By Toh Hsien Min

People who read this editorial will know that I self-identify as a liberal. Both of you may also know that mine is a form of liberalism that is aspirational, by which I mean the ideals may be clearly articulable but they are far more difficult to always uphold. It isn't the Henry Ford brand that goes "happy to be liberal as long as you agree with me", rather it's one that finds its true depth in what happens in disagreement. Your religion may say I'm going to hell, and my religion may say you're going to hell, but while we're all here on this same patch on earth why can't we just get along? Of course, getting along only really works if we can all live and let live. If your religion says all infidels have to be sent to hell post-haste, then that's a bit of a problem.

So it leaves me feeling a little dirty to have written in my last editorial about the failure of democracy. Ideally, democracy means each having a say in the matter; ideally, this means arriving at the outcome that serves the greater good. So what does one make of outcomes that don't appear to? Is the key those words "appear to"; what gives any one of us the right to proclaim where the global maximum lies? Or can ever it be established that decisions are being made without judgement, or without access to information, or under the influence of outright falsehoods peddled by politicians with no concern other than their own? Does the population need protecting from itself?  Is this where true liberalism shows itself, or is it as Juan Perón is supposed to have said, "the best is usually the enemy of the good"?

I ask all this because in a matter of days the United States of America will cast votes in an election with a non-null probability that a candidate with a thin-skinned trigger finger with no sense of the dignity of other human beings (not least women) will have his hands on the largest nuclear arsenal the world has seen. We should hope that probability exists only in simulation, but in case this all happens to be a giant experiment somebody's got to know where the reset button is. If democracy is all right in theory but has the potential of falling down like this in practice, perhaps it's time for that French reversal: the idea that is fine in practice but won't work in theory.

David Fedo, our American correspondent, is of course in the thick of things, and this issues Letter from America is the fourth consecutive one now with no small amount of alarm about the prospect of a President Trump. Whether Alvin's cover photo of a holocaust gas chamber scale model by a Jewish artist is just coincidence... hmm... Otherwise, Daryl Lim's opening poem raises the suggestion of a non-event, before the rest of the poetry surprisingly coalesces around domesticity. We have short stories heroically chosen by an overworked SWF director, and more reviews from one of the Arts House Young Critics, who will no doubt be kept busy by the bumper harvest of books this November, about which I'm guessing we won't all agree.

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