Democracy Under Siege
(USA, 90 min.)
Dir. Laura Nix
Prod. Hannah Phlypo
Donald Trump may be the most cartoonish president the world has ever seen, but the joke isn’t funny anymore. It’s hard to remember why “President Trump” ever inspired a punch line. Perhaps laughter simply provided a coping mechanism to the overwhelmingly exhausting reality of U.S. politics since 2016.
Cartoons aren’t required to be funny, though. They can be provocative and thoughtful. They offer satire without necessarily seeking to elicit a laugh. This philosophy underscores the work of Ann Telnaes, the Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist formerly of the Washington Post. Her gift for capturing the zeitgeist in a single frame fuels the political analysis of Democracy Under Siege. It’s a thoughtful documentary, if one arrives that two years too late to feel as provocative as it should. Many of the interviewees in the film talk about walk might happen “if” Trump gets re-elected. The conditional tense from interviews shot before the 2024 election sits uneasily in the film, but it also underscores how all the warning signs were present, particularly if one looked to the editorial pages of once reputable newspapers.
Director Laura Nix (Walk Run Cha-Cha, Inventing Tomorrow) observes Telnaes as she reflects the pulse of American politics through illustrations. Her cartoons appear throughout Democracy Under Siege and one gets a pretty clear stance of her point of view. A grotesque orange figure with a sourpuss frown tromps through her panels. Her editorials contain only a single frame, yet she conveys a sense of action by depicting the ogre in the White House. That action, of course, is one of violence: the Donald’s relentless assault on democracy, decency, and humanity. The images aren’t warning signs: they’re five-alarm sirens for democracy on life support.
The documentary features a chorus of talking heads who explain how America succumbed to this illness by design. Politicians, pundits, and journalists go all the way back to the Constitution. They stress how the very document that people point to as the core of American democracy ultimately inhibits progress. The interviewees, for example, situate the Constitution within America’s history of slavery. They note how the South rigged the game to maintain power by counting some slaves towards the population in order to merit equal representation, but the Constitution itself took decades to recognize these people as people and even longer to afford them equal space in the democratic process.
Much of the film discusses the introduction of the Voting Rights Act signed into law by President Johnson in 1965. The talking heads credit it for levelling the playing field for all citizens, particularly Black Americans, who remained shut out by the Constitution long after the abolition of slavery. Everyone in the film articulates how the act exemplifies a Constitution’s nature as a living thing, rather than fixed gospel. However, the recent rollbacks to the Voting Rights Act further accentuate the flaws of the Constitution as the Supreme Court enjoys disproportionate power over handcuffed democratic systems.
Some of the arguments within Democracy Under Siege may be familiar to audiences keeping pace with the flood of Trump docs over the past decade. However, it remains a prescient capsule of this time, particularly as the talking heads position Trump within the makings of a “strongman” candidate. He’s the perfect Manchurian Candidate to stand for a history of white fragility eager to hold onto power. Interviewees rightly position his 2016 election as white supremacy’s last stand. It’s also the product of a broken electoral college that’s paralysed by a Constitution designed to favour white Republican states.
Telnaes, however, often takes a backseat to the passionate political discourse that fuels Democracy Under Siege. Her artwork more often serves as narrative framing that conveys how she reflects these conversations through her work. She often appears as one talking head among many, though, and Nix keeps the artist’s voice present even when the work itself appears less frequently. Her artwork serves as conversation starters and this film follows that principle.
While the film somewhat feels dated with its look ahead to the 2024 election, it nevertheless offers a clarion call for the next two years. For all the chaos that Telnaes confronts in her editorials, and Nix in turn conveys through the passionate interviewees, the film lets the circumstances that enabled both elections serve as a cautionary rallying cry to mobilize audiences as the next elections near. Presidents only have two terms according to the twenty-second amendment, and the film makes clear the way to move forward is by seeing the Constitution as a work that can be revised over time. But whether the current administration respects or challenges that amendment may inspire future cartoons. Or, at least, one collective sigh of relief.
Democracy Under Siege screens at Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema on May 17 and 30.
