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

by Marc J. Dunkelman

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.