Dem
47
GOP
53
Americans may not have faced a week this laden with tension and uncertainty since the Cuban Missile Crisis. But, after all the fear, and anxiety, and existential dread, the nation can finally stand down. That's right, Cracker Barrel has announced that it's going back to its old logo. Please take a moment to bow your head and thank the deity or deities of your choice.
After our item on this subject yesterday, in which we expressed confusion over how people could be so upset about a logo change, and in particular how the change could be described as "woke," we heard from a number of readers who chimed in with opinions. We thought we'd share a few of those:
P.H. in New York City, NY, writes: In your article The Strangest Culture Wars Battle... Ever? you remarked how, "The most difficult thing to understand, perhaps, is how the new logo is 'woke.' Huh?" It may be so obvious it is hard to see. It is nothing about the new logo, it is that the old logo featured a white man and the new one does not. That's it. They have a delusion that white male heritage is being erased. How American, Christian, white males, mostly born in the 20th century, somehow think they are being marginalized when in fact they are the least oppressed demographic in the entire known history of the human species is beyond me. Yet here we are. That and they are always looking for something, anything, to manufacture outrage about, so why not?
E.C. in Seattle, WA, writes: Regarding your piece about Cracker Barrel, some additional context you didn't mention. In the early '90s, the company was widely seen as anti-gay, with terminations and explicit policies targeting LGBTQ employees, which led to national boycotts and activist campaigns. Change came slowly, under sustained pressure, and by the early 2000s they had begun adopting more inclusive policies. I remember this clearly because I came out in the 1990s.
The MAGA crowd seems to be having a delayed reaction to a trivial change that they believe represents a purposeful cultural and corporate shift, when in fact those policy changes happened long ago. I am not even sure most people today would remember the Cracker Barrel boycott outside of the LGBTQ community from that era. Perhaps some gay MAGA of a certain age, Peter Thiel as an example, saw the new logo and reminded everyone that Cracker Barrel once used to be the bastion of anti-LGBT respectability.
J.J. in Johnstown, PA, writes: I think you're trying to put too much thought into why the right wingers are upset about the Cracker Barrel logo change. It's because they're racists. Plain and simple. They. Are. Racists. They are upset that they removed what appears to be a 90-year-old man, likely hiding a shotgun, mumbling about "uppity ni**ers" or something. Hell, it's right there in the name: Cracker. Don't give these racists more credit than they deserve.
J.P. in Boston, MA, writes: The right is just sad that the logo no longer includes a barrel or a cracker.
B.W. in Los Angeles, CA, writes: As someone who has lived in three Deep South states plus New York and Los Angeles (and has traveled to every state save Alaska), I'll suggest an explanation for the bizarre whitelash over Cracker Barrel's trade dress.
No single business is more emblematic of "forgotten" middle-America than Cracker Barrel (though Walmart might like a word).
Their business model has always favored very small rural towns (near highway exits). If a town with fewer than 1,000 residents has any chain restaurant at all, it's almost certainly a Cracker Barrel right by the highway. There are probably still places in America that don't have broadband Internet access, but are within a short drive of a Cracker Barrel.
For half a century, Cracker Barrel has had remarkably consistent trade dress that centered and revered rural life. If we city dwellers can muster some empathy, it's not too hard to imagine that the chain may have felt like a dependable, safe, presence to someone who perceives the world as fast-changing and scary.
So the decision to remake their brand in a manner more consistent with urban fast-casual chain restaurants—not just the logo, but the architecture (anonymous cuboids made of glass and metal)—could be easily seen as a betrayal by those communities; a failure to "read the room."
For the non-sequitur blaming of DEI/wokeness, we must remember that rural and exurban grievance has been cultivated, strategically, by the Republican Party for at least the entirety of this century. The GOP has always, as a power-consolidation tactic, supplied a ready-made bogeyman to explain any perceived ill, any perceived slight.
It seems totally believable—even predictable, to me—that people who were resistant to the Cracker Barrel change would: (1) be Republican, (2) have a persecution complex, (3) reflexively blame GOP enemy-du-jour.
Some very useful insights, we think. We do wish that we had recalled, while writing the item yesterday, that Cracker Barrel is central enough to red-state identity that a political scientist developed a system for predicting the presidential vote in states, based on the number of Cracker Barrels as compared to the number of Whole Foods locations (there is also a similar system using Starbucks stores vs. Chick-fil-A locations). This seems way off to us. Counting the number of restaurants that appeal to Republicans vs. Democrats simply tells you the relative numbers of each tribe in the area. In that sense, it is an alternative to Charlie Cook's PVI. Using the restaurant count to predict elections is like observing that Idaho has a PVI of R+18 and on that basis to "predict" that Trump would beat Harris there.
Anyhow, there are at least a couple of lessons here. The first, based on the fact that Donald Trump is taking credit for forcing the change, is that he will take credit for ANYTHING, whether or not he deserves it, whether or not the thing in question even happened (Can you win a Nobel Peace Prize for winning a logo argument?). The second is that, once again, Republicans find boycotts of private businesses to be outrageous and offensive... but only when they're staged by Democrats. (Z)