Crack-Up
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.” —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
Democracy is in doubt. Aspiring autocrats undermine it by accusing their opponents of the same. Should we respond in kind? The temptation is real. But meeting illiberalism with illiberalism does not save the house. It becomes the fire.
Liberal principles have been pushed to extremes by both right and left. The first victory of the anti-liberal impulse is making its methods seem necessary.
The real risk to American democracy is not only anti-democratic behavior but the excuses people make when their side benefits. Political violence becomes tolerable, institutions become obstacles, and democracy itself becomes expendable. Undermining the system is no longer a scandal; it is strategy.
One response is to play what writing teacher and theorist Peter Elbow called “the believing game.” Its discipline is strict: you cannot reject a belief until you have succeeded in believing it. If you only listen politely or restate the view before calling it wrong, you have not refuted it. You may have missed it.
Democracy cannot live by information alone. It needs patience to stay with a question before reducing it to a problem. A disciplined act of belief can reveal what certainty hides. Philosopher Michael Polanyi gave that discipline a philosophical frame: we often must trust before fully understanding.
A more modest version is the “five-minute rule”: spend five minutes thinking from inside a view you do not hold. The White Queen’s claim that she believes “six impossible things before breakfast” is funny because it is absurd. The discipline here asks less: try one difficult thing for five minutes.
What is interesting or helpful about this view? What does it reveal that others miss?
What would I notice if I believed this view? What if it were true?
In what senses, or under what conditions, might this idea be right?
Anyone who cannot answer such questions has not earned the right to dismiss the view. You will not end up believing most views you say “yes” to, but you may experience a cognitive shift — an enlargement of perspective — that polite understanding never reaches. Good citizens will have their hearts broken more than once.
It is now common to criticize binary either-or thinking. Often, the complaint is warranted: polarization has made every difference feel like a nervous breakdown. F. Scott Fitzgerald put it more sharply in The Crack-Up: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” He saw the alternative as stasis or collapse.
“Everything about me is a contradiction,” said Orson Welles, “and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of opposition; we live between two poles. There’s a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don’t reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.” That recognition is not resignation. It is the beginning of sanity.
Differences need each other to make sense. Reconciliation can be the bane of conflict resolution. Not separate but equal, rather distinct enough to meet as equals. Black power was a necessary corrective to integration. Solidarity means alliance, not agreement.
Think of the stone arch. It stands not because the stones have reconciled their differences but because they are caught in opposing pressure. The left side pushes right, and the right side pushes left. Together, they hold the weight above. Stability is not the absence of conflict. It is how tension is held.
The universe itself is the held tension of opposites: expansion and collapse, entropy and the stubborn coherence of matter. It becomes what was never possible before.
The best disagreements do more than settle differences; they make something new out of them.
Hegel is often dragged into this discussion under the flattened slogan “thesis + antithesis = synthesis.” That cliché turns him into a diagram. He was not proposing compromise or a middle ground. His point was that contradiction is not a defect to be fixed but the pressure by which thought and history move. The result is not mere balance but a new form that carries the conflict forward.
The task of liberal democracy is not to suppress conflict but to maintain a structure strong enough to hold it. A healthy democracy depends on the conflict it is tempted to avoid.
Running from guilt, lost in the desert at night, with a rock for a pillow, Jacob had a vision: “Surely God is in this place, and I did not know it.”
“One can’t believe impossible things.”
We confuse the ordeal with the end. Democracy founders when it becomes afraid of itself. Jacob wrestled the divine, an angel no less, and refused to let go until it yielded a blessing. He came away with a new name, a new future, and a hip out of joint.
Fear fails. Blessing does not end the struggle. It leaves us limping.
Notes and reading
“Democracy Hypocrisy: Examining America’s Fragile Democratic Convictions”—Democracy Fund (January 4, 2024). Fewer than one in ten citizens consistently uphold democratic norms. Commitment to democracy is often secondary to the desire for one’s side to win.
The Long Revolution: Creating a United States After 1776—Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (Basic Books, forthcoming June 2, 2026). Only around the 1876 centennial did Americans increasingly begin to see the Revolution as “over,” a “string of events” belonging to the distant past. That was the mistake. The work of 1776 was never simply behind us; its implications are still being fought out.
“For an Agonistic Pluralism”—Verso Books (April 1, 2020). An introduction to Chantal Mouffe’s The Return of the Political, a critique of liberal democracy’s inability to grasp the nature of ethnic, religious, and nationalist conflict. “Agonistic pluralism” aims to turn antagonism into agon, or contest.
Believer’s game—Believe a view from the inside before judging it. Peter Elbow, Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching (1986). Michael Polanyi gives that challenge a philosophical frame in The Tacit Dimension: knowing is never pure detachment; it depends on trust, participation, and tacit commitments. This is Michael Polanyi, author of Personal Knowledge, a landmark in the philosophy of science—not his brother Karl, whose The Great Transformation famously criticized the self-regulating market.
Dao / yin-yang
The essay’s language of tension and opposition resonates with Daoist thought, especially the yin-yang pattern in which apparent opposites are interdependent rather than simply enemies. I touched on related themes in an earlier Substack post on Daoism and the Zhuangzi (August 8, 2024): paradox, flexibility, “genuine pretending,” and the freedom of not forcing reality into rigid roles. But the contrast matters. In classical Daoism, the Dao is not a program for political struggle or historical progress; it is the way things move when they are not forced into schemes of mastery. Yin and yang do not produce a higher synthesis. They disclose a world in which opposites belong to one another. That is not Hegel’s pressure of contradiction, nor Jacob’s wound and blessing, but it belongs nearby. Some tensions are not solved. They are the shape of reality.
Jacob (Genesis 32)
Jacob does not escape the struggle; he stays with it until it changes him. The blessing comes with pain, a new name, and no clean resolution. This hardly exhausts the story’s religious meaning, but it belongs to it. Jacob does not leave triumphant. He leaves marked. That may be one enduring lesson: some conflicts are not resolved but transformed by the refusal to let go.