Contingency, Allegory, Liberalism

This post is a continuation from here.

Now: more on contingencies! 

Absolutely central to liberalism are contingencies—elements of experience that are possible but unnecessary in the world, like Biden’s stumbling performance at the debate or the reflexive panic of pundits. 

In a liberal democracy everyone says whatever damn thing comes into their head and finds a zillion platforms on which to do so. So of course Democrats aired their dirty laundry and called on Biden to resign.

In a liberal democracy, maddeningly, people are also free to propose illiberal, undemocratic policies—like thwarting the will of the people who voted for Biden as president and voted again for him as the nominee. 

People who despise liberalism—because too much humanness presents itself, including lust and racism and greed and wrongness—sometimes invent and inhabit fictional worlds that let them be kings of infinite space. Fox News is one such universe; so is a schematic dystopia like The Handmaid’s Tale.