Politics & Power Quote by Max Eastman

Liberalism, in Eastman’s hands, isn’t a set of policy positions so much as a psychological stunt: the ability to stage-manage your own credulity without actually surrendering to it. The line flatters the self-image of the open-minded while quietly warning how thin the line is between intellectual empathy and intellectual mush. “Imagine itself believing anything” is a deliberately risky phrasing. It suggests a mind flexible enough to enter other people’s premises, to inhabit alien moral worlds, even to flirt with ideas it ultimately rejects. That’s the charitable read, and it’s the one liberals like to claim: openness as disciplined imagination.

But Eastman’s subtext cuts both ways. “Anything” is bait. It implies that the same capacity that allows tolerance can also become a vanity project, a performance of sophistication that treats conviction like a costume closet. If you can imagine yourself believing anything, you can also rationalize believing anything, which is how liberal curiosity curdles into fashionable gullibility or endless “both-sides” theater.

Context matters: Eastman moved from socialist activism into a fierce anti-communism after witnessing how revolutionary certainty hardens into coercion. The quote carries that biographical scar tissue. It’s a defense of pluralism forged in disillusionment with ideological purity. Rhetorically, it’s neat because it redefines “liberal mind” as an internal discipline rather than a tribal label: not what you think, but how far you can travel without defecting your critical faculties.