Marc J. Dunkelman is a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute and a fellow at Brown University’s Watson School of International and Public Affairs. He is the author of Why Nothing Works, a book about progressivism’s role in government dysfunction. Dunkelman’s book has been an important influence on the “abundance movement,” which proposes to shift the Democratic Party’s focus toward reforming government regulation that has made it too hard to build housing, energy infrastructure, and transportation. The movement has been criticized from the left for neglecting the influence of corporate power. Dunkelman spoke with features editor Alexander Stern. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Alexander Stern: Over the past several decades in the United States, there’s been a growing frustration with the government’s inability to finish projects on time and on budget. There’s high-speed rail in California, the Second Avenue subway extension in New York City, various green-energy projects around the country that have either stalled or proven wildly expensive or both. But this project began for you with vexation and curiosity about an earlier problem: the fiasco that is New York’s Penn Station. Maybe you could explain how that prompted you to start digging into this question of “why nothing works.”
Marc J. Dunkelman: I was in a position I feel like a lot of progressives are in: I wanted government to work well, and I think that’s the predicate for anyone who wants government to do more. If you want government to take a stronger hand in health care or education or fixing inequality, it needs to be able to make the case that it is doing a good job within its current purview.
I was taking the train into New York regularly, and I decided at one point that I was going to reread Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, the classic tome of progressivism about Robert Moses, who was the most powerful figure in New York from the 1930s to the ’60s and remade the urban landscape. He built lots of the city’s roadways, Lincoln Center, and the UN, and also lots of public housing. But he did enormous damage, too. Caro’s book came out in the 1970s during Watergate, when there was a sense that government agencies had gone awry. They were too powerful and doing terrible things to the little people progressives cared about: the middle and working class, minorities, people on the fringes.
As my train is entering Penn Station, I’m reading the most famous chapter of that book, “One Mile,” which is the story of the Cross Bronx Expressway. Moses is preparing to build it in the 1950s as everyone screams for him to stop. “Don’t do it. Don’t build through the working-class Jewish neighborhood of East Tremont,” where Jews who had made it out the tenements of the Lower East Side had moved. The mayor was against it, the borough commissioner was against it, the neighborhood was against it. But Moses didn’t care, and he didn’t need to care.
So, I’m entering Penn Station, which is, as you called it, a fiasco. It is the most heavily trafficked transit hub in the Western Hemisphere: more people go through Penn Station each day than through LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark airports combined, more than the population of Baltimore. It is New York’s front door, and yet it is subterranean and smelly and disgusting. My question was: How was Moses able to build the Cross Bronx so quickly with everyone saying no, while now, a half century later, there’s this project screaming to be done—everyone wants it—and yet we can’t do it? What changed over the course of the past fifty years? Why Nothing Works is my attempt to answer that question.
AS: What answer did you come up with? What, exactly, is preventing those types of projects from getting done in a reasonably efficient manner?
MD: It’s the reaction, I think, to The Power Broker. The book comes out of a really suspicious time for progressives who were feeling, as they always have to some degree, that powerful people are essentially corrupt. And there was so much evidence to that point in the early seventies. Progressives had given people—particularly elite, middle-aged white men—carte blanche to do big things. Big government agencies were empowered to build dams and highways, send a man to the moon, make the world safe for democracy, make sense of the stock market and the financial marketplace. We had built the Fed, NASA, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Federal Highway Administration. And then in the sixties we began to realize that these big bureaucracies were either corrupt or incompetent. That’s what Caro exposed in The Power Broker, what Woodward and Bernstein exposed about the Nixon administration, what Rachel Carson exposed about the world of agriculture, what Ralph Nader exposed about the automobile industry in Unsafe at Any Speed.
For working people to flourish again, progressives needed to take the power we had intentionally put in the hands of experts and big, powerful agencies and return it to ordinary people—or at least put checks on the big bureaucracies. And we did that so remarkably well that today it is almost impossible for bureaucrats to get through all the checks and balances required for a project like rebuilding Penn Station. There are so many environmental checks, historic-preservation checks, disparate-impact checks.
There’s a phrase going around within the world of reformers, coined by Nicholas Bagley: “The procedure fetish.” It’s the notion that the left loves procedure for procedure’s sake. Of course we want to organize things, but there is also an opposition to discretionary power. We didn’t like a figure like Moses making choices that affected ordinary people in a very imperial, coercive, almost settler-colonial way. We were going to give ordinary people voices and ways to stop Moses-types from imposing their will. And we’ve done that to the point that now, if you want to put up a wind farm, almost anyone can make it impossible.
AS: You cite the New Deal’s Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) as an example of progressivism working. FDR’s administration identified this problem—the inability, or the unwillingness, of the free market to provide power in the Tennessee Valley. Can you talk about that project and what it looks like when progressivism is working well? What conditions allowed FDR to put that project through that are seemingly no longer in place?
MD: Much of the country was electrified at that point, but the Tennessee Valley wasn’t. It was largely subsistence farmers—Black and white—and incredibly impoverished. The private utilities in the area, owned by the Commonwealth & Southern Corporation, didn’t think that the load these poor farmers would draw from their power plants was worth the expense of building the poles and wires that would tie them to the grid. They were living nineteenth-century lives in the twentieth century.
Roosevelt—either at his best or at his worst, depending on how you see him—says explicitly that not only are we going to provide power to these peons, we are going to make citizens of them. (He really looks down on them.) His idea is to use federal power to create dams along the Tennessee River. The power generated by those dams will supply the farms, and they’ll sell the surplus energy. The profits will tame the river, reforest the countryside, beautify the whole region, industrialize it, remake it—all using public power. Of course, this is done to the consternation of the private market: Commonwealth & Southern is horrified. It sees the TVA as the coming of the Bolsheviks.
The TVA is run by a tribunal, but this lawyer from Wisconsin named David Lilienthal is effectively in charge, and he essentially becomes a dictator. He decides where the dams are going to be; he creates reservoirs and drowns certain parts of the valley; and he puts up wires. He does it very quickly and effectively, and he goes through none of the processes that would be associated today with that kind of project. There are no environmental-impact statements, no historic preservation requirements, no opportunities for the public to comment, no rule-making processes—none of the things that would make this almost impossible in today’s environment.
In 1938, The Nation sends a correspondent down to talk to people in the Tennessee Valley about the TVA. The people love it. Everyone thinks it’s so great, and Lilienthal is a hero. But Caro, forty years later, is going to tear Moses apart for doing the same things that Lilienthal is being extolled for. In the thirties, progressivism was largely in favor of big projects and big discretionary power. But by the time you get to the seventies, no one was buying it anymore. The core thesis of progressivism had turned from trust in big authority to suspicion.
AS: You’re getting at an overcorrection, basically, that progressivism made. There was a need for some kind of reaction to this quasi-authoritarian power that people like Moses were wielding, but your view is that the shift went too far. And there’s a cultural aspect to it; you use the phrase “cultural aversion to power.” But, of course, it’s not as if progressives are only against power. Bernie Sanders’s success, for example, had a lot to do with Medicare for All, which is not about devolving power down but developing government capacity. How do you see that tension playing out in progressivism today?
MD: Two impulses have existed within progressivism from the very beginning. There’s a fight in the 1912 Progressive National Convention between those who think that the solution to the current economic calamities is to strengthen the Sherman Antitrust Act. I call it a Jeffersonian notion: we’re going to push power down to ordinary people, to small businesses, and away from the big robber barons. On the other hand, there’s a Hamiltonian notion that the only way to deal with these big private institutions is to build big public institutions to take them on.
There is still a Hamiltonian element in our minds today. We want a big, powerful bureaucracy to take over the health-care industry so that we don’t see these enormous profits going to Aetna or Blue Cross. Or we want some huge, centralized bureaucracy to impose carbon restrictions. But I think—and you see this in polling—what really gets at progressive heartstrings today is images of government doing bad things to little people. There’s a tension between how excited we are to empower a public entity to replace all the private health insurance companies and how eager we are to make sure gay couples have a right to get married. We don’t like the idea of some bureaucrat inside a county courthouse in Kentucky or West Virginia stopping a couple from getting married, or some masked force of federal agents arresting and deporting people, or bureaucrats telling women what they can and cannot do with their bodies. Those instincts are all, in my mind, of a more Jeffersonian bent. They are born of a fear of centralized power. We need to recognize, though, that the degree to which government doesn’t work is not good for the cause generally.
AS: You’re framing this as a preference for stopping unchecked power over building centralized authority so that government can solve problems. But another way this has been understood is as a preference for cultural issues over material issues. Social scientists like Ronald Inglehart have talked about a “postmaterialism” in our politics. As people’s material needs were increasingly met by the explosive growth after World War II, they turned toward more symbolic or cultural political issues involving personal liberation, social justice, and so forth. Meanwhile, material issues of labor and equality kind of fell by the wayside. Obviously, this relates to the Democratic Party’s hemorrhaging of working-class support, because many working-class voters are on the other side of the cultural issues and see the material issues as having been abandoned. They don’t feel represented by the Democratic Party anymore. Does that explanation align with yours, or is it in competition with what you’re trying to say?
MD: I have the notion that if you’re a blue-collar worker in Ohio, you’re being urged by your preacher to vote red and your union leader to vote blue. You really may be falling behind materially—it’s harder today to live the life your parents lived on a single income, because prices have risen faster than incomes. But if things are worse, then most people aren’t rising up the “hierarchy of needs” to the more symbolic issues. They should be voting, theoretically, based on the lower-rung issues, and yet they are still voting red. So, I find that a less satisfying explanation.
AS: I think the idea is that, rightly or wrongly, they don’t see the Democratic Party as representing their material interests anymore, in part because of this shift toward cultural issues.
MD: If you’re driving along the highway and you see some public construction—they’re expanding the bridge—you don’t really know who “they” are, except that they’re the authorities. Our estimation of whether they are competent and doing a good job has diminished dramatically, whatever public institution they’re part of. In many cases, the diminishment is warranted. The notion that Democrats want to throw more power to an incompetent “they” is not a winning message. We need government to work well if we want the public to endorse a broader mandate.
AS: Let’s move to a concrete policy area: housing. A lot has been written about how overzealous regulation has created a thicket of rules and laws that have made it more difficult to build housing, especially affordable housing. And there are all these veto points where so-called NIMBYs can use the courts to stop projects from going forward. We now have an opposed YIMBY movement, which argues for changing zoning regulations and so forth. Is that going to be enough? Do we need more centralized power to solve this problem?
MD: Housing is unique as a policy issue because the problem often involves the individual property owner. I own this lot and I want to build three apartments on a single-family-zoned lot, and it’s being stopped by the neighborhood. The owner wants it, the state wants it, but the neighborhood doesn’t. In this case, you could solve the problem by taking the neighborhood’s power—zoning or environmental rules or building-code nonsense—and moving it up to the state. As a progressive, that feels a little icky, so you could instead do the Jeffersonian thing and say, “Whoever owns the property should be able to do what they want with it.” That’s essentially what the YIMBY movement has done so astutely. In California, YIMBYs had huge victories last year changing laws so that infill housing and housing near transit can now be up-zoned despite objections from the neighborhood. And YIMBYism has expanded into places that are traditionally considered right-of-center, like Idaho. That’s terrific. But in some other places, the units’ rental value won’t be worth the construction cost, and so we’ll need to find ways to subsidize building.
But housing should be distinguished in many ways from other challenges like high-speed rail and clean-energy transmission lines, which cross people’s property. There, you can’t push power down to the local owner, because the projects require many property owners to accede or to give up their property entirely to a track. It’s a totally different can of worms.
AS: In the so-called “abundance” discourse of which your book is a part, there is a counternarrative to the one you’ve been telling about overregulation. Further to the left, the story is usually about how a neoliberal deference to private companies created some of these crises. For example, with homebuilding they’ll emphasize the effects of the 2008 crash, the irresponsible lending, securitization, all the Wall Street chicanery. Some of the smaller homebuilding companies failed; the industry got more concentrated and more cautious, and building production suffered. So how do you reconcile that kind of story—which emphasizes the role of insufficiently regulated private enterprise in creating the crisis—with your story?
MD: I don’t put all the blame on government and none of the blame on the private sector. There’s avarice in the private sector, and there are bad actors. I think government should be regulating that. Is the Abundance book [by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson] asking for deregulation of the private sector? I think the book is saying that government is not able to come to decisions that would allow it to regulate the private sector in a competent way.
One of the long stories in my book is about the effort to build a transmission line to clean hydropower from Quebec into the Massachusetts grid through Maine. An idea came up in 2016 for a subsidy that would pay Mainers to allow the line to go through, but there were so many different bureaucracies involved. The line took ten years to build, though it’s just some wire and sticks. That’s because the process was so bananas, which made the whole thing more expensive. It doesn’t serve anybody. Addressing government incompetence is not meant to ignore avarice or fraud in the private sphere. A functioning government with clear decision-making power is better able to call out and keep an eye on bad actors in the private sector.
AS: The Biden administration tried to turn the page from neoliberalism by attempting to invest more in infrastructure and so forth. Biden explicitly referred back to the New Deal: industrial policy, support for unions, ambitious projects. Why weren’t those projects as successful—or at least as immediately successful—as they could have been?
MD: We can make an immediate comparison to Lilienthal at the TVA. Without any restrictions or limitations on what he could do, he built dams, erected electrical wires, seized land, and reforested with the federal workers on his payroll. By contrast, take the $7.5 billion Biden put in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to put electric-vehicle chargers in the places on the national grid where it was not profitable for private companies. We didn’t have the federal workforce, so we gave money to the states. The states had no experience with any of this technology. They had to figure out who they could contract with, following federal rules, to build the chargers; they had to find sites that the federal government approved; they had to put out competitive bids; they then had to negotiate with the local utilities to get the remote sites wired up. Meanwhile, the utilities answer to no one but their own investors, and they also provide energy for data centers, for example, which are much more profitable. So, three years after the law passed, Biden was leaving office and we only had fifty-eight chargers set up. The federal government is not what it was in 1934. Biden wanted to be FDR, LBJ; he was going to do big things. But the fundamentals of how the public sector works today make it almost impossible for you to get the sort of results the government used to get.
AS: In December, you wrote an op-ed for The New York Times where you argued that the left had something to learn, actually, from the Trump administration. Obviously, the Trump administration’s actions have been horrific, antidemocratic, and cruel, you wrote, but he has been effective in “freeing the stuck wheels of bureaucracy.” You argue that the reason Democrats haven’t been able to get as much of their agenda across the line as Trump is that they, as you put it, are “lacking a clear theory of how public authority is supposed to work.” A lot of progressives might go in the other direction and say that Trump is a great example of why we need more checks on centralized power and the executive branch.
MD: That’s the obvious reaction to Trump: to say Trump is Robert Moses. Look at what Trump is doing with ICE or tariffs or knocking down the East Wing—you name the offense of the week. We need more restrictions; we need to enfeeble the executive branch. My reaction is that we’re putting the cart before the horse. The reason that we have Trump is that people saw a government that wasn’t working. They saw that “they” aren’t getting things done. We’re not getting the housing that we need; we can’t take advantage of the clean-energy revolution; we don’t have high-speed rail like China. In all those cases, government seems as incompetent as the people behind the glass windows at the DMV. We need someone who is just going to knock it all down and just do things, in the same way that Trump just knocked down the East Wing. He didn’t listen to the rules; he doesn’t care.
The way that Democrats can best combat that impulse is not to neuter the executive branch, but rather to show that government can work responsibly and competently, that we can build wind farms, that we can get electric-vehicle chargers up and running. And that doesn’t mean going back to the era of Moses or even Lilienthal, where there were no checks, but it does mean creating systems where we look at all the various interests—the endangered species, the air quality, the water quality—and then someone makes a decision: we’re going to do this or we’re not. That’s just a different mentality than the cultural aversion to power that has been so prevalent for the last fifty years. The best way to thwart authoritarianism is to have democracy deliver. A democracy so caught up in checks and balances that it can’t deliver is an almost-sure guarantee that people will look to a person who will take a jackhammer to it.
