Belfer Case Study Room (S020), CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA 02138, 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA 02138
The Vik-Bailey Spring 2025 Lecture will be delivered by Frances Lee, Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, and Stephen Macedo, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.
Lee and Macedo will be discussing their new book – due to be published in March 2025 – titled In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us.
In this eye-opening book, the authors examine our pandemic response and pose some provocative questions: Why did we ignore pre-Covid plans for managing a pandemic? Were the voices of reasonable dissent treated fairly? Did we adequately consider the costs and benefits of different policy options? And, aside from vaccines, did the policies adopted work as intended?
With In Covid’s Wake, Macedo and Lee offer the first comprehensive—and candid—political assessment of how our institutions fared during the pandemic. They describe how, influenced by Wuhan’s lockdown, governments departed from their existing pandemic plans. Hard choices were obscured by slogans like “follow the science.” Benefits and harms were distributed unfairly. The policies adopted largely benefited the laptop class and left so-called essential workers unprotected; extended school closures hit the least-privileged families the hardest. Science became politicized and dissent was driven to the margins. In the next crisis, Macedo and Lee warn, we must not forget the deepest values of liberal democracy: tolerance and open-mindedness, respect for evidence and its limits, a willingness to entertain uncertainty, and a commitment to telling the whole truth.
About the authors:
Frances Lee is a Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Her research focuses on U.S. national politics and policymaking. She is author of Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign and Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles, and Partisanship in the U.S. Senate. She is also coauthor of The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era and Sizing Up The Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation. She is a recipient of the American Political Science Association’s Gladys M. Kammerer Award for the best book on American national policy and its Richard F. Fenno prize for the best book in legislative studies. In 2002-2003, she worked on Capitol Hill as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. In 2019 she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Stephen Macedo is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. His books include Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism; Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy; Just Married: Same-Sex Couples, Monogamy, and the Future of Marriage; and, as lead co-author, Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Undermine Citizen Participation, and What We Can Do About It. He won the American Philosophical Association’s 1997 Berger Prize for “Homosexuality and the Conservative Mind.” A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2014, and the American Academy of Sciences and Letters since 2024, he is also the immediate past-President of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, and a former vice president of the American Political Science Association.