It’s pretty common for publishers to give nonfiction books titles that promise more than the material inside can deliver. I know this because it has happened to me. But I’m not sure I’ve ever come across a case of title creep quite as dramatic as the one introducing Marc Dunkelman’s new book on the shortcomings of present-day American public life.
Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back by Marc J. Dunkelman Public Affairs, 416 pp.
The title of the book proclaims that it will tell us “why nothing works.”
It’s hard not to respond with a list of entities and policies that seem to work quite well. To start with the mundane and work upward, I’d make the point that indoor plumbing works. The internet nearly always works—at least mine does. Vaccines work; and, as in the case of COVID-19, they can be produced with breathtaking speed.
In the realm of broader public policy, one can quickly make the point that Social Security works—the checks come on time every month. Air traffic control works—we have just experienced a horrendous air disaster outside Washington, but the fact still is that years go by without the crash of a commercial airliner in the United States. And even the interstate highway system, for all the havoc it has created within American cities, does a pretty good job of getting us between one city and another.
So the title of the book is a venture that leads us rather far beyond reality. But if we stop there, we miss out on the fact that Dunkelman, a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute, has produced a detailed and thoughtful account of the policy problems our governments are embarrassingly unable to deal with. We need several million more units of housing, and we can’t figure out a way to produce them. We ought to have the kind of robust passenger rail network that exists in countries all over the world. We desperately need a crash program in clean alternative energy, but we are nowhere close to getting one.
And Dunkelman goes further, telling us that our broad array of policy failures has disillusioned an entire generation of young Americans about government itself. Even among self-described progressives, he writes, “few pine for big government so much as they fear government coercion. They worry about the prying tentacles of abusive police officers, corrupt election officials, and conservative jurists much more than they dream of expanding access to health care.”
If that’s the box we’re in, how did we land there? That’s the question Dunkelman is trying to answer.
He seeks his answer in a somewhat convoluted way. In Dunkelman’s view, virtually all the progressive impulses in American history can be divided rather neatly in two: either they are Jeffersonian, reflecting a desire to decentralize government, weakening central authority and devolving power to the people; or they are Hamiltonian, embodying a belief that elites and centralized policymaking are the only practical way to create a society that works.
There’s a certain amount of logic to this. Alexander Hamilton really did believe in government by a powerful central elite; Thomas Jefferson did believe in the virtue and wisdom of ordinary folk. But when you try to apply it to historical reality, especially over the past century or so, it becomes rather shaky.
Woodrow Wilson ran for president in 1912 on a platform of breaking up both Big Business and Big Government, but as president he created the Federal Reserve and successfully promoted a national income tax. Franklin D. Roosevelt began his presidency by devolving power to a collaboration of corporations and labor unions, but then he abandoned that effort and created a network of federal agencies far larger than anyone before him had thought possible. Lyndon B. Johnson may have evoked Jeffersonian values in pushing through the civil rights and voting rights laws, but his Great Society initiatives represented a dramatic expansion of federal power.
Those examples don’t necessarily invalidate Dunkelman’s main argument, but they do stretch it quite a bit. He tries to escape from his intellectual trap by arguing that effective government is based on a balance between Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian values. He argues that this balance existed in the early years of post–World War II America, with a public realm based on countervailing power: federal agencies negotiating with state and local leadership, corporations and labor unions reaching compromises that allowed the economy to function reasonably well.
In fact, though, it’s questionable whether Dunkelman really believes in the postwar state as an exemplar of prudent balance. He also pictures it as a time when government yielded to elitism and Hamiltonian excess, and he illustrates that view, as you might guess, by invoking the career of the ultimate modern Hamiltonian villain: Robert Moses.
Moses began his governmental career allied with progressive forces in New York State. He also believed that progressive goals could only be realized through a cadre of professionals and experts. Ordinary citizens, he was convinced, didn’t know what was good for them. He said it many times, and it drove his many decades of authority as his state’s imperious ruling bureaucrat. He wasn’t really an outlier; he was reflecting the arrogance that well-meaning progressives were demonstrating all over the United States.
The litany of Moses’s misdeeds has been well known ever since Robert Caro produced The Power Broker, his monumental biography, in 1974. New York’s unelected master builder destroyed functioning neighborhoods by ramming highways right through the middle of them. He refused to consider public transportation projects that would have reduced his city’s dependence on the automobile and relieved its huge suburban traffic jams. He built ugly public housing projects that became decrepit holding tanks for the poor and minorities consigned to life within them.
But it isn’t the details of Moses’s arrogant public works projects that Dunkelman chooses to dwell on. He zeroes in on the backlash that the arrogance of Moses and other mid-century leaders created in the generation that followed them. This was, in his view, a Jeffersonian reaction—a revolt against elite decision-makers not just in urban planning but in almost every area of public policy and in the nation’s cultural life as well. Dunkelman writes, “Robert Moses wasn’t some benevolent figure by the end—he had morphed into a scourge.”
One can overstate the impact Moses and his contemporaries had on the policies of the second half of the 20th century. But the man serves as a pretty effective icon for the sort of government that discontented Americans of the 1960s and later decades were rebelling against, all the way up to the present time. “If government had gone wrong,” Dunkelman writes, “progressives told themselves it was because the people hadn’t been able to get a word in edgewise.”
The second half of the book is essentially a catalog of the ways in which the anti-elitist reaction has led to ineffective government in the 21st century. “It was impossible to get good projects going in the 2000s,” Dunkelman explains, “explicitly because it had been so easy to pursue bad projects decades before.” A president can come into office vowing to push through projects that are shovel ready, only to discover that virtually nothing is shovel ready. Getting started simply takes too long.
To make that point, Dunkelman takes us back to the 1960s, and to the revolt against elites that pervaded both the liberal and conservative side of the political spectrum. He cites the radicalism of Students for a Democratic Society, and its Port Huron statement of 1962 that denounced elitist leadership in starkly dramatic terms, both in business and in government. “We are dealing with a colossus,” SDS leader Carl Oglesby proclaimed, “that does not want to be changed.” Oglesby and his soulmates were talking about corporate greed as well as bureaucratic arrogance. And they soon found themselves in league with libertarian ideologues.
On the right, there was the economist Milton Friedman, arguing that the military draft was an assault on human rights by overweening government, and that occupational licensing was a needless bureaucratic assault on the freedom of individuals to pursue their chosen careers. On the left, there was Ralph Nader, pointing out the dangers of automakers’ irresponsibility. In the middle was the drive to deregulate large segments of the American economy, most notably trucking, air travel, and banking, launched by a bipartisan coalition in Congress and endorsed enthusiastically by President Jimmy Carter and his successors.
But it was the left that mounted by far the most effective assault on the ability of elites to make public policy. This was accomplished through the passage of laws granting dissidents the power to block ambitious policies and programs, and through the willingness of courts to honor their complaints.
The 1970s were the seedtime of class-action suits, and of decisions by numerous courts allowing aggrieved consumers to group themselves together to file suit against government actions they considered unfair or oppressive. The age of class action essentially began in 1966, when the rules of federal practice and procedure were rewritten to emasculate Rule 23, which imposed strict proof of individual harm on anyone who wished to see a law overturned. Class-action suits prompted a vast array of decisions expanding legal protection under civil rights laws to plaintiffs who did not know each other but could band together in a massive display of victimhood. It was class action that made possible the multibillion-dollar judgment against tobacco companies rendered in federal court in 2006, and by numerous courts in subsequent years.
Most of us today regard the tobacco and civil rights cases as justifiable limitations on insensitive governments and arrogant corporations. Dunkelman doesn’t go after those. His targets are the environmental laws enacted by states and by Congress that enable classes of challengers to delay or prevent the implementation of projects generally supported by the American public.
Foremost among these laws is the National Environmental Policy Act, passed by Congress in 1970, which demands, among other things, the preparation of minutely detailed impact statements proving that a project would not inflict serious long-term environmental harm. In the early years, these statements were relatively concise and could be dealt with fairly expeditiously. In the past few decades, however, courts have allowed an ever-wider range of groups and individuals to bring lawsuits under NEPA—something the lawmakers who crafted the statute never intended. Consequently, many of the impact statements have ballooned to thousands of pages and can delay the start of a project for years, if they do not cause it to be canceled altogether. “The once-powerful bureaucrat’s burden under the new regime,” Dunkelman writes, “wasn’t to engineer a road, or a rail line, or whatever else—it was to navigate the requirements and obstacles, to create a record of each factor contributing to a decision, and to anticipate the lawsuits that were sure to be filed against any decision.”
NEPA spawned a host of similar laws in states all over the country, but most dramatically in California. Under that state’s Environmental Quality Act, which requires not only that developers delineate all the potential environment impacts of a project but also that cities “mitigate” whatever environmental impacts might occur from local land use decisions.
The joint effect of NEPA and CEQA was to make it hard to build anything of significant scope anywhere in California. This applies to high-speed rail; it applies even more stringently to housing projects. “CEQA’s impacts were clear,” Dunkelman argues. “Californians incensed by the cost of housing simply weren’t willing to abide its construction anywhere nearby.”
The implications of all this are clear, and pretty difficult to dispute. In the reaction against bureaucratic power that emerged in the second half of the last century, we have given disaffected citizens and pressure groups not just a seat at the table but a veto. We are in fact living in an age of multiple vetoes—we have moved from a public realm in which the powerful could say yes to projects with impunity to one in which just about anyone can say no. Good public policy requires trade-offs: Nearly any project or program hurts some people and interests while helping others, and managing those trade-offs is what bureaucrats are supposed to do. But that isn’t happening now. The opposing sides in a policy argument tend to view it as a test of righteousness, not an opportunity for sensible compromise.
It’s not that nothing works in our governmental system—much of it works. But solving problems of planning and development and reasonable regulation isn’t one of them. We need to recapture our lost ability to say yes to things. It will require, in Dunkelman’s words, “shaving back but not eviscerating some of the reforms that have defined the last half-century. It will mean giving communities a voice but not a veto.” That won’t be impossible, but at the moment it is very difficult. Dunkelman may overdramatize the depth of the problem, but he has the fundamentals right.
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