Politics & Power Quote by Harold Evans

“Necessary tension” is a slyly disciplined phrase: it refuses nostalgia for some imagined era of national harmony and instead frames conflict as a feature, not a flaw, of the American project. Harold Evans, the British-born editor who made his name taking institutions to task, isn’t romanticizing rugged individualism so much as warning against any story that turns America into a simple morality play. The country’s “young history” has always been an argument over who counts as an individual, who gets folded into “the group,” and which groups get to define the rules.

The intent is corrective. Evans nudges readers away from tribal certainties by reminding them that American freedom has never been purely personal; it’s been brokered through collective bargains and collective exclusions. The subtext: when people declare a crisis of polarization, they often forget that polarization has been the engine room of reform. Abolition versus property, labor versus capital, civil rights versus “order,” privacy versus security - each fight tests how much autonomy a society can tolerate without dissolving, and how much solidarity it can demand without turning coercive.

Calling the tension “necessary” also punctures two comforting myths at once: that the individual naturally thrives when the state retreats, and that the group naturally becomes just when it speaks in the language of “the people.” Evans is insisting on an adult view of democracy: rights need institutions to enforce them, and institutions need dissent to stay legitimate. In that friction - often ugly, often generative - America keeps reinventing itself.