Why America can’t build things like it used to

[MUSIC PLAYING] DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards.

Watson fellow, Marc Dunkelman's newest book, Why Nothing Works, Who Killed Progress and How to Get it Back, was partially inspired by his old commute.

MARC DUNKELMAN: So I live here in Providence. For a long time, I worked in New York, and I was frequently taking the train from Providence to New York, and arriving in Penn Station.

DAN RICHARDS: Penn Station, the busiest train station in the United States.

MARC DUNKELMAN: More people go through Penn Station every day than they go through Laguardia, Kennedy, and Newark airports combined. Essentially, the front door to the world's most important city.

DAN RICHARDS: A front door which, for much of its modern history, has been a total bummer to use.

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MARC DUNKELMAN: This rat's nest of underground warrens, just a depressing, horrible situation.

DAN RICHARDS: If you've ever traveled through Penn Station, you know. Despite some recent renovations and an expansion that opened in Twenty Twenty-One, much of the station is still located underground, beneath Madison Square Garden. It is dark, crowded, and difficult to navigate. And as Marc was commuting through Penn Station, he was reading a book.

MARC DUNKELMAN: Robert Caro's Nineteen Seventy-Five Pulitzer-Prize-winning book, The Power Broker, which is about Robert Moses, who between the Nineteen Thirties and the Nineteen Sixties, really remade the physical landscape of New York City.

DAN RICHARDS: Robert Moses was an urban planner who, it should be noted, was never elected to an office in New York City. And yet, through his appointments to various boards and commissions in the state, Moses--

MARC DUNKELMAN: Built highways. He built parks. He built housing developments. He built the Lincoln Center, the UN headquarters, name it. He just completely remade the entire landscape of the city in his own image.

DAN RICHARDS: One of his most famous, or rather infamous projects--

MARC DUNKELMAN: The construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway.

DAN RICHARDS: The project, which involved demolishing entire blocks of working class neighborhoods in the Bronx and displacing countless Bronx residents, was not popular.

MARC DUNKELMAN: Everyone opposed Moses. Not only the community activists, not only the Bronx leadership, but the mayor of New York City was opposed to the project. And Moses just turned a deaf ear to all of them. And he built this highway. It was the Nineteen Fifties. By the time that The Power Broker comes out, 15, 20 years later, the highway has effectively turned the South Bronx into a wasteland.

DAN RICHARDS: Marc read this story on one of those train rides from Providence to New York City.

MARC DUNKELMAN: And I'm thinking to myself, why is it that Robert Moses was able to get a bad project going, with everyone screaming, no? And yet I know that people have been calling for the reconstruction of a beautiful Penn Station, probably for 20 years at that point.

And I genuinely didn't know what had happened between the moment when Moses built the Cross Bronx and the period where Penn Station was just stuck. And so I set off to explain it.

DAN RICHARDS: What Marc found was a story about much, much more than one train station in one American city. He found a surprising history of ideological and cultural change in American politics in the last half-century that hobbled government's ability to make good on ambitious projects.

And perhaps most surprisingly, many of the most profound changes Marc identified didn't come from movements or parties we often associate with small government in the US. They came largely from America's progressives.

The story Marc tells helps to explain so many of the challenges we face as a country today, as well as why our government seems unable to address them.

On this episode, you'll hear from him about how progressives got in their own way when it comes to achieving ambitious government projects, why that's bad for all of us, and how progressives might get their own movement and the rest of the country to build big things again.

To understand what Marc found, we have to go back a little bit to the beginning of the progressive movement in the United States, in the late Eighteen Hundreds and early Nineteen Hundreds.

MARC DUNKELMAN: That period, there is this middle class rising in America, in the course of industrialization, and they don't like the way that the country is being governed for a whole variety of reasons. There are robber barons on one end. There are corrupt political machines on the other. The regulatory apparatus is not properly constructed to deal with these huge behemoth corporations that didn't use to exist.

And so there's this big question among the reform community about what we should do about it. And among these progressives, there are essentially two impulses.

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One impulse is to see the world as it is and to say, power is too diffused. We want to build a transit system that works. We want to build a park system that's good or a good school system, something none of us can do individually, but we know it needs to be done.

And so their idea is to take power as it exists, and push it up into some institution that has real public authority. I call that a Hamiltonian impulse, in the spirit of the Hamiltonian impulse at the beginning of the republic.

So in that case, you would want to have a school board set up a school system, and then hire teachers and not let those teachers be corrupted by the political machine. You'd have this independent authority. Or you'd want to have a port authority to manage the fees charged to shippers who own the port, so that there isn't competition and whatnot. So that's the move, power up.

There's a second impulse. And that impulse is to move power down, to say that there is a corrupt series of institutions that are oppressing ordinary people, and we should take those institutions and break them up or push power back to the ordinary people.

DAN RICHARDS: Marc calls this the Jeffersonian impulse within progressivism.

MARC DUNKELMAN: Jeffersonian in the sense that Thomas Jefferson believed in yeoman farmers and wanting to empower them, as opposed to the crown or to the decentralized government in colonial America.

And so, from the very beginning, progressivism is this strange marriage of this Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian impulse. And almost every progressive has some element of these two ideas in their heart and in their mind. Even today, it's still true.

For example, when you talk to a progressive today, if you were to walk into a coffee shop and see a young progressive activist and say, what are your top two voting issues, many of them would say, climate change and reproductive rights.

And on climate change, the almost universal progressive notion is that we need to have a Hamiltonian solution. We need to push power up into some institution that will tell big polluters that they need to stop emitting carbon.

On reproductive rights, our viewpoint is almost exclusively Jeffersonian. We don't want some bureaucrat telling a woman what she can do with her body.

These two ideas live side by side. I don't think that, for generations, we've recognized the two are in tension but they fundamentally are in tension.

DAN RICHARDS: And one of these strains clearly dominated the progressive movement in its earlier eras.

MARC DUNKELMAN: From the late Eighteen Hundreds through the Nineteen Fifties, Nineteen Sixties, Nineteen Seventies, really, the Hamiltonian impulse prevailed. And if you look back at the progressives of those eras, they are looking to build big bureaucracies.

The New Deal is building the Social Security Administration and the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Tennessee Valley Authority. And all of these are huge, big bureaucracies that are going to solve big problems.

And then something happens in the late '50s through the '60s and '70s, the notion that we should be pushing power up into the institutions, is eclipsed by the Jeffersonian impulse to pull power down. And that's the big shift.

DAN RICHARDS: These changes is really at the core of your book's argument about, as the title suggests, why nothing works. And before we get into what this change looked like and its effects on government as progressives, with this new view took power, what would you say were the main things that of off this change? Was it a cultural change, a change like economic circumstances? Why did the pendulum swing back against the Hamiltonians, as you say?

MARC DUNKELMAN: There's this old phrase that politics is downstream of culture. And I think there was a cultural shift that was associated with the rise of the boomers. The previous generation had lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War, and seen how crucial these big institutions were to saving the country, both from economic catastrophe and from a foreign threat. And that was woven deeply into their view of the world.

But then you get the boomers who were born after the Second World War. And that's not their experience at all. In many cases, they are growing up feeling as though these institutions that their parents venerate are corrupt, incompetent, parochial, self-interested, just bad.

en, through the course of the: 1960

DAN RICHARDS: Vietnam, that is.

MARC DUNKELMAN: Yes. Bull Connor and the Jim Crow establishment, that's a centralized institution in the South that is really bad. It's bigoted. You get stuff like the scourge of pesticides put on American agriculture, approved by the purported regulators, that lead to birth defects, DDT. That's exposed by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

You get exposure of the way the institutions that are supposed to regulate the auto industry are allowing the big three automakers to put out cars that are, by the title of Ralph Nader's book, Unsafe at Any Speed.

You're getting the downstream effects of urban renewal, which was a federal program, centralized institutions that were clearing whole blocks, often of minority neighborhoods, certainly of working class and poor neighborhoods, and just leaving rubble in their wake, never taking any time to resettle people. And the Jeffersonian impulse emerges as a reaction to it.

DAN RICHARDS: As Marc put it, by the Nineteen Seventies, this desire among many on the left to prevent big government from doing bad things, which they saw occurring.

MARC DUNKELMAN: It moves from this fringe complaint about the establishment, to becoming the very essence of our political agenda. And at that point, you're getting elected as Democrats to very high office, progressives who are very suspicious of power.

And so, by the late '70s, progressivism itself, its aims are no longer to build up institutions. Instead, we want to push them down, erect new gauntlets to ensure that a Robert Moses type or a Robert McNamara type or Bull Connor or you name the old establishment figure, we want to create barriers to ensure that those kinds of characters are no longer given the authority to bulldoze all the objections to what they want to do.

DAN RICHARDS: One way that progressives around this time aimed to do that, as you write, is by putting a lot more emphasis on process and procedure, when it comes to what the government does, as opposed to the end goals. What exactly does that mean, to be more focused on process and procedure? What did that look like?

MARC DUNKELMAN: So the thing that Robert Moses could do, or that any of these people with real power in the establishment could do, is make decisions at their own discretion.

So the bridge was going to be built across the river. It could have been built at any of these spots along the edge of the river. They got to choose where they thought it was best for the country and the region. And the people that were in the way of the place that they chose, basically had no way of saying, stop.

So the way that progressives imagined that they could stop the next wannabe Robert Moses from doing something similar is to say, let's give the people, who he might otherwise trample, all sorts of opportunities to object. That they should have community meetings for them to weigh in. That there should be opportunities for people to demand that the government study what the environmental implications are. That there should be protections for certain kinds of buildings that are historically significant. That there should be mined, paid to the economic consequences for people, say, who are fishing in the river or using the river for commercial means. That we should make sure that the areas that are bulldozed to make way for the supports, for the bridges, are not exclusively of one race or of a lower socioeconomic status.

That in each of these cases, we can create a checklist of requirements and demand that the people who are, quote, unquote, "deciding where the bridge goes," meet all of these demands. That they have properly studied, the economic consequences, the environmental consequences, the noise consequences. And that they have done that for the other options.

And that if they have not properly followed the process, as delineated in legislation or in regulation, that a private party would be able to bring suit to stop the project, on the basis of the fact that they had not done the process correctly.

And that in theory is great. You do want Robert Moses to be taking into account all of these various issues, when he is thinking through which projects to do and where to place roads and where to place housing projects. You want those things.

But if the process is loaded up so thoroughly that you're taking lots of things into account, and that each person who has an objection can use any of these levers, you get to a point where there are too many vetoes in the system.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, and this brings us maybe to the beginning of the answer of the question you maybe had when you were going into Penn Station of, why can't the Penn Station be rebuilt? And it's some of these layers of processes that make it so difficult. Does that seem like it answered your Penn Station question in the end, or were there other--

MARC DUNKELMAN: Yes. In the Penn Station story itself, it's even more complicated because it's New York. But you've got the state is interested in doing it. Amtrak, they own the station, but they don't care what the station is like. They just want to get more people on trains. They're interested in the train tracks, so they don't want their money going towards that.

You've got the owners of Madison Square Garden who sit above Penn Station. You've got the residents of the local community, the historic preservationists. You've got just a whole variety of generally well-intentioned participants in the negotiations.

The core of it is that in two or three generations earlier, Robert Moses would have said, this is what we're going to do, and that's what we would have done. And there would have been no requirement that he consider these various objections or countervailing concerns. All of these things, he would have just plowed through them.

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DAN RICHARDS: Instead--

en Eighties. I'm commuting in: 2013

DAN RICHARDS: Once again, this is not just about one train station in one city in America. Whether we're talking about building high speed rail in California, green infrastructure in the Northeast, or housing across the entire US, so many projects today that progressives would love to see happen. Marc argues, fail because of progressives, and specifically the operationalization of this progressive impulse to make sure that power isn't abused. It wasn't a conclusion Marc expected or relished.

MARC DUNKELMAN: I would have loved nothing more than to have come through the research for this book and been able to say, this is all the Republicans. This is a legacy of the Reagan administration. George W. Bush did X, Y, and Z. Trump made it worse with, A, B, and C.

Just a fair rendering of what's happened since the '50s, '60s, and '70s, is that in most of these cases, the bulk of the culpability for government not working is our progressive doing. And that's the element that I think, that progressives themselves have yet to grapple with.

DAN RICHARDS: And I guess, a question then that would follow for me is, what is an alternate path? If we have seen what the Robert Moseses of the world can do and the damage they can do when left unchecked, and we see the stasis now that any progressive who lives in any city anywhere is probably frustrated with the rate something's getting built, what's a middle path, or do we have to-- is there a middle path?

MARC DUNKELMAN: I think that there is, and there has to be. You're absolutely right. We have at the Hamiltonian extreme, Robert Moses doing the Cross Bronx Expressway. We have at the Jeffersonian extreme, Penn Station just being left as a rat's nest for decades.

And the thing that we did was that we've replaced discretion with process. I think that we can reform the process so that everyone has a voice, but no one has a veto.

So Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their book, Abundance, which came out a month after mine, Ezra has made famous this what he calls the everything bagel problem. And his view is that progressives see a project, and they want to get it done. And then they add all of these additional requirements that all the labor needs to be paid a certain amount of money, a living wage. That all the steel needs to be domestically manufactured, that no environmental harm can come. Any harm that does come needs to be mitigated. No minority neighborhood can-- blah blah, blah.

DAN RICHARDS: There needs to be childcare for workers at new factories was one notable stipulation in the CHIPS act, for example.

MARC DUNKELMAN: Correct. And so that drives up the expense. It drives up the time, and it's almost impossible to get the project done.

My concern is that in the end, there's no one empowered or assigned the role of ratifying the tradeoff of saying, yes, we want to have the materials manufactured domestically. That's going to be a 10% premium? OK. Oh, it's going to be a 200% premium? No. We're going to then buy the materials from overseas. That's not worth it. That we've done a year's worth of work on the environmental implications. This design has 5% fewer detriments to the environment than this other one, but is three times more expensive. We're going to do a little bit more damage to the environment in order to save that cost. Or maybe the other way around. But ultimately, someone needs to be put in charge of that decision.

And that's just not the way that the process works right now. We've gone from one where there is essentially Robert Moses or whomever it is who can make the decision entirely on their own, to another where almost anyone can throw sand in the gears. And we need one where everyone has a voice, but no one has a veto.

DAN RICHARDS: When thinking about any move back towards some more centralized power or hierarchical power, I think some pushback you hear is that in the long history of authorities in the US making tough tradeoffs, like you were just describing, that when those tough choices have to get made, disproportionately marginalized communities and people are the ones who get the short end of that stick and get harmed in those tradeoffs.

And we know that history. We know what's going to happen. The sewage plant is going to get built in the poor part of town. And that it's not a risk we can take because it's been proven so consistent in history. What would you say to that argument?

MARC DUNKELMAN: I'd say three things. First is the core of the criticism is correct. The second thing is this balance, as you say, between centralized power and diffused power, is cyclical through American history. Sometimes power seems to be concentrated. Sometimes it seems too diffused.

In my view, it's too diffused right now. And we need to make some way back, hopefully not to the point where we're back at Robert Moses. But right now, it's too diffused so that we can't get things done.

And so the third thing that I would say is, you're absolutely right to be concerned that if we did give someone more discretion to make these decisions, even if we created some protections, that the short end of the stick would go to the community of color or the community of working class families. But that the element now is that those families aren't being served by government.

DAN RICHARDS: Because government isn't getting stuff done in it?

MARC DUNKELMAN: Right. If the idea is to create a clean energy economy, it's those neighborhoods that are going to have fewer carbon-emitting buses that create asthma in the community. So we'll have cleaner buses. But in order to do that, you need to have clean energy infrastructure.

In all of these cases, the beneficiaries should be people who have fewer means or who have been marginalized, and government can't serve them right now.

And then, worse, if Democrats are the party of government and government doesn't work, voters are going to notice that. And if they're paying attention, it's almost as though we're rolling out the red carpet for Donald Trump to steal their support.

Government needs to be competent. It needs to be able to make tradeoffs. It needs to be able to make decisions. It needs to be able to do things expeditiously, so that people have faith in government and will remain loyal to the party that wants authentically to do well for those who are without.

DAN RICHARDS: But I can't help but think at the same time, It's not like the progressives have done nothing. Recently, I think our last president passed a massive infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act. And the Democratic president before that, Obama, overhauled health care in a pretty profound way. The Democratic party still does some big things from time to time. Is it fair to lay this atrophy all at the hands of progressives, or were the people opposing progressives playing an active role in this destruction as well?

MARC DUNKELMAN: Well, let me answer that in two ways. First, Republicans should not be given a free hand here. They have not been helpful. Their view is that if you just got government out of the way, all these problems would be fixed on their own. That seems laughable to me. There are lots of examples in American history where the free market by itself does not serve people well, and then people are left behind. And then that's a real scourge. So the notion that government is by itself always the wrong answer is utterly wrong, in my view.

So let's ascribe that problem to them. But also recognize, if you are progressive, our job is to find a way to pick off support from those who would otherwise vote for them, and provide them with a better alternative.

I don't have any influence over the conservatives. I'm not a conservative. I don't share their ideology. My goal cannot be to scream at them so that they begin to share my point of view. That's not a productive use of my time.

What I can do is try to encourage us to provide a more compelling vision of what government can do, and to show that government is an effective tool to people who are on the margins.

So if you look to your point, you're absolutely right. We passed a bunch of bills, both under Obama and under Biden recently, that we're all providing money and real resources to do big things.

So among those things, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill included $7.5 billion to put up electric vehicle chargers in nodes of the Federal Highway system that otherwise wouldn't have them built. That was passed in Twenty Twenty-One. By the time Biden is leaving in Twenty Twenty-Four, $7.5 billion later, only a few dozen had been built.

Now, there are very logical explanations for that. Biden and the Biden administration did not have a federal workforce that was able to do this in the way that the Tennessee Valley Authority, 90 years earlier, had been able to connect poor farms in the upper South to the grid. The utilities in those local spaces needed to run wires to the places where they were going to put up these new electric vehicle chargers. It was a very complex, cumbersome process.

But if you were an ordinary citizen and you know that if you were to buy an electric car, that you could call an electrician and have them install a charger on your garage, even in the course of a day or two, here we are three years later and these charging stations aren't up. It's an outrage to the ordinary consumer.

DAN RICHARDS: I was going to say, as you were describing the importance, for so many progressive causes, of a effective, ambitious, dare I say, efficient central government, you've been working on this book for a long time. It comes out right, as President Trump is in a second term, and there's all this talk about government efficiency. And we are going to streamline government, get rid of bureaucrats who are maybe gumming up the works in various ways. Some of the language sounds like similar language that could be used by progressives who are advocating the type of reform you are, but clearly, I think it's to very different ends. So I wonder, just what have you made of this moment?

MARC DUNKELMAN: Well, you're absolutely right. It is a confusing moment. And for me to recommend at the moment of the beginning of Donald Trump's second administration, that we give more unfettered power to the executive branch for progressives to be arguing that, seems particularly noteworthy. And rarely do I have an interview where somebody doesn't ask me about it. So you're absolutely right.

I'd say first that the core notion that, in its best form, DOGE and what Elon Musk is doing is controversial. There are certain things that he's done that progressives have reacted to furiously, that seem entirely reasonable to me.

Asking federal bureaucrats, what have they accomplished in the last week, that is a question that people in the private sector are asked all the time. And if they're not producing, they are let go.

And I think that progressives should view the federal bureaucracy in much the same way. If people are not actually adding value to the public interest, as they collect a salary from the taxpayer, that should be very angering for those of us who are progressive as well.

So there's a place where I was put off by criticism of Musk, but that's on the margins. More interesting to me is that the people that he's firing are, in many cases, the people that helped move things through those series of hurdles and barriers.

So it sounds like the narrative in his mind is that these people are gumming up the works. And so if we get rid of them, things will be decided more expeditiously. But that's exactly wrong. The problem is the underlying gauntlet, and these people are doing their damnedest to move projects forward. So you're going to get rid of the people that are speeding things along. It's just going to take longer. It's really, really counterproductive.

More to the point, and this is the final point about this, people are frustrated that government isn't working. And so they've turned to these guys to take a sledgehammer to the system.

And we may not like that, but the solution to that is not saying, let's preserve the system as it was. Our voice should be, people are right, the government doesn't work, and we're going to find ways to make it work more expeditiously.

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DAN RICHARDS: And as Marc sees it, if progressives did that and dedicated themselves to making government work more effectively and efficiently, once again, it wouldn't just be good for people who say they want a new Penn Station. It would also be good politics for progressives.

MARC DUNKELMAN: I know so many progressives who spend every election night watching their television white knuckled, not knowing, just hoping that they've done enough to convince the country that Trump and Republicans are bad. And that's a terrible way to live your life, one election to the next.

What we ought to be doing is spending our time thinking, what are the things we can change about our own creed that will make us more appealing to those same people, so we don't have to worry about Trump?

That's what this book was written to do. This is a wake-up call to progressives, that there are things that we can do ourselves now. Set the Republicans aside, set the screaming aside. What are the things that we can do with our own agenda that would make it so that government works, so that people felt comfortable casting ballots for our preferred candidates in elections moving forward?

DAN RICHARDS: Well, it is certainly a wake-up call of a book, and I hope anyone interested in the future of progressivism picks it up. So, Marc Dunkelman, thank you so much for coming on to Trending Globally.

MARC DUNKELMAN: Thanks so much for having me. Great conversation.

DAN RICHARDS: This episode of Trending Globally was produced by me, Dan Richards, and Zack Hirsch, with production assistance from Errol Danahy. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield. Additional music by the Blue Dot Sessions.

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And if you haven't subscribed to our show, please do that too. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode of Trending Globally.

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