By Amita Sharma / KPBS / September 15, 2023
As the world marks Democracy Day today, the United States’ system of representative government is under attack.
Despite dozens of court rulings to the contrary, nearly 70% of Republicans still believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen. In the last 10 years, more than 29 states have passed legislation making it tougher to vote.
Censorship is on the rise. A growing number of Americans, from both parties, believe political violence is justified.
In San Diego, it might be easy to view these developments through a national lens and assume they don’t have much impact at the local level. That would be a mistake, said Carl Luna, a San Diego Mesa College political science professor.
“The late Tip O’Neill, former speaker of the (U.S. House of Representatives), said all politics is local and that means all democracy is local,” Luna said. “If you kill democracy at the grass roots, the rest of it’s going to wither and die and what you’ve seen is national level partisanship and polarization has gone back to infect the local level which is just going to make the cycle worse.”
International Day of Democracy was established by the United Nations in 2007 to promote democratic principles around the world. To mark the day, KPBS decided to explore some of what’s happening at the ground level in San Diego County.
In certain aspects the picture is cloudy. San Diego has seen an increase in threats to elected officials, attempts to ban books and shrinking local news coverage. But in other areas, like voting, the region is doing relatively well.
For the balance of this article, please go here.
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In this article after the link, Carl Luna is quoted as saying, if all politics is local, then all democracy is local.
I would have to add that the death of San Diego’s 43 community planning groups is a huge indicator of how healthy local democracy is in San Diego.