We are used to political news that is almost all about politicians criticizing each other, battling in the trenches over budgets and appointments, responding to crises, and positioning themselves for election or re-election.

These forms of politics are inevitable, but I don’t think it’s widely recognized how little governance actually takes place in our time. In some ways, petty debate has filled a vacuum left by a lack of real law-making, if that means getting elected with compelling platforms and then turning them into legislation.

Teaching a (virtual) classroom of undergrads this week, I realized that I could only think of four bills passed during my students’ two decades of life that have really altered the social contract. The Authorization for Use of Military Force (2001) launched 19 years of war. The USA PATRIOT Act (also 2001) changed law enforcement and surveillance. No Child Left Behind (2002) made measurement and testing more important in k-12 education, although it was actually a set of amendments to the basic framework of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, some of which were relaxed again in 2015. And the Affordable Care Act of 2010 extended access to health insurance, albeit less dramatically than Medicare or Medicaid (1965).

Compare that list with what Congress passed (and the president signed) during the year 1965.

For the first few months of that year, Congress was presumably busy with committee work and markups. In April, it passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, for the first time getting the federal government involved with funding education and regulating schools in return for those funds. In July, Congress began requiring health labels on cigarette packages and regulating tobacco ads. Three days later, Congress established Medicare and Medicaid and entitled millions of people to government-funded healthcare.

August started with the Voting Rights Act, which arguably made the US into a democracy at last. Four days later, Congress established HUD and got heavily involved with urban development. Under the Public Works and Economic Development Act, also passed in August, Congress appropriated money for urban development.

September saw the founding of the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts, meaning regular federal involvement in culture. (The NEH also created the important national network of state humanities councils.)

October 1965 started with a law (the Hart-Celler Act) that permanently transformed the demographics of the United States by opening the country to mass immigration without the national quotas that had favored Europe. That was a big deal, but Congress also spent October passing major legislation against heart disease, cancer, and stroke; began to regulate automotive emissions; and passed the Highway Beautification Act, which is one reason our public roads are no longer lined with litter.

The year 1965 ended with the passage of the Higher Education Act, still the framework for federal involvement in college education; and the Vocational Rehabilitation Act.

I have chosen 1965 because it was a banner year, but I was tempted to mention 1964 instead. That was the year of the Civil Rights Act, the War on Poverty, Food Stamps, and the congressional authorization for Vietnam, among other bills. Imagine the TV news or newspaper headlines when every few weeks brought a transformative law.

The point is not that these laws were all good–their record is mixed and debatable. Nor that they were liberal; 1981-4 saw significant lawmaking in a conservative direction. The point is that they were highly consequential acts of governance, enacting new visions of how our country should function. No wonder reporters and voters often focused on substance.

To put it the other way, no wonder that reporters and voters rarely debate substance today. As many important bills have passed in 20 years as used to pass in a single month in the 1960s.

You could argue that we don’t need that pace of change any more, because our social contract is much closer to perfect than it was in 1960. You could argue that the reforms of that era created an administrative behemoth, and the best we can do now is to administer it competently. You could oppose the arrogant social engineering of the Sixties. Or you can decry today’s gridlock and blame it on partisan polarization, inequality, corruption, special interests, incompetence, propaganda, or a lack of civic virtue.

Regardless, I think you would expect an era marked by a lack of landmark legislation to be an era of tawdry politics. The tawdriness may be one reason for the stasis, but I suspect the causal arrow points the other way as well.

Friends, I know we are all seeking ways to ensure that our students, even ‘trapped’ at home, get a high quality civics education. Our good friends at the Constitutional Rights Foundation know this as well. They are offering free student driven webinars for elementary, middle, and high school kids that you can have your kids take part in that help them understand public policy, individual rights, and civic life. Check out the information below. I know I am going to try and get my own middle school child to take part! 

We are in this together. Our team is developing new resources in real time to help students keep learning at home.

A quick search reveals scores of articles by people who, like me, have recently read or re-read Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977).

Sontag’s thesis is simple: “illness is not a metaphor, and … the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking” (3). She adds, “The people who have the real disease are also hardly helped by hearing their disease’s name constantly being dropped as the epitome of evil” (85).

I would say: It is wrong to use sick people as assets in arguments, as new reasons for conclusions you already held. If you want to use a disease as a metaphor, ask yourself whether you would make that argument in a sick person’s hearing. If that would be cruel, don’t say it anywhere.

There is no such thing as a fact that is innocent of comparison and evaluation, no “writing degree zero” that lacks metaphor. But we can adopt an ethic of very close attention to known details about our actual fellow human beings, or we can venture into broader speculation

Sontag explores how “Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society [is] corrupt or unjust.” She shows that “to liken a political event or situation to an illness is to impute guilt, to prescribe punishment.” (72) But little actual insight comes from likening a moral or social problem to a disease, or vice versa. “Traditional disease metaphors are principally a way of being vehement” (83).

This is a warning against using the pandemic for rhetorical purposes. I am collecting examples for a short commissioned article of political theory that is mostly an argument against theorizing casually while people are suffering.

Sontag’s main examples are cancer and tuberculosis. She argues that they provided rich (but problematic) material for metaphor because their causes were unknown. Their mysterious etiology gave them rhetorical power. In contrast, everyone always understood that syphilis was an infection transmitted through sex, so it never worked as anything but a crude and direct trope. Since we basically understand COVID-19 already, maybe its rhetorical uses will be limited.

See also: on the moral dangers of cliché; on the proper use of moral clichés; and on the moral peril of cliché and what to do about it.

Last week, we shared with you a collection of video lessons for learning civics from home, put together by the excellent folks in Palm Beach using some resources from Civics360. Today, we are happy and grateful to share four more. Each video runs about ten minutes long, give or take a couple of minutes. I’ve included a link back to Civics360 under each video. Thank you, Lori Dool, for giving us a chance to support teachers!

Enlightenment Ideas

Civics360 Module

Impact of Historical Documents

Civics360 Module

Pursuit of Independence

Civics360 Module One
Civics360 Module Two

Articles of Confederation

Civics360 Module

We hope you found these useful, and thank you again to Palm Beach District Schools for sharing them!

Declining tax revenues will likely cost our state about $500-$750 million during the current fiscal year, which ends on June 30. Over the next five quarters, the loss may reach $3 billion. I believe the total budget for the state is $43 billion, so that would be a 7% reduction–at a time of intense need.

The scale of this problem may not surprise anyone, but it’s important to be able to quantify it as a basis for smart policy. These estimates come from a new brief entitled “Estimating the Shortfall in Massachusetts Tax Revenues,” from the new Center for State Policy Analysis (cSPA) at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, where I work.