Tortilla Soup + Puss in Boots + Democracy at Stake
Monday Miscellany
Well, that worked out, even though we didn’t feel like eating it outside, despite the nice weather. Flying tires you out in so many ways.
A surprise recommendation from me: the animated film Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is terrific. I’d heard from a few valued sources that it was unexpectedly great, particularly considering how played out the entire Shrek franchise has felt almost from the beginning. (The original film and its first sequel have not aged well, if you get a chance to see them again. The subsequent sequels were never any good in the first place, and that includes the Puss in Boots spinoff.) The animation style is dramatically improved (sometimes in ways that remind of Into the Spider-Verse) and the story is actually quite affecting—without the constant referencing of current celebrity culture and so on.
A quick thought on democratic communities (whether nations or anything that runs by more-or-less democratic procedure). There really have to be two important principles in force at all times for them to function. The first is that any time you have a vote or election that is anywhere close to 50-50, everybody needs to stop and think about it a bit—and no weighty decision should ever be forced through on that kind of margin. Anything that fundamentally changes the structure of government, that changes the relationship between the democratic body and other organizations or nations, any major change to the procedural status quo if that’s been in place for a while? Anything inside of 45-55 means that it shouldn’t matter who is on the losing side and who is on the winning side, the change should not go forward. The status quo has the virtue of having been around for a while, regardless of how troubled half of the community might be by it, whatever it is. It’s up to that half to work to persuade more people about the need for a change, to try and get to at least a 60-40 split. Anyone trying to punch something through is valuing the change they’re seeking over the health of the community and the integrity of its democracy.
Which is the flip side: the one thing a democratic community has to fight above all else is someone who is threatening the democracy itself. The failure to do that magnifies and intensifies the threat. So that means you have to fight a leader who is trying to push something through despite very substantial opposition. It also means you have to go after a leader who tried to overthrow the democracy by some other means. And if that means one near-majority has to face off against another near-majority that no longer accepts democratic process, so be it. Privileging amity and consensus in the face of a determined threat is not preserving democracy, it is abandoning it.
If you think this applies to Israel, yes. If you think this applies to France, yes. If you think this applies to criminal and civil actions against Donald Trump, yes.
The problem with your rubric about close elections is that, as you note immediately after, some things require a choice. One can either punish attacks on democracy or allow the democracy to be defeated. One can either accept trans people/immigrants/etc or allow them to be demonized. One can either accommodate new people in our community or allow housing prices to rise without limit.
We do not face the choice of whether to preserve the fence, it has already been washed away by the sea.