The second and third words of the title of a new book from policy wonk and former Clinton Foundation and Democratic congressional hand Marc Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress―and How to Bring It Back, make quite the assertion. Nothing works?
416 pp., $32.50
Based on the results of last year’s presidential election, reams of polling showing dissatisfaction with schools, churches, and Congress, or simply the bedlam of one’s local Nextdoor page, it seems a choleric public agrees with him. Dunkelman is, however, mostly interested in diagnosing a specific kind of dysfunction, one that he nevertheless believes is at the root of our national anomie: the seeming inability, or unwillingness, of America’s ruling class to build the public infrastructure — think highways, power lines, apartment buildings — that make society … work.
He enters a conversation that has reached a fever pitch. Dating back to the first Obama administration’s ill-fated “shovel-ready projects,” 21st-century politicians have developed an obsession with rekindling the spark of capital-intensive building projects that fizzled out amid the malaise of the 1970s. Think-tankers and public intellectuals pitch an “abundance agenda” that waves off the fuzzy macroeconomic and environmental concerns that thwart new building; Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden alike have dumped billions of taxpayer dollars into domestic manufacturing projects whose success is hardly guaranteed. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs performatively scorn software development in favor of hard-tech projects such as weapons and rocket building.
For Dunkelman, a true-blue liberal, the diminishing returns many of these projects have faced are the result of his own side’s jurisprudence and negative cultural attitudes. The vast majority of Why Nothing Works is given over to anecdotes from post-Reconstruction America about how, why, and where the legal authority to build was decided. If you have spent your adult life crippled by a lingering insecurity that you don’t know enough about how the different Franklin D. Roosevelt administrations oriented themselves to the question of state power, you are in for a treat.
The primary heuristic Dunkelman views this question through is borrowed from The New Republic founder Herbert Croly’s definition of progressivism as using “Hamiltonian means” to achieve “Jeffersonian ends” — that is, using the hammer of centralized authority to make sure every little nail has room to grow. Dunkelman argues that, in the second half of the 20th century, the progressive movement doomed itself to futility and irrelevance by embracing Jeffersonian jurisprudence, inspired by its obsession with protecting the little guy from overweening state power. He urges a renewed embrace of state capacity, and for policymakers to work assiduously to reduce the number of “veto points” in construction that allow any given environmental group, industry rival, or snooty historical society to block new projects.
The historical figure looming largest over this argument is the city-builder Robert Moses, a reconsidering of whose reputation seems to be swelling on the cultural horizon like a summer storm. Moses, as recounted by Robert Caro in The Power Broker, used his lawyerly shrewdness and lack of remorse to consolidate the kind of unaccountable political power scarcely seen in American history and used it to build the public works projects that transformed New York City from a squalid morass into the triumphal polity of the 20th century.
He also used it, of course, to bulldoze entire neighborhoods at will, browbeat his opponents with McCarthy-like ruthlessness backed with the credible threat of his political power, and effectively exclude non-car owners from public life. Dunkelman gives short shrift to Moses’s critics, favoring the restoration of lost “balance” and arguing that “by curtailing opportunities for centralized power brokers to wreak havoc, reformers risk immobilizing the public sphere, rendering the big, hulking bureaucracies that were once the apple of progressivism’s eye incompetent.”
The book is filled with howlers about projects that have fallen into the void left by Moses’s absence, most memorably a recently planned transmission line that would bring clean energy from Quebec to New England — had it not been continually thwarted by lawsuits to the tune of $500 million in delays. But the density of Dunkelman’s storytelling about the byzantine network of courts, committees, boards, and assemblies involved in authorizing and blocking these projects can become tedious to sift through, leaving the reader impatient for him to just out with it and say what should actually be done.
When he does get around to the task, a similar call for an editor echoes from the page, in the service not of brevity but mere rhetorical clarity. Returning once more to the well of Moses anecdotes, Dunkelman writes, “The residents of the South Bronx would have been unlikely to support the Cross Bronx Expressway even if Moses had been willing to renegotiate the route … at its most benign, participation is ineffective; but if given real teeth, it holds the potential to render government incapable of making hard choices.”
He then generously declares that “giving communities voice isn’t bad per se.” But if it is, in fact, categorically ineffective to try to incorporate the concerns of communities that would be affected by construction projects into their planning, why do it at all, except as a legitimizing gloss for the ultimate decision? So Dunkelman argues that voices should be heard, but ultimately, “the reality was, and is, that progress involves ratifying trade-offs that distribute burdens across communities, fair and unfair.”
The political question of who should be authorized to make those trade-offs and on what grounds is largely left unexplored. Writing for his progressive audience, Dunkelman simply argues that the potential of Republicans taking control of powerful state authorities, or widespread regulatory capture, is preferable to the status quo: “If the result is a housing market so tight that the nation’s supply cannot meet demand — that people are forced to pay too much for their homes — then government can’t reasonably be called competent,” the goal for which progressives should aim.
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The shortcomings of Why Nothing Works are especially frustrating because its goal, to both progressives who want more housing and clean energy and conservatives who want a renaissance of the industrial heartland, is basically noble — Libertarians, sorry, this is not the book for you. But by larding down an already-anemic political analysis with endless, occasionally jaw-droppingly dull anecdotes about state capacity — at one point, after an 11-page anecdote about highway construction, he triumphantly declares, “San Antonians have their straight shot to the airport,” hooray — Dunkelman does his side no great favors.
One can imagine a nonprofit board member, junior member of Congress, or ambitious city council member reading Why Nothing Works and taking heart in telling “the groups” to go kick rocks, as is now in favor among the centrist Democratic vanguard. When it comes to shedding light on its titular question, however, the book is so bogged down in statute and detail that it fails to come even close to grappling with the millennia-old, vexing question of who governs and why — committing the wonk’s original sin of missing the forest for the trees.
Derek Robertson co-authors Politico’s Digital Future Daily newsletter and is a contributor to Politico Magazine.
