Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

by Marc J. Dunkelman

this book argues that progressivism itself has changed. Once committed to galvanizing experts to tackle big problems, the movement has more recently turned in the other direction. Having come to see how men like Moses were wielding public authority, progressives haven’t just taken more frequently to “speaking truth to power.” Rather, we’ve remade our governing agenda in its entirety. We’ve broadly abandoned efforts to draw power into the hands of power brokers and worked instead to diffuse authority—to push it down and out.

If the progressive agenda is going to prevail—if government is going to be given the leash required to combat inequality, to solve poverty, and to fight prejudice—we will first need to convince voters that government is capable of delivering on its promises. At present, we’re too inclined to cut public authority off at the knees. And that’s why progressives so often feel like they can’t win for losing. Our cultural aversion to power renders government incompetent, and incompetent government undermines progressivism’s political appeal.

the balance that’s emerged since the late 1960s—the excessive tilt toward the Jeffersonian—is a seminal political liability for the progressive movement. Beyond conservatism, populism, MAGAism, and whatever other forces are pushing in contrary directions, progressivism is undermining itself. The cultural aversion to power hasn’t just tied government in knots—it has diminished the movement’s broader appeal. It is at the root of contemporary progressive exasperation.

In some cases, there is no good riposte to those questions—progressives are right to hold the authority to account. But there’s a balance to be struck if only because, by limiting the discretion public officials have to do bad, the Jeffersonian agenda also narrows the path for other public officials to do good. 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. Controlling for the vices of Hamiltonianism, progressivism loses virtues as well.

It was, and is, easy to argue that the downsides of any given decision could have been avoided if everyone affected had been given sufficient voice. But the reality was, and is, that progress involves ratifying trade-offs that distribute burdens across communities, fair and unfair. And so a progressive agenda centered in almost every context on providing ordinary citizens with new tools to thwart that centralized authority—opportunities to use their voice to lobby an official, to file a lawsuit, to register a complaint—too frequently fails to answer a crucial question: Who, after everyone has spoken, should make the final choice?

It is one thing to argue that the specter of Robert Moses’s resurrection is too much to bear—that progressives should bar the door to the imperious Establishment figures who would happily raze whole blocks in poor and minority neighborhoods. But if the result is a housing market so tight that the nation’s supply cannot meet demand—that people are forced to pay much too much for their homes—then government can’t reasonably be called competent. And when government is viewed as entirely incompetent, people look for alternatives like Donald Trump. Put more simply, if housing remains forever a symbol to ordinary citizens of why progressives can’t be trusted with power, the movement undermines its own viability. To make a serious claim on shaping the nation’s future—to offer a more compelling argument than the conservatives, populists, and demagogues—progressives need to make the public-sector work. And while acknowledging that perfect balance of Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian impulses will always prove elusive—that any public policy decision comes with trade-offs—progressivism’s best foot forward is to create a system that can be trusted to look at public concerns, weigh the choices, and come to a reasonable decision.

Here is progressivism’s self-contained dilemma distilled to its essence. Reformers want both to build great infrastructure and to protect communities from coercive power. We want fast trains without having to cut straight rights-of-way. We want the benefits of Robert Moses without the drawbacks. We are willing to throw money at improvements, but we fear unleashing the Establishment. And rather than seek to balance these two impulses, progressivism has, through the decades, toggled between the two, letting Robert Moses–like figures run amok during one period, and then overcorrecting in the decades that follow.

Not every stakeholder should have the wherewithal to stand in the way. No single figure should be able to impose their will with impunity. Not every decision should be made by a court bound by the limits of judicial precedent. Government “by the people, and for the people,” as Abraham Lincoln once described American democracy, needs today to develop more expeditious ways to weigh competing interests against one another. It needs to be able to metabolize opposition without an excess of delay. We can’t forever endure the false choice of tyranny or nothing—of either letting Robert Moses tear up the South Bronx or allowing a fetid Penn Station to fester for decades. We need a process that considers broad public interests and that provides everyone a voice but not a veto.

if the details of these changes are important, they are downstream of how progressives understand the nature of their dilemma. The last major progressive pivot was born not from some technical epiphany or ideological breakthrough. Fundamentally, reformers beginning in the 1960s and 1970s shifted their policy agenda in response to a change in culture—in the progressive zeitgeist. The movement was reacting viscerally to evidence that the Establishment was rotten, as demonstrated by the carnage of war, the scourge of pesticides, the injustice of institutional racism, the corruption of Watergate, and more. It was only after the zeitgeist changed that reformers began to hammer out the Jeffersonian thrust that has prevailed over the last several decades. The movement had to behold the octopus before it could seek to manacle its tentacles.