I have a newsflash for you: Todd Gloria is going to win the election for Mayor of San Diego.
For those of you looking for a stomach-turning contest that will keep you up at night, I suggest you stop reading this now and keep your eyes on the Presidential election, where despite a nearly perfect month for Harris and an endless stream of deeply embarrassing moments for Trump, the polls are far too close to think that we live in a sane country.
But here in San Diego where, of late, Democratic dominance has become a historically very new but suddenly taken-for-granted reality, things are different. This is thanks to demographic shifts, polarizing national politics, incompetent Republicans, as well as a better, more mobilized base in labor and on the center-left side of local politics over the last several election cycles.
Despite various scandals, circular firing squads, factional battles and all the things that make people hate politics, Democrats, with the help of labor and other progressive allies as their ground troops, have managed to keep winning elections, bringing uneven results in some cases. No serious person thought that the local Democratic Party was bringing in Utopia, and they indeed have fallen far short of that mark.
Those who have followed my columns in this space and earlier in other outlets know that I have never been hesitant to criticize Democrats, but that has not included being wistful for the good old days before the Gloria era when Republicans, the Chamber of Commerce, the Lincoln Club, and rightwing think tanks roamed around town like they totally owned the place—because they did.
Thus, it is amusing to see the emergence of a new strain of ahistorical (isn’t it always?) nostalgia for San Diego’s past in certain quarters of the city’s politics. Indeed, for those who want to purge the place where happy happens of the unwashed hordes of the dispossessed, stop all urban density in its tracks, and simultaneously fix our infrastructure, improve city services, and make themselves feel safe again without ever having to pay a cent more in taxes, Larry Turner has emerged from his humble origins as a cop and former Marine to return San Diego to a time when you didn’t have to walk by poop or drive over potholes to get to the Padres game.
Yes, dear readers, remember when you had no concerns about development by your beach home or the scourge of bike lanes and homeless camps?
If I close my eyes tightly, I can conger up the Gaslamp Quarter of yore, where instead of tent cities and overpriced condos, you had the wholesome sight of crowds of sailors in their tidy white uniforms swarming the streets in search of strip joints and prostitutes. Then there were the parking lots and edgy street corners that served as crack markets (before that it was meth). But for good weed or acid, you went to Ocean Beach where some folks put “Please Don’t Feed the Bums” stickers on their cars and windows. And who can forget the halcyon era of the Hepatitis A outbreak?
It all blurs together, but it was certainly better back in the day before the tyranny of Democratic rule!
How far we have fallen from those glorious times when Kevin Faulconer, Jerry Sanders, Dick Murphy, Roger Hedgecock, Pete Wilson, and others of their ilk ruled our humble little town. Shed a tear, San Diego, for the loss of these titanic civic figures who did so much for us all only to have the first Democratic super majority in the history of the city ruin everything in just a few years.
Oh wait, I’m off message, but you get the point. The Golden Era of the past never existed.
In fact, when you get about an inch deeper into the largely blank slate of “the San Diego Party” presented by the “independent” Larry Turner, you get a guy who supports “compassionately” shipping the homeless off to Sunbreak Ranch, declaring bankruptcy in the city so you can bust unions and reduce pensions, stopping wasteful transit initiatives, getting rid of everything the city does except what he defines as “core services,” and blaming the county and depending on non-profits and private capital to come in to save the day. It sounds just a little too much like “starving the beast” lite. Or perhaps it is Carl DeMaio shapeshifting into an ex-Marine and former cop promising to stop all change in your neighborhood and telling the kids to get off your lawn to boot.
But there is so little actual policy outlined by Turner in his campaign that it quickly becomes clear what he is really selling is a kind of nostalgia that no progressive who knows anything about the actual political history of the city would ever support.
This is not to forgive the current mayor for all of his flaws, but simply to point out that when it comes to the opposition, there is no there there.
I can’t think of a single person in labor or activist circles who doesn’t take issue with some aspect of the mayor’s policies or the fact that he is still too tight with the Chamber of Commerce crowd, but none of them are rushing to support Turner over a San Diego mayor who actually shows up to picket lines and has disappointed at times but also come through in other instances.
But for some, throwing rocks at Gloria and spite-voting for a good ol’ mayor cop like the ones we had in days past when there was no life east of I-5 and corporate-funded rightwing think tanks had all public services and those pesky labor unions in their sights and yearned to turn us into Indy by the Sea is pretty much all they’ve got.
Perhaps that’s why, as Doug Porter has uncovered, according to the latest 496 form filed with the City of San Diego, the Lincoln Club paid $28,124, in August for polling in support of Larry Turner. Clearly, they are searching for a way to give wayward Democrats a permission structure to vote for a stealth Republican agenda in a purple “San Diego Party” t-shirt.
They will lose and contribute virtually nothing of value to the public discourse along the way, except to clearly underline that property values and the comfort of the affluent matters most for a loud, cranky portion of the minority of folks in San Diego who own homes in some of the most desirable neighborhoods in the city.
So what, in the end, is this all about? As the late great Mike Davis noted in City of Quartz of the homeowner revolt that produced Proposition 13 and reinforced deep, generational inequality in California: “If the slow-growth movement … has been explicitly a protest against the urbanization of suburbia, it is implicitly—in the long tradition of Los Angeles homeowner politics—a reassertion of social privilege.”
Welcome to the imperfect now of San Diego politics where Southern California history is repeating itself as farce.
So, back to the boring reality that Gloria will easily win in November. This means that if progressive folks want a significantly better alternative to the current Democratic status quo, it will only come by organizing and continuing to build a more progressive city from the grassroots up.
That means coming to terms with the huge class and race divides that define San Diego, understanding rather than moralizing about and demonizing our houseless neighbors, addressing economic inequality and the profound lack of affordable housing that underlies our biggest crises, and acknowledging that city planning needs to account for and attempt to abate and adapt to the runaway climate catastrophe that will only continue to worsen.
Doing all this would require earnestly getting to work for a more just future for San Diego. History will tell whether we are up to the task or are simply not very serious people.
