Real Alpha Males Cry Over Corporate Branding
The politics of being a pants-pissing baby
There are three major political persuasions in the United States, each with its own ethos. The center, represented by the core of the Democratic Party, argues for respectable governance to maintain the existing economic and social order. Though far from power, the left has gained ground over the last decade with a message of expanded democratization and the reprioritization of Americans’ welfare over profit. The current ruling faction, the right, won unilateral control of the American government by promoting the conservative, alpha-male value of being a pants-pissing little bitch. If there’s something to complain about, Republicans complain. If there’s something to be scared of — a city, public transportation, or a corporate rebranding effort that provokes their anxiety about the ever-changing nature of human civilization — they’ll record a two-hour podcast confessing their childish insecurities to an audience of millions.
Aggrievement is the beating heart of American conservatism. The movement’s objectives of uncontained capital and social hierarchy are great for business owners, but are unappealing to the working class and marginalized identities that have historically found themselves on the lowest rung of the ladder. So, conservatism attracts non-capitalist support through a victimhood mentality. By portraying working-class economic gains and minorities’ social advancements as coming at a cost to higher-income and majority Americans, conservative leaders build campaigns under the guise of fighting this perceived oppression. They promise to ‘stop DEI’ by rolling back civil rights, ending communist rule by cutting the 28% corporate tax rate, and ‘kill the woke mind virus’ by re-renaming the Washington Redskins, something neither team ownership, the fans, or the corporate sponsors that forced the name change want.1
This tactic has worked well for the Republican Party. But they’ve been competing against the Washington General Schumer and Jeffries Democrats, so it’s not like it’s been a challenge. Still, Donald Trump has built cult-level support by convincing many Americans that every one of his personal problems, from being found guilty of sexual assault to hairspray being less glossy, was actually their problem. Though the President’s constant complaining is a forthright example of the Conservative Victim Complex, the perpetual right-wing self-struggle session is nothing new. Many Southern states teach students about ‘The War of Northern Aggression,’ their way of pretending the Civil War was an attack on their liberty instead of a recognition of the rights of the enslaved. Ronald Reagan launched his 1981 Presidential bid with an anti-civil rights speech framed as a need for ‘States’ Rights’ in Philadelphia, Mississippi, just a few miles from where the KKK murdered three civil rights activists fifteen years earlier.2 Conservative union-busters have always portrayed their attack on workers’ collective rights as a preemptive defense of their personal rights, not unlike how conservatives deflate African American college admission by claiming affirmative action hurts Asian students.34
While this grievance grift has worked well for the Republican Party, it has a problem. Once conservatives are in power, as they currently are, they run out of plausible targets. It was easy to paint Crooked Hillary as a menace when she was the presumptive President. It’s much more difficult when you control the government and she’s producing Netflix shows. Anyone who can fog a mirror can see the Justice Department isn’t out to get Trump. It’s led by his appointees! To avoid scrutiny and keep the followers in line, Republicans need to give their base something to be mad about — and who better than a restaurant chain that recently updated their logo?
Not long after Julie Masino took over as Cracker Barrel CEO in November 2023, she announced a $700 million revamp aimed at achieving three key business objectives: building relevance, elevating the food and beverage experience, and growing profitability. To achieve these goals, the company sought to refine the Cracker Barrel brand, which they did by simplifying the logo.5 As soon as the change was announced, all hell broke loose. I hadn’t seen a Republican this mad since a Muslim man joined my uncle’s pickleball league.
It’s easy to miss in the absurdity, but conservative activist Chris Rufo accidentally said the quiet part out loud.
‘We must break the Barrel. It's not about this particular restaurant chain—who cares—but about creating massive pressure against companies that are considering any move that might appear to be "wokification."‘
Straight from the horse’s mouth, we see this manufactured outrage isn’t even about Cracker Barrel (‘who cares’), but preserving American culture in the way White males want it to be — ‘any move that might appear to be wokification.’ They’re not even mad about wokification itself, whatever that means. Only the possibility that something familiar to them might change. Which is pretty common, given the passage of time and whatnot.
It’s also no coincidence that this manufactured outrage arrived as the second Trump administration goes from a nose-down tilt to free-fall plunge. Strong majorities disapprove of the President’s job performance, the occupations of L.A. and D.C. are pointless wastes of taxpayer money, and there’s a continuous evidence stream Trump was an eager member of Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring — made more suspect by the alleged government release of an Israeli official indicted for child sex trafficking earlier this month.678 Whenever the Republican Administration is put on the back foot, either with its supporters or the national political environment, it retreats to what it knows will work: convincing mouth-breathing reactionaries that they’re under attack! It’s why the Vice President created the panic over Sydeny Sweeney’s American Eagle ad, and why top Republican officials are posting things like this, promoting the idea that anti-fascists are both powerful enough to bend Cracker Barrel to our will, but are also weak and unattractive.
It will surprise no one that portraying adversaries as both simultaneously helpless and all-powerful is a common fascist tactic, articulated best by Umberto Eco. In his essay Ur-Fascism, Eco provides anecdote from his upbringing under Mussolini:
The [fascist] followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy, I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.9
Much like its predecessors and inevitable successors, The Great Cracker Barrel Meltdown of 2025 is not a byproduct of brutish Trumpism, but a natural result of so-called reasonable conservatism. Rightist movement have always been had an engine driven by complaining and self-victimization. William F. Buckley, who founded modern conservatism, rose to fame with a book about how many Jews were admitted to Yale, which he saw was an affront to his Christianity. Today, the magazine he started, National Review, keeps the tradition alive, penning articles about how second-term Obama was mean to conservatives by insinuating Republicans didn’t take the lesson of slavery seriously, which was objectively correct.
If they weren’t backed by the world’s second-largest nuclear arsenal, the outrageous cultural crusades of the MAGA right would be somewhat funny. Given the preposterous nature, it’s easy to attribute the cancellation of Cracker Barrel, the de-sexification of the green M&M, and whatever imaginary character the right gets mad about next week to the wackiness of Trump world. That would be a mistake. We’d seen the same cultural hissyfits if Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, or any other ‘normal’ Republican were in the White House. They wouldn’t be complaining as much as Trump, but that’s because they wouldn’t need to. The well-oiled right wing outrage machine would do the work, stirring up the most easily-triggered followers with tales of corporate executives ruining America by putting 3% less salt on McDonald’s french fries. If you need more proof obscene conservative victimhood is a pre-Trump phenomena, typing the last sentence made me remember the right demanded we rename french fries because France didn’t invade Iraq. That showed them!
Complaining and insecurity are the backbone of conservatism, of which Donald Trump is one of many agents. The Cracker Barrel freakout seems extraordinary, but that’s only because there’s no where for the Republican Party to hide. There’s not a Democrat-controlled congress, or even an “activist” (i.e. Black) Supreme Court for them to put the blame on. This is what Republican governance looks like, and the American people don’t want. Hell, Trump’s most loyal supporters are starting to buck him. Expect the nonsense outrage to continue through this term, and likely into the next Republican administration, Trump or otherwise.
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In Solidarity — Joe
https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/45783141/trump-calls-commanders-guardians-reverse-name-changes
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/reagan-speech-at-neshoba/
https://presidentlincoln.illinois.gov/oral-history/collections/janus-mark/interview-detail/
https://www.sidley.com/en/insights/newsupdates/2023/08/us-supreme-court-ends-affirmative-action-in-higher-education--an-overview-and-practical-next-steps
https://www.fsrmagazine.com/feature/cracker-barrels-emotional-legacy-fuels-its-700m-revamp/#
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/52823-americans-strong-feelings-donald-trump-most-negative
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/house-oversight-committee-subpoena-jeffrey-epstein-estate-trump-birthday-letter-book/
https://thecradle.co/articles-id/32686
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism
Nice piece! I wrote about the contrast between the belligerence of the right wing, and the apparent fragility of so many of its leading voices. https://open.substack.com/pub/shahidbuttar/p/the-rise-of-the-fragile-tough-guy