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February 18, 2025
The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s
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.
progressives will need first to understand the conflicting impulses that have led so many Americans to feel as though nothing works.
The issues that resonated most powerfully painted government as a menace—as an institution poised to rip families apart, rob women of their bodily autonomy, and discriminate on the basis of religion. Issues that framed government as a salve—proposals to raise family incomes, expand access to health care, and save the earth from a climate catastrophe—were less heartrending.
As Greatest Generation sensibilities gave way to boomer skepticism, Hamiltonianism began losing its purchase. If progressivism had once been focused on building up centralized institutions, the new goal was to tear them down.
that’s driven well-intentioned reformers to insert so many checks into the System that government has been rendered incompetent.
Progressivism emerged to steer the country in a different direction—and it prevailed.
Things feel stuck.
attacking government turns out to be, for progressives, a ham-handed way of convincing ordinary people that government should be empowered to do more to pursue the public interest.
Having identified the core of progressivism’s frustration, the solution presents itself: the movement needs to come full circle—to rebalance its Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian impulses.
These progressives came to believe that Brandeis’s vilification of “bigness” was fundamentally off base. In their view, the salve wouldn’t be in eroding concentrations of power, but in establishing new nodes of public power to hold vast concentrations in check.
They wanted to replace a system defined by working-class graft with one characterized by middle-class professionalism.
Cleveland’s first term as president, he forced forty thousand Republican postmasters out of their positions, replacing them with Democrats. When Republican Benjamin Harrison subsequently defeated Cleveland, he replaced fifty thousand Democratic postmasters with Republicans. This churn was based not on ability or talent, but on political connections—those
Parallel to modern day
the Hamiltonians would create new, publicly
minded bureaucracies capable of keeping any rapacity in check. The problems of industrialization wouldn’t be solved with renewed competition, but rather with new, competent organization. The nation’s scientifically oriented middle class would swoop in to save the day.
Granger Laws
short of revolutionary. Without providing any real recourse for those forced to endure the costs of progress—people whose property was to be flooded behind new dams, and those whose homes would be inundated with smokestack pollution, and those forced to accommodate new power lines strung across their lots—the TVA plowed ahead. By dint of his perch atop this vast, unchecked federal authority, Lilienthal could not only brush past some of the most powerful corporations in the country; he could impose his will on a population without heeding much of any local opposition.
41 Beneath their good intentions, many progressives came to believe that, to put it indelicately, the general public was too stupid to be trusted with any real influence. And that wasn’t simply born of prejudice—it reflected the country’s newfound draw toward new sources of expert wisdom.
progressivism increasingly came to view oppressive democracy as a far graver danger than overbearing bureaucracy.
through the 1930s, the judiciary, even more than party machines, remained progressivism’s most potent adversary.
“As intricacies of human relationships increase, so power to govern them must also increase.…
FDR
And from that point in 1937, the court never again thwarted a New Deal program.
Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom,
Reinhold Niebuhr,
the large bureaucracies that had been created theretofore, now licensed by the Supreme Court’s repudiation of Lochner, wielded enormous authority. Largely abandoned were the Jeffersonian dreams of restoring the norms of small-town life, or breaking up the big, bad trusts—those sorts of concerns had been rendered something of an afterthought. Now the challenge was simply to steer existing bureaucracies to invest.
It was during this period, an era when Keynesian economic doctrine emerged as accepted wisdom in Washington, that Hamiltonian progressivism reached its zenith.123 Government would fund great endeavors, and those endeavors would be run centrally by great men.
Hamiltonianism’s rise was spurred less by any conspiracy than by widespread deference to those with expertise and professional wisdom.
And the gruff old men who dominated progressivism during the postwar period—Establishment figures set in the mold of Robert Moses—rarely doubted that they knew best what was required to best serve the greater public interest.
1964’s Economic Opportunity Act
For decades, progressivism had worked to build up an Establishment—and now the various beacons of that same Establishment, scattered as they were across the country, were intent on maintaining their fiefdoms, whatever the public interest.
As conceived in the final draft of the Economic Opportunity Act, community action programs (CAPs) would help communities advocate for themselves against bureaucracies that, as Hackett’s old friend Senator Robert Kennedy complained, “plan programs for the poor, not with them.” The whole scheme would be run out of the newly created Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), led, as it happened, by Kennedy’s brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver. Through the OEO, CAPs would fund local community action agencies (CAAs), which would “provide stimulation and incentive for urban and rural communities to mobilize
...more
Doomed. Funding programs to disrupt local gov and establishments.
the community action programs would endure as a symbol of government incompetence. Moreover, the chasm within the Johnson administration separating the liberals from the radicals rekindled the decades-old tension between progressivism’s Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian impulses.27 And that internal debate, paired with the dysfunction it bred within government, would go on to have profound political consequences.
so the underlying culture, as much as anything else, steered postwar progressivism to invest power in centralized nodes of authority capable of keeping the lid on. The movement’s watchword, if not America’s, was stability.
The boomers, coming of age during the early 1950s, had not directly witnessed the traumas of the 1930s and 1940s. Their early years had been defined more by abundance than chaos. Their parents’ desire to steady the boat, to keep the lid on, to maintain a proper balance, did not, for them, hold the same appeal.
The New Left was less interested in attacking the right than it was in pulling the progressive tradition away from its embrace of centralized power.
This particular wave of Jeffersonianism was different, however, in the way it looped private and public authority together.
To that end, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, two of the Johnson era’s most iconic achievements, were distinct in that they flowed directly from progressivism’s Jeffersonian tradition.68
Those who believed centralized power was a force for good were more likely to want to empower bureaucracy. Those who thought it inherently bad were more likely to want to burnish individual rights. Both impulses were fundamentally progressive,
But in the wake of Chicago, progressivism’s zeitgeist was different. In the cultural battle for the heart of the movement, the aversion to power had prevailed.
Woodstein, as the pair was known together, was driven to make news simply by exposing the machinations of power—it went without saying that something was awry.
Their impulse wasn’t just to explain what the Establishment was doing; it was to hold the Establishment to account.107
remained on the force, protected in no small part by reforms often championed by progressives decades before.
Chauvin.
“the Footnote.”
Administrative Procedure Act (APA) of 1946.
it specified that outsiders could sue if they believed action by an administrative agency wasn’t just or fair.
35 Progressives in the early decades of the twentieth century wanted social workers to do for young women receiving public assistance what a doting parent might do for a struggling adult child—help them up and on their way.36 But since the 1960s, many progressives have come to see that maternalism as a patronizing burden on families already mired in poverty. As a result, like in other realms, reformers became more inclined to manacle the octopus.
A policy conceived before the 1960s, imbued with an explicitly Hamiltonian ethos, becomes the object of Jeffersonian ire. Well-intentioned reformers then begin to conceive of ways to push that centralized power down and out—to disrupt the Establishment’s hold on its victims. In order to manacle the octopus, reformers work to endow the victims of the old regime with new rights—leverage of the kind Charles Reich conjured in “The New Property.” Last, amid generalized frustration with the end result, government is made to appear generally, and
specifically, incompetent.
The ultimate irony was that progressivism’s effort to preclude social workers from prying into people’s personal lives created what felt like more government.
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
