Mascot Politics

[Locutus]

“Marginalized groups” are tokens, not beneficiaries, of elite self-regard.

Dr. Victor Davis Hanson’s quietly chilling article, “Two Californias,” ought to be read by every American who is concerned about where this country is headed. California is leading the way, but what is happening in California is happening elsewhere — and is a slow poison that is largely being ignored.

Professor Hanson grew up on a farm in California’s predominantly agricultural Central Valley. Now, as he tours that area, many years later, he finds a world as foreign to the world he knew as it is from the rest of California today — and very different from the rest of America, either past or present.

In Hanson’s own words: “Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different from what I have seen in the Third World. There is a Caribbean look to the junked cars, electric wires crossing between various outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming around the yards.”

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Mascot Politics | National Review Online

Two Californias | National Review Online

 

[Tecumsehsbones]

Bet he's a Ph.D. in the Bloody Obvious.

 

[Nuggler]

Sounds like "The Road" without the bomb.

 

[darkbeaver]

“Marginalized groups” are tokens, not beneficiaries, of elite self-regard.

But but we help them cuz we love them and we want everybody to be equal and happy. We would never use their underdogedness on a chessboard.

 

[BaalsTears]

I live in California. In a very general sense people cope with this dystopia by creating a personal cordon sanitaire that becomes impenetrable. Examples of this phenomenon can be found in the gentrification of San Francisco, and the proliferation of charter schools. The unfortunate consequence is the creation of a sense of separate reality.

 

[Zipperfish]

I livesd in San Diego for a while, in high school, and sold newspaper subscriptions door-to-door. Not the best job in the world, but kept me in beer in smokes, neither of which I was techncially old enough to indulge in. Learned a lot on that job. One thing is, it's way easier to sell to poor folks than rich folks. La Hoya was a complete bust, but you could easily sell five or ten subscriptiosn in the black and Mexican neighbourhoods ("the back page is all in Spanish!"--also learned how to lie with a smile on my face).

Anyways, that was back in the mid-14th century. OK the 80s--almost as long ago. And I saw lots of that back then--chickens running around and ****. Tarpaper shacks.

So not all that convinced this is a new phenomenon.

 

[BaalsTears]

...So not all that convinced this is a new phenomenon.

It's been happening incrementally for at least forty five years until it reached critical mass. The Latinos are now the largest group in California. They have a tradition of large families. African Americans statewide are about eight percent. Asians are about 14%. Whites are divided between folks falling out of the middle class, and gentry whites who live along the coast. Twenty four percent of Californians are officially categorized as poor. Less than half of Californians are middle class. But we have a bunch of rich progressive types. It's sort of a fusion of tribalism and feudalism.