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Marc Dunkelman is a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. His most recent book is Why Nothing Works.
In this conversation, Yascha Mounk and Marc Dunkelman explore the challenges facing big projects in the United States, the origins of progressivism, and how Donald Trump fits into this story.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Your book title immediately grabbed me when I saw it, which is Why Nothing Works. What do you mean by that? Why do you think that nothing works?
Marc Dunkelman: I think there's a sense, particularly on the center left and probably across the country as a whole, across the electorate, that government doesn't function the way we intend it to. The book came from my noticing at one point when I was commuting into Penn Station and reading this famous book, The Power Broker, which was the story of Robert Moses, who reshaped the landscape of New York City over the course of 40 years. He just did it with a precision and alacrity that was remarkable.
I was commuting into Penn Station probably 20 years after I'd gone to school in New York and I'd remembered going to school in New York reading articles in the New York Times and the New York Post about how Penn Station was about to be redone and here we were 20 years later and the station still hadn't been redone and there was this famous quote from Vin Scully, an architecture professor at Yale, when the original Penn Station had been erected. It was erected in the first decade of the 20th century and then demolished in favor of Madison Square Garden and an office building in the 60s. And he said, we once entered like emperors and now we enter like rats. And that's how it felt. It's a subterranean station with a warren of halls. It is the second most heavy-traffic transit hub in the country. There was almost no political opposition to building a better station. But despite Robert Moses having been able to do things that everyone wanted to stop half a century earlier, now we had a station and a piece of public infrastructure that everyone acknowledged was terrible. Yet nobody seemed to be able to get it done. That sparked this question for me.
I realized that you could see this pattern across the whole of American public life. We can't build high-speed rail. We can't build housing. We can't build clean energy facilities. We can't connect the clean energy that we would get from those facilities to the grid. We just can't do things. I realized that there was something systematic going on. So this book is my attempt to understand systematically what has happened.
Mounk: Why do you think that not just the United States, but other developed economies, other liberal democracies like Germany, are stuck in the same problem? Why is it that nothing works?
Dunkelman: I would try to answer that question by going back in history to a moment where, after the Depression and after the Second World War, there was a notion that big institutions, at least in the West, were largely trustworthy institutions. We really placed faith in the wisdom of “great men”—in a gray suit with a fedora and a frown and their arms crossed and taking very serious decisions. In the United States there was sort of a sense that these men who had seen us through the Depression and the war were worthy of our esteem and that we could trust them to make big decisions. So we created institutions that gave them the discretion to accomplish major things. The quintessential example of this in my mind is the Tennessee Valley Authority. David Lillenthal was effectively the dictator of this bureaucracy in the Upper South—which is a region of the country roughly the size of England and was incredibly poor at the time. He was given this mandate by the federal government to build dams and electrify poor farms and create reservoirs and reforest areas that had seen soil erosion. There was no substantive check on his power—he was just able to do it and hire federal workers to do it.
Roosevelt really wanted these big public bureaucracies to take charge. And that was what defined progressivism in that era: This notion of the big bureaucracy that had a lot of discretionary power.
Mounk: There's a sense of where “progressive” comes from. We want to achieve progress. We're going to do that by using the power of the state to do big projects. That is what it is to be on the left in some sense.
Dunkelman: The power as it was distributed in the early 20th century before the New Deal, before the Great Depression, was too diffuse, too dispersed. We can't figure out ways to build the big sewer system our city needs because the machines are too powerful or the corporate interests won't let us. We need to vest power in publicly-minded men who will do these things, in solving various tragedies of the commons. That was the mentality.
Then in the 1960s, sort of beginning with C. Wright Mills and his description of the power elite in the late 50s… and then you see it on the left in the Port Huron statement and Students for a Democratic Society, rising through the counterculture and into the protests of the 1968 convention… is a totally different idea. It’s not that power is too dispersed and that's preventing us from doing big things. The problem is that power is too concentrated in these big bureaucracies and that they have created these monsters like Robert Moses in New York, like Richard Daly in Chicago. You see within progressivism and in some sense across the ideological spectrum a countervailing movement against concentrated power. It's not just in the world of politics. Like, the movie Chinatown is about a powerful guy who's stealing water from the valley outside of Los Angeles and giving it to the city. Or the tagline of the movie Network which comes out in the mid 70s: “I'm mad as hell and I won't take it anymore.” That statement is directed at the “establishment” which becomes sort of a meme—the notion that there is some collection of extremely powerful figures who sit in a back room, whether it's smoke-filled or not, and make decisions.
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Mounk: Just as a side note, what's interesting about this is that what you're describing is a theory of the deep state. At the time, it was really the left and this new progressive movement that saw itself as fighting the establishment and the deep state. And in some ways, those roles have today inverted.
Dunkelman: You're absolutely right. John F. Kennedy's inaugural address was a big bureaucracy pro-establishment push, and then in reaction to that the new left emerged very suspicious. By Watergate, the zeitgeist in the country has just entirely bought into this notion that there is a powerful elite that runs the country and that the solution to that problem is restoring power to individual people so that the highway does not run through their neighborhood, so that the dirty soot-producing power plant is not put next to a school for the profit of the utility shareholders, so that a housing development that is going to somehow devalue people's property nearby can be stopped by the people who already live in the neighborhood. These are all notions that we are going to stop the establishment in its tracks. That then becomes the central thrust of progressivism moving forward.
Mounk: The connection to why things don't work today, just to make that explicit, is that obviously all of that becomes an obstacle to ambitious projects and any form of centralized planning. Suddenly the fear becomes the ability of these big state institutions and the establishment to just run roughshod over a neighborhood or to tear down the old Penn Station that was beautiful.
Dunkelman: That's exactly the idea. The notion is that progressivism from its very birth, and this predates even the New Deal, has always been this awkward marriage of two different ideas. The first idea has been, we have a tragedy of the commons, the only way to address it is to empower some centralized bureaucracy to do it. I call that a Hamiltonian impulse—the notion of taking power and pushing it into the hands of some responsible figure. Then the second idea, right from the beginning of progressivism, is this notion that we should take power as it exists and return it to the people that are being coercively impacted by some far-off monarch, or powerful figure, who is doing something that they object to. We should be able to make sure that, you know, the Jeffersonian land holder is able to protect his fiefdom from some coercive authority above him.
So right from the beginning of progressivism, when people talk about the progressive movement at the turn of the 20th century, they will just sort of list the different ideas that were associated with it. One of them is to create blue ribbon commissions so that we can do big things—that’s clearly a Hamiltonian impulse to put power in the hands of experts. A second is a public referendum, which is an explicitly Jeffersonian notion that we're going to let ordinary people weigh in and make laws because we don't trust the people in the legislature to actually pursue the public interest.
We see climate change today and we think to ourselves, we need to empower some bureaucracy to curtail carbon emissions. That's going to require some powerful centralized public institution. That's a Hamiltonian impulse. And at the same time, we think about reproductive rights and we think to ourselves, what we do not want is some centralized bureaucrat telling a woman what to do with her body. That's a primarily Jeffersonian impulse. What we just talked about in the late 60s, early 70s, was that the prevailing zeitgeist within progressivism itself switched from Hamiltonian to Jeffersonian.
Mounk: As I listen to the story you give, some of it feels quite specifically American, right? I mean, certainly the sort of mental frame of Hamiltonian/Jeffersonian can be useful in other countries as well, but it obviously goes back to a real clash of philosophical approaches among the key figures of the American founding that in some ways set up the original party system in the United States and has a particular resonance here.
How easily does the story internationalize and what does that tell us about the American story?
Dunkelman: My immediate reaction was to think of James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State, which begins with the story of the Germans trying to regularize the layout of forests in northern Europe, with the presumption that if you make the layout of how trees are planted legible, that will improve the output of the forests. That notion of reorganizing things and sort of imposing from above a logic that makes sense to someone perceiving the world as it is from 10,000 feet, then that will improve things, that's a classically Hamiltonian perspective. Scott's book walks through how that notion has taken hold across the country. He actually cites the TVA a bunch, but it is the same broad impetus that leads people in the world of development to imagine that if they go to a poor country in the Global South and they impose these standards and impose a system then that will inevitably lead to development and will be good. These two ideas of a planned economy versus embracing sort of an organic approach to growth and progress, it seems to me, span the Atlantic Ocean.
I think you're right that, as the balance has shifted, the levers of bureaucracy and how things actually work in various places have shifted. Like the failure of “leveling up” in Britain, of investing in rail to the cities in the North: I think the Labour governments or even the Tory governments in the postwar era in Britain might have been more effective in getting that done. So, from society to society, the arrows in the quiver of the Jeffersonian counter-reaction to big establishment power work in various ways.
Mounk: I think a lot of what you're saying is plausible to me and makes sense. But one way to challenge it is to say that, perhaps there's just an underlying shift of forces as societies and economies develop. So there’s big attempted infrastructure development when you're relatively poor and when people desire more than anything else an increase in the standard of living. But also when there's not a lot of entrenched powers to resist those changes, because there aren’t a ton of landowners with political power, that's when you end up in more of what you would call a Hamiltonian mode.
All of the incentives of a political economy are going to drive you towards big projects that often come with very big benefits, but can also be quite disruptive and destructive in various kinds of ways. That’s true whether you think about how Germans and other European nations mastered their environment or whether you think about Moses building highways that improved circulation in New York City, but cut off neighborhoods and really degraded them in ways that were quite damaging. Now, as a society becomes more affluent and more complex, and particularly as there's sort of a growth of a big middle class, you know, the political power shifts. Suddenly, the sort of prospect of future improvement becomes less important and the maintenance of what you already have becomes more important.
Dunkelman: I think there's probably a lot to that. My one pushback would be to suggest that if you look at the architecture of power in the United States in the late 1800s, you could build the subway up through Manhattan pretty expeditiously as they did in the early 20th century because there was much less development in Manhattan at the time, and you could cut and cover and just sort of drive a tunnel up Broadway or between City Hall and Washington Heights. It was much easier to do.
At the time, many people believed that the machines, which represented working-class interests in many cases, or else the machines that represented the robber barons at the time, that they were implacable and you couldn't do big things in America because they were so powerful and they acted as a check against big projects. That's essentially what progressivism emerged as a response to: there was suddenly a growing middle class that wasn't satisfied with the fact that they couldn't get a better sewage system. They couldn't get clean water. They couldn't get good public transportation. There weren’t bridges when they wanted them. There was a whole series of complaints and progressivism emerged to say, we can do better than this and among the things that they did was to say, the machines and the courts are inherently standing in our way and we are going to develop a series of tools designed to chisel at both those institutions’ power.
They wanted to be able to impose a minimum wage and to create labor standards and to erect bridges and to build sewer systems. And they wanted these things to be done by scientific experts. That was an idea that, again, spanned across the Atlantic Ocean. That idea was emerging in Britain and in continental Europe. The most remarkable change to happen in the first few decades of the 20th century is that we go from a situation that strangely enough looks a lot like today, where nothing was getting done, to one in which a whole bunch of progressives get together and begin trying to chisel away at the authority of the courts.
I think you’re right that as society becomes more complex, more people have something at stake in preserving the status quo, and it is harder to get things done. But people would have said that in 1895 or 1905 as well: that you can't break up the sugar trust because everyone now knows how much sugar is going to cost and the chaos that would ensue if we had real competition. We're in a remarkably similar moment again where I think more and more people, and you see this in the election of Donald Trump, are just frustrated that the institutions don't work and are trying to figure out some way to axe their way through them.
Mounk: As you're saying, Donald Trump ran in part on the sense that nothing in the government works. I think it’s one of the reasons why he won, and anybody who opposes him should take that very seriously. And he's being very disruptive in what he's doing in Washington, D.C. But he can't single-handedly get rid of environmental reviews either, because those are enforced by all kinds of Supreme Court rulings that aren't going to go away overnight. So how realistic is it, do you think, that the YIMBY movement, that the “abundance” movement, is going to or can transform these obstacles? What changes should we advocate for if we want things to work again?
Dunkelman: I think that if you're sitting in America in 1895 and predicted the New Deal, you would have appeared bananas. The government was so corrupt and incompetent at that point. The federal government was tiny. If you're sitting in America in 1958 and seeing the power of centralized government and what it's doing and how it's remaking the American landscape, it's impossible to imagine that 60 years later it would be impossible to move a bus stop from one block to the next. There is no law that Congress is going to pass and that Donald Trump is going to sign that is going to change all these things: certain things are determined by judicial precedent, and you really have to chisel through a lot of ossified bureaucracy to free up the discretion of anyone to be able to do things expeditiously.
But what happens in this country is that we toggle between being too decentralized, too wary of power, and then slowly over time, things begin to free up. So there was a big movement at the end of the Biden administration to pass a permitting reform bill. We on the left need to think of some better terminology because I think some people may fall asleep just in the middle of saying “permitting reform.” Just such a boring topic, just terrible. There was a law signed by President Nixon in 1970 called the National Environmental Protection Act. And a lot of people in this abundance, supply-side progressivism, YIMBY world are focused on that particular law. We’re at the stage where we’re coming to see the problem as it is. Just a few years ago, we didn't understand the degree to which we progressives have become so inured to the idea that power is bad, that we were undermining our ability to deliver the things that people actually want.
We need to find some sort of balance between stopping bad projects from moving forward and allowing good things to move forward even when there are costs. The question here is, in moments where there are trade-offs to be had—if we build the power line that will allow us to harness a bunch of clean energy, it is possible that a rare orchid species may go extinct—is that reason enough not to build the power line? These are value judgments that we need to make and the thing that progressives have generally fought against over the last several decades is allowing anyone to make that decision. The perfect really did become the enemy of the good because we created procedures designed to make sure that there were no costs to each of the projects, which meant often the project couldn't go forward.
Mounk: I would slightly also expand the way to think about those trade-offs, actually, because I think there's an immediate set of costs, and then there's a more indirect set of costs that we should take very seriously if we care about our political system. The immediate set of costs is, are we willing to forego the benefits of high-speed rail in California in order to save a bunch of trees that would be felled in order to build that high-speed rail line? Are we willing to tolerate the inevitable costs that any infrastructure is to have in terms of some amount of disruption to local communities, habitats, and so on, in order to build that infrastructure program? There are often very good reasons to build the infrastructure program. But of course, a lot of them only become visible at large scale. I get the instinct of saying: well, my neighborhood is lovely and nice. Why do we have to change that by allowing more high-rise buildings within it? But of course, the systematic cost of that is that suddenly, all of us are paying vast amounts of money on our housing in a way that, as we see from countries that have been better at building housing, like developed democracies in Europe, is completely unnecessary.
The second kind of argument is the systematic risk that poses to our democracies. I do think that whether it is in this area or in a very different context, in the case of immigration, there's a kind of legalistic argument that people make. We need to respect the rule of law and we need to respect the way that these kinds of procedures are done: that's just not on the negotiating table. There's no way around those. I think that both misstate the extent to which… of course we need the rule of law, but the particular way in which the rule of law is applied. It comes downstream from political decisions and should be up for legitimate political debate.
Of course people should be able to sue against building projects, but that should only be if they have reasonable concerns. And those decisions should be made in a very fast way and they shouldn't be a toolkit for just destroying our ability to act collectively. The thing I'm trying to get at in a slightly roundabout way is what it does to our politics when people give up and when this feeling of nothing works becomes very widespread. I think what people say is, well perhaps we just need somebody to go and destroy the whole damn thing, and that is what we're living through right now. Somebody like Donald Trump is himself a strange mix of Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Marc discuss how frustration with why nothing works paved the way for Trump, and how the left can effectively change the system. This discussion is reserved for paying members…
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