How Far Will “Just Don’t Step On Your Balls on Cultural Issues” Take Democrats?

What if we have a one-point plan?

Cracker Barrel is rebranding, and people are shitting even more bricks than they typically do after eating at Cracker Barrel. The restaurants — which always had a “your grandma’s house meets the shack from Deliverance” vibe — will soon look like an information kiosk on the moon. Also, the company’s logo was run through the Corporate Logotron 500, and this happened:

Did Cracker Barrel just shoot itself in the scattered, smothered, and covered foot? I don’t know. Twitter is reacting like the Cracker Barrel just beheaded Dolly Parton on a livestream, but the fact that the company lost about 2/3 of its value in the past five years suggests that not many people complaining were actually eating at Cracker Barrel. On the other hand, Cracker Barrel’s brand is nostalgia, and disappearing the old codger kind of makes it seem like he died. Surely there was a way to keep the old guy but acknowledge the changing times — may I humbly suggest:

Obviously, this controversy is only a little about country fried steaks and a lot about cultural displacement. Feelings of cultural displacement are tricky, because sometimes they’re unfounded paranoia stoked by conservative media, and other times they’re completely true. There are people who sneer at cultural conservatism; there are environments in which the less straight and white you are, the better. It’s not totally irrational for folks in red areas to sense that some people are hostile towards their culture, and though they probably never consciously thought “I am the Cracker Barrel guy,” when he got erased, it probably felt a little like they got erased, themselves.

There were some good tweets in response to the rebrand; I like this one, and this one was good, too. But I thought this was clearly the best one:

Thank God: Someone at the DNC gets it. They know that rural people feel hostility towards them from the left, and that’s a big reason why the Democratic brand in rural parts of the country is a million times worse than Cracker Barrel’s brand could ever be. And bonus points for using the word “sucks” — that’s a normal word that regular people use. People in the 2010s tried to put “sucks” on the cancelled speech list, but the DNC is politely telling the speech police to jump up their own asshole, which is another phrase I’d like to see in a DNC tweet some day.

Democrats can’t win power while getting trounced in rural areas. We’ve said “it’s a bad Senate map this year” for the past 20 years — maybe it’s time to accept the Senate’s rural tilt as a given. We do terribly with non-college educated voters and white working class men — it’s a total bloodbath. The question is: What to do about it?

Everyone’s first answer is the same thing: Knock off the woke shit. Stop trying to bully people into thinking, acting, and speaking like the HR person for a fair trade coffee company. And stop giving cultural bonus points based on how much someone deviates from being straight, white, male, and able-bodied — the goal needs to be equality, not “discrimination, except different this time.” This is the first-thought, no-brainer answer that everyone has — if there was a Hippocratic Oath for Democratic office-holders today, it would begin “First, never say ‘latinx’.”

But beyond that, things get trickier. Some say we should provide economic opportunities to non-college degree holders in rural areas who feel left behind by globalization, to which I say: “Absolutely, but you need to tell me where the ‘provide-economic-opportunities-to-non-college-degree-holders-in-rural-areas-who-feel-left-behind-by-globalization’ lever is.” There actually was a recent, pretty successful effort to shift wealth towards the working poor and blunt the impact of economic shocks, and it was called “The Biden Administration”, and people in red parts of the country fucking hated it. Solutions in this area are hard to come by. I like the Abundance Agenda because it’s an honest answer to the question “what can you do for me?”, but frankly, I doubt that enthusiasm over rental prices being 15 percent below projections five years from now will spark a political revolution.

So, my answer to “What can Democrats do to improve their performance in rural areas other than not be woke?” remains a decided “¯\_(ツ)_/¯”. But sometimes, I think: Maybe we don’t need a second thing. Maybe ditching wokeness is enough. Consider: Trump is making moves that have every economist in the country considering lighting themselves on fire like that Buddhist monk. He’s abusing power like a 15 year-old boy abuses his dong. And what do people want to talk about? The fucking Cracker Barrel rebrand. Some people are reacting to the loss of a guy in a corporate logo who didn’t even have a name the way that Catholics reacted to the assassination of JFK. Part of me thinks “Come on, folks,” but part of me thinks “If that’s what people care about, then that’s what people care about.” And the good news is, it means that Democrats might be able to really move the needle by just not being such out-of-touch freaks.

I’m not saying that Democrats shouldn’t try to think of more ways to appeal to rural voters. But I am saying that abandoning cultural weirdness might get us farther than we think. Probably one reason why the left fell so badly out of step culturally with much of the country is that we thought these things were too small to matter. We were fighting climate change and reducing child poverty — who cares if we did a land acknowledgment and nodded along to dumb activist bullshit? But people cared: It showed cultural distance and sometimes hinted at disdain for who they are. The good news is: We can just stop. We can stop today and maybe people will hate us less in ten years. And we can keep looking for ways to appeal to voters who currently hate our guts, but even if we don’t come up with a second thing, we might get a lot of mileage from the first thing.

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