Whither California?

Do read this excellent column - titled "Mascot Politics" - by Dr. Thomas Sowell (pictured).

In the piece, he discusses the salient (and scary!) points made by Dr. Victor Davis Hanson in "Two Californias."

Dr. Sowell notes: "While waiting in line at two supermarkets, Victor Davis Hanson realized in both places that he was the only one in line who was not paying with the plastic cards issued by welfare authorities to replace the old food stamps. He noted that these people living on the taxpayers were driving late-model cars and had iPhones, BlackBerries and other parts of what he calls "the technological veneer of the middle class."

Sadly — and, in the long run, tragically — this is not unique to California, or to illegal immigrants from Mexico, or even to the United States. It is a pattern to which the Western world has been slowly but steadily succumbing.

In France, for example, there are enclaves of Third World Muslims, living by their own rules and festering with resentments of the society that is content to let them vegetate on handouts from the welfare state.

The black ghettos of America, and especially their housing projects, are other enclaves of people largely abandoned to their own lawless and violent lives, their children warehoused in schools where they are allowed to run wild, with education being more or less optional."

All these parties, according to Doc Sowell, have been turned into mascots by the liberal elites who both indulge them and ignore them.

The Hanson column, referenced by Sowell (about how twenty years of illegal immigration has negatively transformed central California), is here.