Conservative writer Rod Dreher of The Dallas Morning News is a redneck but doesn’t even know it — or is too ashamed and ignorant to admit it. Listen to how he describes his upbringing in a blog post titled “On Shame, Identity And The South“:

[I]t was a small town; everybody knew everybody else. One of the most admirable things about my mom and dad is that they are not and never have been snobs. They both grew up poor, and worked hard to get into the middle class. Having prospered through middle-class virtues of thrift, self-discipline and so forth, they have firm, clear ideas about morality and propriety. But they get along with everybody, and treat everyone the same. I have literally seen millionaires and rednecks both entertained at my mom and dad’s table, and they both got the same treatment; it wouldn’t occur to my folks to do any different.

That’s a great description of an enlightened redneck, and odds are good that if Dreher was observant enough to see it in his parents, he already has fulfilled his ambition of living up to their standard.

Unfortunately, Dreher also holds to the same kinds of stereotypes about rednecks as elitists. In the same article, he equated the state of being redneck with obesity, racism that in his mind can somehow be made worse by “snarling nastiness,” a “miserable lot” in life, loose and chaotic morals, vulgarity, violence, and contempt for social respectability. Oh, and being raised in the South.

Memo to Dreher: Those people aren’t rednecks; they are what we rednecks call “white trash.”

Rednecks are not, as you think, “people who live chaotic lives, dwell on grievance and resentment, and despise boring bourgeois standards of sobriety, order and respectability.” We are “independent, hard-working, hospitable and honorable people with good values,” just like Dreher’s parents.

We practice law (in not-so-fancy footwear). We testify to Congress about the importance of education. One of us ran for vice president last year.

We also know how to have a good time, whether that means hunting turkeys for honeymoon fun, “fly fishing” with bow-and-arrow or hitting the links in jeans.

And we live everywhere, not just in the South. We are “the backbone of society.”

It’s clear from his article that Dreher is looking for his “inner redneck,” but it’s just as clear from his rhetoric that he hasn’t found it yet. Once he does, he will start writing things like this: “I’ll choose those redneck characteristics I respect and seek to embody, and reject those that really aren’t redneck but rather ignorant, ill-mannered and downright disrespectful.”