Transcript: Marc Dunkelman on Why Nothing Works

An interview with the American author

If you live in North America, chances are good that you spend a lot of time wondering why things feel so dysfunctional. Why can’t we make any progress on the big issues of our age, like housing? My guest on the program today has some answers — and he has written a fascinating new book about why nothing works.

Marc J. Dunkelman is an American author and former political staffer. He’s a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs. His latest book is Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — and How to Bring It Back.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.

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TH: It’s so nice to have you on the program. The subject of the book, why nothing works, is something that we’ve grappled with on this program. Your analysis focuses on the history of the American progressive movement. But there are lessons that are directly applicable to Canada, which, as I’m sure you know, has been governed now for a decade by the Liberal Party, who come from this progressive tradition. Our country is grappling with a lot of serious issues similar to the ones that you talk about in the book. I think it’s interesting to flesh out at the beginning here for our listeners where you’re coming from — that this is about the dysfunction that we’re seeing right now, but it’s the culmination of two divergent impulses in progressivism. Let’s start by talking about what you mean by progressivism and then what these two impulses are.

MD: Yeah, when I define progressivism, I’m pretty broad about it. It basically means you see the world as it is and you want to make it better, as opposed to you seeing the world as it is and wanting to go back to what it used to be, which is what I view as the conservative tradition. And in the progressive tradition, there are essentially two different impulses that are in an awkward marriage with one another.

The first I call Hamiltonian. It is [the idea] that you see some tragedy of the commons, some challenge that individual people would not be able to solve for themselves. The neighbourhood where you live doesn’t have a good sewage system, or a good school district, or there’s no park, or there’s no good way to get in and out of downtown. Those are tragedies of the commons; you need to push power up into some centralized authority that will make a decision on behalf of the community as a whole, because individuals can’t solve those problems for themselves. I call that a Hamiltonian solution or impulse. It is the notion that you want to push power up and into some well-intentioned, well-governed, scientifically managed bureaucracy. That’s been part of the progressive tradition right from the very beginning.

At the same time, from that very beginning, progressives have also been very fearful of patriarchal, coercive bureaucracies that hover above them and take away their individual liberties, freedoms, and opportunities. In the sense of Jim Crow in the American South taking away the civil rights of African Americans, or some bureaucrat telling a woman what she can do with her own body in the case of reproductive rights. In both of those cases, the progressive impulse is not to push power up, it’s to push power down from some centralized, authoritative establishment and into the hands of the individual. I call that, as opposed to the Hamiltonian tradition, the Jeffersonian impulse — the impulse to push power down to individuals.

What’s interesting is that if you go right back to the very beginning of the progressive movement, both of these impulses were part of the traditional progressive mindset. We both wanted to create bureaucracies that would hold the trusts, the robber barons, and political machines [in check], pushing them out of the way so the public could [thrive] — that’s the original Hamiltonian idea. Big, powerful public authorities would be able to do great things. Then also, we wanted to do antitrust, which was to break up big, powerful organizations entirely so that everything was small. And that did not require big government. That was really an effort to keep government small and let competition work its magic so that people would all have an opportunity to thrive.

Throughout progressive history, these two impulses — to push power up and push power down — have fought with one another. We’ve gone like a teeter-totter from the beginning of the 20th century until the late sixties and early seventies. The Hamiltonian impulse, while not exclusively of purchase within the progressive tradition, really predominated. Since then, after the Vietnam War, after urban renewal, and after a whole series of bits of evidence that the establishment wasn’t so great, the Jeffersonian impulse to push power down to individual people has really prevailed.

The argument of my book is that, as a result, things don’t really work. Power is so diffused that it’s very hard to build a bridge, to take advantage of climate solutions, to build a transmission line, or a high-speed rail line. There’s no powerful institution with enough leverage to get big things done expeditiously. And so we’ve got a housing crisis, and it’s very frustrating for everyone.

TH: We will come back to that housing crisis for sure, because that’s been a major issue in this country as well. But just as we’re setting the stage for our listeners, I want to talk for a moment about how you came to this unique way of articulating the problem within progressivism. You were commuting to Penn Station and also at the same time reading the Robert Caro book, The Power Broker, about Robert Moses and the incredible way that Moses was able to railroad through all these changes that a lot of people didn’t want. Talk to me about putting those two ideas together to make this thesis, which, as I say, I think is very unique.

MD: So, you’re absolutely right. This 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by Robert Caro, about Robert Moses, who was the most powerful man in New York from the 1930s to the 1960s, has one chapter in it called “One Mile.” It is about how Robert Moses — who was the highways czar, the housing czar, the park czar, he just controlled everything in New York City — was able to push a canyon through the Bronx through destroying thousands of homes, apartment houses. All in the effort to build the Cross Bronx Expressway, as everyone objected. The mayor objected, all the communities objected, the Bronx objected. Everyone thought it was a bad idea. But Robert Moses was so powerful that it didn’t matter. He turned a deaf ear; he could have moved the route just slightly to make it so that it was less destructive, and he refused. I was reading that while on a commute into Penn Station. Which, many people don’t know, is the second most heavily trafficked transit hub on the face of the earth, the most heavily trafficked transit hub in the Western hemisphere. Every day more people go through Penn Station, which is essentially New York City’s front door, than live in the city of Baltimore. I don’t how many Canadians have … You probably fly into New York. But if you take the train into New York and you arrive at Penn Station, it is just a rats’ warren. It’s disgusting, right? It’s just tiny little hallways underneath Madison Square Garden. It’s nothing to look at. It’s certainly an unpleasant place to be. And it was remarkable to me, as I thought about it, as I was commuting into Penn Station once or twice a month from Washington or from Providence.

I was thinking to myself as I read this portion of The Power Broker, “Why was it that in the 1950s, Robert Moses was able to do this terrible thing as everyone screamed ‘no.’ And now, here we have this terrible existing Penn station that everyone wants to replace and yet we can’t make any progress getting there?” People had been talking for, at that point — this was a decade ago — people had been talking about since the 1980s, about replacing Penn Station with something else. Why had we gone from being unable to say no to a bad project, to being unable to say yes to a good one?

At that point, I didn’t know the answer. So I began looking at it and that’s what got me to this — just trying to understand every step of how Moses did the Cross Bronx and why the Penn station couldn’t be done. I began to untangle these two elements of the progressive tradition, both the story of being frustrated that nothing can get done, which led to us vesting power in institutions like Robert Moses’s Triborough Transportation Authority, which was the seat of his power. And then being so fearful of those public authorities that we have spent decades trying to make sure that they couldn’t do any damage anymore. As you pull those apart, you begin to connect them to broader themes within the progressive tradition that extend well beyond just transportation or just infrastructure, but to welfare, to criminal justice. In every realm, we are buttressed on one end by a desire to empower someone to do great stuff, and [on the other hand] by a fear that someone bad will do something bad with power. And it’s very hard to find the right balance.

TH: There’s so much in this book; there’s so much history. I hope everyone reads it. We’ll touch on a few different points. One of the ones I wanted to touch on is: In the era where the Hamiltonian impulse was more predominant, you saw this reverence for authority and this lionizing of credentialism and experts. And also a feeling of disdain for the common man. How do you see that taking root now?

MD: Well, you’re absolutely right that there was, certainly after the Depression and the Second World War, a notion that there were great men — and generally they were men, middle-aged men wearing fedoras and grey suits — who were better equipped to make decisions for the host of us than the ordinary person. That was certainly prevalent in the forties, fifties, and early sixties. Today that remains. You could see in the reverence that people had for scientific experts during the pandemic, this notion that we should do whatever they say. You see that on the left. That still exists on some level. Of course, in many cases, just as in the old days, there were elements of that reverence that were misguided. Here in the States, we closed schools for much too long during the pandemic.

TH: Here too.

MD: And so, once you lose the presumption of wisdom, which the experts have had at different times during American history, it’s very difficult to get it back. It steers progressives in particular, but certainly conservatives as well, into a notion of “isn’t common wisdom better?’ Then you end up with … Once the public health authorities, for example, have lost the reverence they once had, spurious notions that there’s a connection between vaccines and autism, which has no scientific basis in fact, become widespread and rampant. And it’s because you’ve lost trust in other realms. And so, in the same way that today — to come back to the themes that are the focus of my book — the notion is that we need more housing, but we can’t build it. And the great men, or the various powerful figures, in our various societies aren’t able to solve this problem, lessens your faith as an ordinary citizen that they will solve other problems competently.

Why would we give more power, more authority, more deference to experts if, in the realms where they do have a fair amount of influence, it seems, they’re not getting the job done? That’s the essence of the problem that I’m trying to tackle. In a moment where people have lost faith that government does well, and progressivism is still saying, “let’s give government more power to do more things,” would it be more helpful if we took a step back and said, “we need to make it so it’s possible for government to function more effectively within the mandate that it currently has before we try to expand it?” We should build faith that actually government can work.

TH: I want to touch on another moment that really stood out to me, which is the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Around that era, the Hamiltonian ethos is collapsing amid scandal, and corruption, and the war, and the cynicism. And you write that “the movement’s previous inclination to build power up had been replaced by an almost insatiable desire to tear things down.” What did that look like on the ground and what were the consequences? What was the fallout?

MD: You’ll remember during the 1968 convention, there was a meeting inside the Democratic convention. These old grizzled power brokers from generations past — Richard Daley was the mayor of Chicago at the time — stood there as the symbols of the old powerful Hamiltonian tradition. Outside the convention hall were these hippies, marching around angry, trying to stop the war, trying to disrupt the convention. The folks inside the hall really believed in the old institutions of power. Those on the outside, led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and this ilk, really believed that the establishment was fundamentally corrupt. Their idea was, “Let’s tear it down.” The convention proceeded, there was violence outside, and the Democrats obviously lost that year. Hubert Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon.

What’s interesting is that by the time you get to the mid-seventies, so maybe a half decade later, the very time that The Power Broker comes out, the people who had been on the inside of the hall have by then essentially imbibed the zeitgeist that had been prevalent outside the hall. In the sense that the spokespeople for progressivism and for the Democratic tradition at that point become enamoured of the very same message that had been chanted outside. Which was that power was fundamentally corrupt. That absolute power corrupts absolutely. And that the key to progressivism was not to build up institutions that would solve problems, but was in fact to tear down institutions.

The phrase that I like to associate with those outside the convention hall —and then the Democratic Party and the progressive movement as a whole in the years that followed — is that they wanted to “speak truth to power.” Even to this day, if you want to be seen as a leading light in the progressive movement, the key is to be framed as someone who speaks truth to power, who is not intimidated by institutions. Because the general gestalt of the progressive movement today is very Jeffersonian, in the sense that we are very suspicious of big institutions. Which is a weird thing to be when purportedly your movement is about empowering government to solve big problems for little people. And so, the shift from Richard Daley, Robert Moses, Robert McNamara, who was the Secretary of Defense during the Johnson administration — that iconic progressive figure who was a wise, older, middle-aged white man who knew best — to a notion that that was exactly the antithesis of what progressives wanted? That’s the big change that happens between the DNC in 1968 and the mid-sixties. At which point progressivism really is about tearing down institutions.

TH: It’s fascinating. I want to talk about a couple different files and how this tension plays out. You mentioned welfare, and that was really interesting to read about. You write that it’s “Hamiltonian progressivism at its very worst.” And you write that “a program established during the New Deal to help mothers in need had become, a half century on, a poster child for bureaucratic incompetence.” Can you explain the arc of that program and how it illustrates, as you write in the book, this pattern of how progressives get themselves into trouble — without conservative influence even being a factor?

MD: Yeah, sure. I think it’s an excellent example. And one that I think people don’t entirely understand. Our debates over welfare are often in such a right/left divide that those of us on the left are not taking a close look at what we actually believe. So, Aid to Dependent Children. ADC was the original program passed with the New Deal. It was basically a program designed to keep women from having to go out into the professional workforce. The notion was that if you lost your husband in the war, or you were a single mother for whatever reason, we didn’t want, as a society, you being unable to parent your child. So, we were going to provide you with some sort of welfare benefit that would keep you at home. That was the general sense of the moment. That was the cultural value of motherhood.

So, we created this program. But the notion was that a social worker — generally a middle-aged white woman — would come and help, in a matriarchal way, women who were on the dole, to ensure that they did not get off the tried and true beaten path. That they didn’t get too involved in drugs or in alcohol, or neglect their children, or become sexually promiscuous. So, these women who were social workers had this strange, almost parental power over adult women who were in their charge. They were doing things like midnight raids. They would come and knock on the door of a recipient’s address in the middle of the night to see whether there was a man there. Because if there was a man there, something untoward was going on. Or else the woman was in a committed relationship and shouldn’t be receiving public dollars; that person should be being supported by the man in the house.

You get to the sixties and that whole notion just becomes completely anathema to the left. This notion that there are these women who are bearing down, generally on women of colour, and telling them how to live their lives? These are adult women that should be able to live by the mores of their choice without having to somehow answer to some other white woman who is coming and telling them what to do. So, we move the welfare system from Aid to Dependent Children to Aid to Families with Dependent Children. And the notion there is that rather than having social workers manage those funds, we will have essentially clerks, case managers, work those funds. We will take all of the leverage that the social workers had over the lives of individual women and hand them over, basically, to checklists. You get a guaranteed benefit if you meet these conditions: Do you make this amount of money? How many kids do you have? Where do you live? Et cetera, et cetera. We are not going to build a whole infrastructure around you that’s going to be patriarchal or matriarchal or try to tell you how to live your life. You’re going to get this cheque no matter what. The rolls of welfare expand dramatically, but it becomes a fundamentally different program — the notion that we have from television programs and movies of the overworked welfare caseworker who’s got a stack of files on their desk that’s a mile high, and doesn’t know any of their patients, and is cold and uninterested in how people are actually doing. They’re just trying to make sure that everyone is qualified for the benefit that they are getting. There’s no actual attempt to pull people up. That becomes the alternative. And people hate both of these systems. They hate the matriarchal system and they hate the cold system.

But they are fundamentally different approaches to welfare — and both progressive, they’re both from the progressive tradition. And so, the degree to which the country becomes disgusted with the welfare system is all internal to the progressive mindset. And, I think, an example of how we have at times wanted to build up institutions that are powerful and influential like Robert Moses or that social worker. And then at other times, we want to completely depersonalize government altogether, in ways that often make it feel as though it’s not actually serving. Or isn’t fit for purpose.

TH: You also write about policing, another hot-button issue. You write about the murder of George Floyd, which I thought was so interesting — the way in which you complicated the narrative. Derek Chauvin had something like 22 complaints against him going into that day. The progressive impulse to check power is part of what got into that situation as well. Tell me about that.