Fights, Good and Bad

On Cracker Barrel, conservatives, and other conundrums of America today

A Cracker Barrel restaurant in Minnesota, 2009 (Photo by Dave Stone)

If you are Cracker Barrel’d out, I don’t blame you. You may have been Cracker Barrel’d out five or ten minutes into the controversy. I will not dwell on the subject. But I have a few points to make. For a superb treatment of this controversy, consult Jonah Goldberg, here, and for another one, consult Nick Catoggio, here.

Cracker Barrel and I go way back. Once or twice a year, friends and I eat at the Cracker Barrel in Gaffney, S.C. We’ve been doing this since ... the mid-’90s, I think. At the end of 2020, I sang a hymn to Cracker Barrel, here.

There had been talk of secession in these United States. I wrote the following, in my “hymn”:

In the last few days, I have done some musing. What if America splits apart, between “red” and “blue”? Will there at least be easy movement between the two countries, as in the European Union? I mean, what if a person likes both Cracker Barrel and the Metropolitan Opera?

I voiced these thoughts on Twitter. A tweeter replied, “If that fails”—in other words, if there is not easy movement between Red America and Blue America—“I sense a great franchising opportunity for a Cracker Barrel across the street from Lincoln Center.”

My reply: “You have just enunciated my personal dream.”

If there were a Cracker Barrel across from Lincoln Center, you might not be able to get in. The line would stretch down to Greenwich Village, or, in the other direction, up to Harlem.

I always loved a certain meal at Cracker Barrel. Habitually, I ordered grilled catfish, cucumber salad, mac ’n’ cheese, biscuits, diet root beer, and blackberry cobbler with vanilla ice cream.

“If I had a nickel for every time I’ve had that meal,” I wrote in my “hymn,” “I’d have ... about a dollar. I look forward to the next dollar.”

There came a time when the grilled catfish was off the menu—at least in Gaffney. And, frankly, I believe the food has declined in recent years: has become blander, more like junior-high–cafeteria fare. But I am not writing a food column today ...

As you are all too aware, Cracker Barrel changed its logo and instituted some other changes as well, and a lot of people freaked, charging the company with “wokeness” and worse. Cracker Barrel became the political controversy du jour, or de l’heure.

I’ve seen Barbie dolls burned in effigy (owing to the movie Barbie). I have seen Bud Light cans shot at. There are countless battles in the culture war. Some are worth fighting, in my opinion, and others are ... manufactured. Political rage for political rage’s sake.

(Burning Klaus Barbie in effigy, I could understand. But the blonde?)

Now and then, you think about how you came by your political views in the first place. One reason I joined the conservatives, way back, when I was in college, was that they acknowledged a private sphere. An apolitical sphere. Not everything had to be soaked in politics, you know. A cigar could just be a cigar.

Many on the left around me insisted on politicizing everything. There was a slogan: “The personal is the political.” The clothes you wore, the music you listened to, the food you ate—all of it was political. And conservatives said, “No, for crying out loud!”

William F. Buckley Jr. spoke of “totalism” and “totalists.” You never wanted to be a totalist. You did not want to be a 24-hour ideologue. Conservatives prized many freedoms, including: freedom from politics, where politics does not belong.

Well, when Cracker Barrel changed its logo, there was a freak-out from “Red America.” A prominent media personality accused the company of “gay race communism.” Another coined a slogan, revolutionary in its fervor: “Break the Barrel.” (There is usually a whiff of violence about revolutionaries, when not violence itself.)

The Republican president got involved, naturally—or unnaturally? The executives at Cracker Barrel succumbed, reverting to the former logo. When they did so, a Trump aide tweeted,

I appreciated the call earlier this evening with @CrackerBarrel. They thanked President Trump for weighing in on the issue of their iconic “original” logo.

Ah, they thanked him, did they? Smells like fear. Smells like “Don’t hurt me.” This ought not to be the posture of American business before the president.

More and more, the White House is enmeshed in private enterprise, something that conservatives and Republicans warned against for years.

Last Tuesday, Bret Stephens had a column headed “Donald Trump’s Assault on Capitalism.” He began like this:

Ask an American conservative what makes America great, and at least until about a week ago, he might have said that, among other virtues, it’s a country in which the government stays out of the business of getting in business.

Some of the views I have expressed here at Onward and Upward today, I expressed on social media. “In so many ways,” I said in a tweet, “the Left and Right are now kissing cousins. They should get a room and let the rest of us alone.”

(Have we ever discussed the distinction—the formerly acknowledged distinction—between “to leave alone” and “to let alone”? I think so, but we can return to it some other day.)

I heard from critics on left and right. The lefties said this, essentially:

Don’t both-sides us! This is a Republican problem and a right-wing problem! Don’t put us into bed with them! I’m sorry you had such a tough time in college, buttercup. But no president has ever acted like Trump!

As for the righties, they said essentially this—what they have been throwing at conservatives like me for ten years:

What’d you ever conserve, old-timer? You never fought. You were a bunch of girly-men. You let the Left eat your lunch. You tried to remain primly “apolitical” and above it all. You never got down ’n’ dirty. You wanted to go to cocktail parties with libs.

Etc., etc.

(A quick aside: I have an aversion to cocktail parties, always have. For the last many years, the only such parties I have attended, basically, are those I have been required to attend by work, at which people got within six inches of my face, breathing wine fumes at me, saying, “You better get on the Trump Train or get crushed.”)

The truth is, we conservatives have always been on the political battlefield, fighting it out. Arguing it out. And one of the things we have argued is: Politics is not the whole of life. Government does not belong in every nook and cranny of society. We are not Mao’s China or Perón’s Argentina. We are America, dammit.

And businesses should, by and large, be free to make their own decisions, smart or dumb. (Don’t ignore the “by and large,” please.) It is not the place of the president to boss businesses around. Not in this country.

Earlier this summer, Paramount announced that it would cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. This was shortly after the company settled a lawsuit with Trump. Colbert is a perpetual critic of Trump. The president tweeted,

The word is, and it’s a strong word at that, Jimmy Kimmel is NEXT to go in the untalented Late Night Sweepstakes and, shortly thereafter, Fallon will be gone. These are people with absolutely NO TALENT, who were paid Millions of Dollars for, in all cases, destroying what used to be GREAT Television. It’s really good to see them go, and I hope I played a major part in it!

A lot of people on the right said something different, however. They said, “Oh, come on. Paramount’s decision has nothing to do with politics. Colbert was losing money. This was purely business. Don’t make everything about politics!”

And what happened when Cracker Barrel had the temerity to try a new logo? “Gay race communism.” “Break the Barrel.”

Every day, conservatives are told by the “New Right” (actually an old, illiberal Right), “You don’t know what time it is.” Oh, we know. But we also know the value of longstanding American principles and are willing to defend them. In fact, fight for them.

You may not like what we’re fighting for. But fighting we are. Buttercups.

At the top of this column, I quoted a “hymn” of mine, to Cracker Barrel, and I will close with a real one—a real hymn: “Fight the good fight with all thy might.”