I think he's just funning
(Via Silent Running) Rod Dreher at NRO reviews a book with a most peculiar premise:

Michael Graham, has discovered there's no point in lighting out for the North to deliver oneself from rustication. The whole damn country has done gone redneck.

So he claims in Redneck Nation: How the South Really Won the War, a laugh-out-loud funny rant that twits the north for its hypocrisy while mercifully steering clear of sentimentalizing the southern way of life. You might call Graham a self-hating southerner, but this is a man whose Menckenesque scorn for boobery happily knows no geographical bounds. He is appalled to have found that the worst elements of traditional southern culture - the kinds of things thoughtful Yankee liberals rightly opposed a generation ago - have been reinvented in the contemporary north as liberal virtues.
...
Graham takes a swipe at trendy educational theories that maintain that students learn differently because of their ethnicity, and that therefore black students have to be treated differently from whites and others. "So let's see if I've got this straight: We run a public school system where the districts are drawn based on race. We use education theory based on the idea that black and white children are inherently different and cannot be taught the same way. Black children need to be taught in separate (but equal?) schools from white children where they can learn the principles of racial loyalty. And all this is happening in public schools outside the South? Somebody owes Governor [George] Wallace an apology."

The idea of Southern exceptionalism ("It's a Southern thing, you wouldn't understand") was used back in the day as a rhetorical device to combat criticism of institutions like Jim Crow. Northerners refused to be cowed by the "that's the way we do things around here" argument, and pressed their reasoned moral case for equal justice under the law, using the force of law when necessary. Nowadays, says Graham, exceptionalism has become the philosophical basis for multiculturalism. Here he is on media hypocrisy when it comes to criticizing Islam in America:

Five toothless goobers get together in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and rant about establishing a white Christian nation and it's a full episode of 20/20, but hundreds of thousands of Muslims gather each week to discuss the proper context in which to kill the infidels, and it doesn't even make the Metro section of the New York Times. I'm not making the pathetic "The only group you're allowed to hate is the straight, white Christian male" argument. I'm glad to see the media hammer fall every time the pointy, empty head of the KKK pops up. But how did we end up with an America so attuned to divisive ideas that calls for tax cuts are denounced on the floor of Congress as racist 'code words' by Congressman Charles Rangel of New York, but a mosque full of Muslims can openly support terrorists who target Israelis and nobody notices?

And Dreher's punch line:

Take Sen. Trent Lott (R., Yoknapatawpha County), who was inadvertently making Graham's case the other day when he said that America would've been better off if it had voted for Segregationist Strom for president in 1948. Well, that did it. Now Lott is being instructed in righteousness by the Boss Hogg and Roscoe P. Coltrane of black America. I refer, or course, to Jesse Jackson and his not-so-bright disciple Al Sharpton, the most notorious racialist hornswogglers north or south of the Mason-Dixon line. Few media people seem to find this objectionable, or even particularly funny, because hey y'all, we're all rednecks now.

Oh yeah, Spike Lee says Trent Lott is a "card-carrying member" of the KKK.