with Israel potentially heading into Gaza City and the UN declaring a famine in the area – in my opinion, fraudulently. President Trump also decided to force Intel to allow the US government to take a 10% interest in its operations, an action that should rightly be seen as a major overreach and step further down the path of socialism.[1] But the vast majority of attention online, particularly among the commentariat on the right, has coalesced around something else entirely: the potential rebranding of the chain restaurant Cracker Barrel. Yes, that Cracker Barrel. The one conveniently located off the interstate, chock-full of tchotchkes, and brimming with (tacky) Americana and calories[2]. Somehow, the generic rebranding of the venerable chain has gotten the internet right up in arms far more than the soft nationalization of one of America’s best-known tech companies. And boy, has it gotten them heated. The rebrand has been labeled a “crime against humanity,” an “intentional erasure of American heritage,” and a step in “re-educating [Cracker Barrel customers] with the principles of gay race communism.” Between those three accounts, you have more than 6.5 million Twitter followers, multiple visits to the White House, and an editorship of a major online right-wing publication. One of America’s leading conservative colleges, Hillsdale College in Michigan, compared the logo change to radical leftist agitators smearing red paint on statues of America’s founders.[3] Highly-influential online anti-woke crusaders like Robby Starbuck and Christopher Rufo have made “breaking the Barrel” their primary focus. None of this is sarcastic at all. It is entirely earnest.
To be sure, this rebrand is not very good. It reeks of corporate risk aversion and overanalysis by an empowered marketing department. The interior redesign is sterile, generic, and completely uninteresting. It evokes no feelings whatsoever, which is perhaps the worst thing to be said of a restaurant’s ambiance. It discards a traditional identity, even if overly kitschy, for blandness. It looks cleaner and brighter, which is great, but it also looks mass-produced. The logo redesign is little different. It removes the man and his barrel[4], de-cluttering the image, but making it less memorable. It keeps the same color scheme, but somehow feels uglier even though it is simpler – that simplicity is a major trend in modern corporate graphic design, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Altogether, it seems like a corporate boardroom attempt to freshen up and revamp a struggling chain to appeal to new audiences, albeit one that failed to understand the brand’s original appeal. What it is not is “woke.” It also is not unexpected or being done for nefarious purposes. Cracker Barrel is indeed struggling. It has lost nearly 70% of its value since reaching a post-pandemic peak in 2021, after lockdowns had ended and dining began to return to a (and I hate this phrase, but it is applicable here) new normal. The chain has seen faltering sales, significantly reduced traffic, and an aging demographic that has shifted consumption habits since 2020. It has high fixed costs due to its large physical locations, significant portions of which are taken up by low-margin souvenir sales. In just the year-to-date, it has seen a further 16% reduction in traffic. For a business like a chain restaurant, that could spell the difference between a modest profit and a loss. The executive team did have to do something to get the business off the glide path to irrelevance, insolvency, and bankruptcy. This is not like the Bud Light Dylan Mulvaney fiasco. (If you don’t remember that, please keep yourself sane and avoid looking it up.) Bud Light was a massive seller, even if it was losing market share to beers like Modelo. Cracker Barrel is not that. This was not a move intended to alienate customers, even if it did end up doing that. It was meant to freshen up a brand that was failing, while still retaining some of the original’s uniqueness – peg games on the tables, the tchotchke store, and the rocking chairs are all staying put. The reason this rebrand was so widely panned is that it is stale and lifeless. Instead of taking a real risk to change the business by altering the menu, improving the food, reducing portions, or decreasing the size of the in-restaurant storefront, the CEO decided to do the easiest thing that could, if it failed, be blamed on a subordinate: a redesign. That’s the problem with this whole thing, not that it destroys American heritage or whatever other nonsense the internet right came up with today.
And that brings me to the crux of the matter and why I’m even bothering to take the time to write about a restaurant I don’t particularly care for: the ridiculous reaction from the New Right. I have written before about the phenomenon known as the ‘Woke Right’. I have problems with the term and think it is overused and unfairly applied at times. But it does describe a very real issue with some on the New Right, particularly on cultural issues. They do use the tactics of the left, both consciously and unconsciously, when getting overly engaged in cultural politics. They make every little thing that happens into some sort of world-altering event that conveniently fits snugly into their political preconceptions. The hyperbole is off the charts. Even if they don’t use the word and, in fact, make fun of it all the time, the online right constantly polices and gets offended at microaggressions. They have a totally conspiratorial view of everyday events, seeing everything as but a cog in the machine that is dedicated to destroying their way of life. The villains and targets may differ, but the ethos is the same: if I don’t like what you are doing, you must be doing it for evil reasons and you must be punished for it. The Cracker Barrel fracas is the perfect microcosm of this worldview. Just as the woke left see white supremacy or racism behind every corner, the woke right see wokeness or – as Federalist editor and two-time defending Moron of the Year champion Sean Davis put it – “gay race communism” lurking just around the bend. The mild rebrand of a poorly-performing highway restaurant chain is evidence of a widespread woke plot that everyone must fight against as an attack on America herself. Everything simply has to be political; the Cracker Barrel revamp is because of a woke CEO who hates Republicans, not the act of a struggling chain trying to do the easiest lift possible to turn its fortunes around. They believe that failing to stand up on even the smallest cultural ground is tantamount to a humiliating, self-abasing surrender to totalitarian devilry. And that cultural ground changes every other day; it was Cracker Barrel one day, male NFL cheerleaders two days later. The specific issue is not actually the point. The point is forcing you to join their crusade or calling you an apostate for not doing so – a lot like militant Islam, actually. Anything is an affront to their delicate sensibilities, even altering the logo of a chain restaurant few of them go to.[5] The sensitivity is, just as with the woke left, couched in the language of harm. The rebrand isn’t stupid or boring or lame, it’s an attack, a slap in the face, an assault on American history and culture. The hyperbole is the point, as they believe it makes their argument stronger. In reality, it makes them seem weird, obsessed with minutiae, and off-putting – exactly like the woke left. They see the most minor things as a slippery slope to literal Hell. This is genuinely how these people think: “If the communists are allowed to take Cracker Barrel, what’s next? Arby’s? Old Country Buffet? The government? No, sir. It stops here.” It would be farcical if it weren’t such a powerful impulse. The woke left dominated American culture for years, making its mark on politics, policy, and society – all for the worse. We should not want the woke right to have the same destructive success. Deprioritizing the culture war would not only cool the temperature of political discourse; it would bring people on the right back to the issues that actually matter and that can be handled by the government. The Republican Party currently has a federal trifecta – holding the House, the Senate, and the White House – and has a favorable majority on the Supreme Court. It has a limited time before the 2026 midterm elections to pass laws and implement durable policy changes that aren’t easily reversible by the next Democratic president. Instead of reforming our immigration and asylum system and building out a permanent border security apparatus, they’re arguing about Cracker Barrel. Instead of passing laws to build our defense-industrial base for the conflict with China, they’re whining about male cheerleaders. Instead of passing serious spending cuts and welfare reforms into law, they’re complaining about woke Disney movies. This is fundamentally unserious stuff. It’s a distraction from the real reasons why the GOP won in 2024 and it misreads a legitimate cultural frustration with left-wing wokeness as a mandate to engage in the same thing from the right. A word of advice for the keyboard culture warriors: keep your powder dry, pick your battles, be less insufferable, and stop acting like leftists. Unless the next target is Waffle House. In which case, WE RIDE AT DAWN.
[1] We will likely be talking about many of these things on the Rational Policy Podcast. [2] I am not a fan of Cracker Barrel, so I am not speaking as someone with a longstanding attachment to the brand. But I would argue that neither are those who are viscerally angry about this. [3] I am generally an admirer of Hillsdale and the good work they do over there, but their online presence has skewed more radical and faux-edgy than it has any reason to be. It is unbecoming of the endeavor. [4] This is what most people seem to be upset about, as they pounced on it even before the interior renderings were publicly available. [5] If they went to Cracker Barrel as much as they cared about it online, it probably wouldn’t be in such poor financial condition. Rational Policy is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Rational Policy that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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Tuesday, August 26, 2025
Culture War Über Alles
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