These have been excruciating years for observers of U.S. lawmaking. Any hopes for improvement are soon frustrated by partisan acrimony and flagging legislative momentum. Because of divided government and frequent turnover in party control over the executive and legislative branches, regardless of one’s party affiliation or ideological commitments, it seems implausible that your legislative priorities are making progress.
But even against this gloomy backdrop, we can find some encouragement in our national life, and that word “progress” forms the centerpiece of the following claims. If we seek consolation amid the cruel winds of political fortune, it helps to recall the important distinction between legislative progress and moral progress. Recognizing them as different affords valuable perspective on where we are and where we might yet go as a national political community.
Can we engage our ethical imaginations to frame U.S. public life through the category of moral progress, putting aside the usual categories of power politics, narrowly economic calculations and escalating polarization? If so, where might we find signs of recent achievements? While legislative progress is easy to track, moral progress can be observed when the lives of needy people are concretely improved and when our national understanding undergoes change to move closer toward the polity’s stated values.
- Childhood poverty—An affluent society that fails to protect its youngest members from the toxic effects of material deprivation indicts itself. In recent decades, the U.S. has allowed its social safety net to fray considerably, as several rounds of “welfare reform” removed vital protections for low-income children. This trend toward progressively stingier social policy culminated in a 1996 law (bearing the Orwellian title “The Personal Responsibility and Employment Opportunity Reconciliation Act”) that revoked the guaranteed income floor for single-parent families. States had to impose lifetime benefit caps, time limitations, work requirements and other constraints. Our national commitment to children unlucky enough to be born to struggling parents withered for decades.
Then something unexpected happened. Laws passed in 2020 and 2021 included, under the rubric of pandemic relief and economic stimulus, suddenly generous public benefits for low-income families, expanding the Child Tax Credit and child care subsidies. For months, Congress has debated extending these tax credits and other benefits, with surprising support from traditional proponents of fiscal conservatism—there is a serious “Mitt Romney plan” to consider!
Economists agree that well-targeted public investments in low-income families and children foster broad social improvement. While statistics certainly demonstrate legislative progress in these measures to benefit the next generation and their hard-pressed parents, we should be equally secure in our judgment that moral progress has also been achieved. Incorporating these lessons may finally allow us to disavow old tropes about welfare queens and discredited arguments that public benefits disincentivize work. At long last, we may realize our national commitment to reduce child poverty permanently.
- Student-loan forgiveness—As anyone familiar with higher education knows, millions of young adults near the start of their work lives are drowning in debt—a burden usually acquired to finance the noble aspiration for knowledge, academic credentials and eventual career achievement. All too often student loan agreements become a trap, saddling unsuspecting youngsters with unsustainable financial commitments that limit their prospects for a decent life. Rising tuition costs, unfavorable interest rates, and compounding spirals of debt give rise to despair for many debtors.
In 2022’s final weeks, the Biden administration invited applications (and received 26 million!) for a proposed program relieving up to $20,000 of debt for everyone eligible. Immediate legal challenges mean the entire effort is tied up in court for the foreseeable future. Admittedly, the task of sorting out criteria for need and fairness, not to mention financing a popular program like this, threatens to stymie Biden’s plan. Nevertheless, even if success is a distant prospect, moral progress is on display as we witness the start of a genuine public debate on collective action to support young people struggling to start their work lives on favorable terms. As a nation, we are beginning to ask how to lower the barriers that prevent millions of young people from transitioning from education to the workplace and succeeding in their life courses. What may look to some like a giant giveaway of public funds may just constitute a significant sign of moral progress.
- Addressing climate change, at long last—Year after year at climate change summits, the U.S. faces fierce criticism for its lack of national effort to reduce the carbon emissions that cause global warming. These detractors have not been wrong, although they now must account for the bold climate change provisions President Biden signed into law on August 16, 2022. Though not a comprehensive response to this existential global threat, this new law creates a pathway for the U.S. (both public and private sectors) to cut carbon emissions and finally comply with the promises made in the 2015 Paris Agreement. It is both good law and a vehicle of hope for a superior national trajectory.
As such, this development represents both legislative and moral progress. Ironically, these crucial provisions were tucked inside an omnibus piece of legislation that (for eminently political reasons) was creatively titled “The Inflation Reduction Act.” Nevertheless, this long-delayed restructuring of American energy policy shows substantial national commitment to transforming our entire energy landscape, boosting the dawning revolution of renewable energy and the phasing out of fossil fuels. Nobody knows for sure if this legislation will bring about change that is sizable and fast enough to save the planet from looming calamity. But certainly we occupy a superior strategic and moral position than we did just a year ago.
Further signs of hope
The significant distinction between moral progress and legislative progress leaves us pondering the gap between aspirations and actual achievements. The good news is that, just as athletes speak of “moral victories” visible even in defeat, significant progress can mean simply placing on the national agenda some pressing issue and a proposed solution.
Two such weighty issues have recently joined the national agenda, though neither has been resolved in any meaningful sense. The first is a matter of Congressional ethics involving conflicts of financial interest. Observers have long expressed dismay at the latitude members of Congress possess to buy and sell the stocks of companies they oversee through their membership on legislative committees. The media have recently drawn attention to the danger of profiting via inside information, including in a front-page New York Times story that listed 97 members of Congress with such potential conflicts.[i] There is every reason to believe the current Congress, pressured by public opinion, will move to prevent such insider trading soon.
Second is the wider problem of tax avoidance by ultra-rich people and corporations that evade tax laws by shifting capital offshore. This issue joined the national agenda through events like the release of the Pandora Papers, a collaborate journalistic effort that investigated and unmasked corrupt practices involving secret bank accounts and widespread patterns of global corporate abuse. The U.S. has already pledged to join an international effort of dozens of nations to hold owners of great wealth accountable, such as by enforcing a minimum 15% tax on eligible income. While key details are yet to be determined, addressing such abuses is now squarely on the national agenda. An egregious dysfunction has been identified and there is little chance the problem will remain unaddressed. This represents great moral progress, albeit of the remedial variety.
Where moral progress remains out of sight
While this analysis may appear overly sanguine, even Pollyanna would recognize several items of public concern where achievement of any moral or legislative progress remains elusive. One is gun violence and mass shootings in America’s schools and other public places. The annual carnage of hundreds of such incidents is completely intolerable and failure to enact sensible controls over the sale of firearms is inexcusable. The passage in June 2022 of a single Congressional measure (The Community Safety Act) to restrict certain categories of weapons, however welcome, hardly makes up for the prolonged history of stalemates and policy failures in this regard. We continue to observe that it is inadequate to offer merely “thoughts and prayers to the victims and survivors” after yet another atrocity, but proposed reforms to end the gun lobby’s winning streak invariably stall.
A second recurring disappointment concerns campaign finance regulation, where the pernicious effect of “dark money” in the electoral process continues unabated. Periodic proposals to reform the disproportionate power of lobbyists, donors and corporate interests gain no traction, and the courts seem powerless or positively complicit (witness the 2010 Citizens United ruling of the Supreme Court) in continuing an indefensible status quo. A third is the crying need for comprehensive immigration policy reform , overdue for decades now. Because each affects the lives of practically all Americans, it is hard to assess which of these issues (or others that might be added to this doleful list) represents the most egregious failure. Moral progress will only come within reach when we muster the political will to face each issue head-on with the necessary courage.
Conclusion
Several of the above examples fit the familiar pattern whereby the power of the modern state is (or at least might be) enlisted to address longstanding societal problems, such as overcoming barriers to human flourishing and empowerment in an industrialized economy. The generations that have already benefitted from welfare state arrangements (such as income security and social insurance programs that protect people from poverty) in many parts of the world readily witness to this dynamic of state-led moral progress. Maintaining an agenda that reflects a nation’s most deeply held values is a constant challenge, so true moral progress requires vigilant updating of the policy agenda.
In his end-of-year column for 2022, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof resumed his longstanding practice of documenting how the previous year was the best in human history.[ii] Citing statistics chronicling progress in overcoming poverty and disease, he argues that for all the contemporary problems and threats, this is the best time ever to be alive.
Unlike Kristof, I have considered moral progress, an intangible good that resists quantification, as the lens through which to view recent developments in the United States. We should be under no illusions that a perfect world is just around the corner, or that moral aspirations will easily guide our national life to new achievements. Indeed, most political developments unfold for reasons quite remote from high-minded ideas. Nevertheless, ideals and ethical aspirations remain supremely relevant in understanding and shaping what we can achieve through collective action. The category of moral progress remains well worth employing, even when we seem to witness moral backsliding from our cherished values and ideals. Guided by a vision of a better world, a healthy society will display resilience and patience in overcoming the many obstacles to human flourishing.
Works Cited
Kate Kelly, Adam Playford and Alicia Parlapiano, “In Congress, Thousands of Potential Conflicts in Stock Trading,” New York Times, Sept. 14, 2022, (A1, A19).
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[i] Kate Kelly, Adam Playford and Alicia Parlapiano, “In Congress, Thousands of Potential Conflicts in Stock Trading,” New York Times, Sept. 14, 2022, (A1, A19).
[ii] Nicholas Kristof, “The Optimist’s View of 2022,” New York Times, Jan. 1, 2023, Sunday Opinion section, p. 2.