"Minority Rule"

[Dill]

(06-02-2021, 11:47 AM)hollodero Wrote: Well, for one, when it's about my own opinion then I decide that. And whether I see such a move as warranted or not is always following subjective criteria, as is everything really. My subjective stance would also be that attacking Canada is bad; and if a democratic minority would use every measure (including ones they wanted to get rid of before) to prevent something like that is fine by me. I'd not call them hypocrites, or inconsistent.

Now is a good time to remember that all value judgments are "subjective." 

But that doesn't make them all equally irrational or expressions of personal preference

or equally untethered from factual grounding. 

Collective value judgments take objective social form in institutions and laws, so that determining whether such are democratic or not is not "merely subjective" but a matter of correlating collectively established definitions and values to observable behavior. 

I agree it is not clearly "inconsistent" or hypocritical to blow up a democratic vote to prevent one party from passing anti-democratic laws to preserve its own power.  

It might even be consistent in the sense that (following Bpat) in decrying a filibuster against civil rights because it hurts democracy and then walking out of session to prevent legislation to curtail others right to vote, one is expressing a consistent ethical stance in each case, though in the latter one is breaking rules to which one supposedly subscribes.

But can one allow such exceptions to one's own side without allowing them to the other? 

The only way out that I can see is on the analogy to civil disobedience, which honors rule of law in the violation. 

One might also be inconsistent with the ethical stance to which one supposedly subscribes if one advances legislation to "secure the vote" as a sacred democratic right while refusing to explain or even address the question of whether that legislation will actually do more to limit that sacred right.