Chrissy is using codespeak.
He's exercising his right, as a Massachusetts Righteous Person, to bullyrag Southerners in particular and smear conservatives in general by "bracketing" [propagandist's term of art] them with known perverse entities like the Ku Klux Klan and the segregationists.
There is nothing about the Constitutionalists who are talking "nullification"/"secession"/"interposition" today, that makes them socially and politically identical with the segregationists of 80 years ago, but he's seizing on those terms, which were last widely used in the 1830's and 1860's, to yoke the Constitutionalists to the Confederacy, slavery, segregationism, and racism -- the holy exacta of liberal demagogy.
This has been a major meme of the reactionary liberal counterattack on conservatism since the 1994 congressional elections, when Bill Clinton and his MSM allies began to try to smear conservatives "for serious real". The use of the "Confederate flag [pseudo-] issue" and a host of Southern hate-puppet icons (beer-swilling good old boys driving drunk with shotguns in their trucks, that kind of thing) has always been an attempt by the Clintonistas and their allies to drive a wedge between Midwestern, "battleground State" conservatives and mostly-Southern social conservatives. It's about "busting the box" -- the Finkelstein box that describes the conservative strength of what liberals like to call "flyover country", a.k.a. "the sticks".
Thank you. I am never disappointed in the range of understanding and knowledge found on FR.
I wonder how many non-elitist, non-academic citizens had any idea what Matthews was saying. This is rarefied code. I suppose he was speaking to the politically professional left.
BTW, you made me search “Finkelstein box”. Very interesting. I have always been an admirer of Lee Atwater. I see that they worked together.
I think it may be out of date, though. There has been an infiltration of liberals into the box, especially over the past 35 years. We are some of those who came to rural mid-America and found something of value in the people, their character, their lives and the precepts by which they live. We came as young liberals and are now not only politically and economically conservative, we have come to understand and agree with many of the social and especially, the spiritual, values we found here. Perhaps 80% of those who came here back in the day have never changed and they are the ones who turned many of these states, or at least some counties, purple.
So, they have “burst the box”, but it was because it became stuffed too full of leftists.