View this post on the web at [link removed]

In February 2009, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), an unprecedented $787 billion stimulus package touted as a way to put Americans back to work and stimulate economic activity in the wake of the global financial crisis. While much of the law’s largesse went to extending unemployment benefits, reducing taxes and providing aid to states, what captured the public imagination was the infrastructure element: The act included $48 billion in transportation funding to repair roads and bridges, spiff up national parks, upgrade government technology, improve public buildings and undertake other such projects said to be “shovel ready.”
Before his inauguration in January 2009, President Obama said after meeting with a group of governors, “All of them have projects that are shovel ready, that are going to require us to get the money out the door.” History indicated that it could be done: In 1933, within 90 days of its establishment, the Civilian Conservation Corps had more than a quarter of a million workers on its payroll. Bearing in mind that precedent and the incoming president’s promise, ARRA’s drafters gave agencies 90 days to begin getting shovels in dirt.
But it was not to be. In the seven months following ARRA’s passage, the Department of Transportation managed to spend less than 9% [ [link removed] ] of its allocation under the law. Many of the infrastructure projects ostensibly funded by ARRA were already funded by other appropriations [ [link removed] ]; existing employees whose paychecks were never in doubt were counted as “jobs saved.”
The bureaucracy created by a progressive governance between 1933 and 2009 was the law’s worst enemy; all told, ARRA-funded projects required some 192,705 reviews under the National Environmental Planning Act (NEPA) before they could be implemented. By October 2010, President Obama famously admitted [ [link removed] ], “There’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.”
The increasingly glacial pace of public projects is the topic of Marc Dunkelman’s “Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress―and How to Bring It Back [ [link removed] ],” out later this month. Dunkelman, a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute, is one of the leading voices on the American left arguing for taking seriously fundamental challenges of whether and how government can deliver, and his experience and deep thinking on the subject come through in this valuable volume.
Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian Impulses
“Why Nothing Works” is written by a progressive, for progressives, about the history of American progressivism and its attitude to, well, progress. Dunkelman convincingly argues that throughout its history, American progressivism has been the “awkward marriage of two very different impulses”: a Hamiltonian desire to centralize power, move quickly and run roughshod over naysayers; and a Jeffersonian instinct that is deeply suspicious of concentrated power, fond of diffuse authority and fiercely protective of individual rights.
In the current era, Dunkelman argues that progressivism has become too Jeffersonian and needs to course-correct to embrace a more Hamiltonian ethos. “Once committed to galvanizing experts to tackle big problems,” Dunkelman writes, the progressive movement “has more recently turned in the other direction.” In short, the progressive reaction to all-powerful 20th-century builders like Robert Moses and the “best and brightest” brainboxes of the Kennedy White House who led America into the Vietnam War was to swing too far in the other direction.
Dunkelman’s history of progressivism is well written and impressive, especially because of the usual short shrift modern progressives typically pay to their intellectual tradition and historical antecedents. Relative to conservatives (and certainly relative to neoconservatives, classical liberals and libertarians), progressive intellectuals and journalists show little interest in their forebears aside from political actors. “Why Nothing Works” is valuable as a relatively concise history of what might be called 20th-century applied progressivism, written from the perspective of a partisan.
“Why Nothing Works” details how progressives have tried to square the circle of wanting to accomplish big things while at the same time fearing concentrated power. The result has been abominations like NEPA, which its framers believed would simply cause planners to think a bit more about the environmental consequences of their decisions. The law’s end result has been to throw spanners in the works of even small projects, with NEPA weaponized (sometimes in service of protecting wholly fictional species [ [link removed] ]) by interest groups to stop things from being built [ [link removed] ].
Special Interests
This is in part because of an explosion of “interests” masquerading as “rights.” Somewhere along the line, progressives and progressive-driven policies began to confuse interests and rights, and much of the modern Jeffersonian impulse is devoted to protecting the former using the language of the latter. Well-defined property rights combined with bargaining to fair and efficient outcomes is a vastly preferable means to achieve progress than the progressive impetus to either empower strongmen or use “voice” in the form of interminable public meetings and hearings. (Dunkelman is a critic of using “voice” excessively as a means of disguising the tradeoffs inherent in policymaking; the section “Veto by Voice” in chapter 6 is especially strong, though it fails to distinguish legitimate liberal rights from those merely asserted by activists.) Part of the effort to reset progressivism will entail separating actual rights from mere interests, protecting the former while expeditiously making decisions that balance the latter.
Because Dunkelman is writing for a progressive audience who he wants to take seriously the role of government in driving progress, it’s to be expected that he pulls his punches somewhat when writing about his team and comes out aggressively in denouncing the other tribe. But sometimes his descriptions of the progressive movement—or at least the most energetic and vocal of its tendencies—feel two decades out of date.
Consider his claim that “[p]ublic officials can’t fight climate change, or address the nation’s housing crisis, or enhance the country’s infrastructure because of strictures progressives themselves have installed to protect the public from abuse. Conservatives, of course, haven’t been helpful on those fronts.” The first sentence is no doubt true (at least in part), and much of the book is dedicated to a thorough explication of that thesis. But it also hides the political reality of the modern progressive coalition.
Bluntly put, a significant part of the progressive coalition views climate and infrastructure spending—not to mention DEI and diversity scams—first and foremost as opportunities for payouts for its members. No doubt many progressives care deeply about addressing climate change and other challenges. But approximately zero progressive climate change proposals are designed to do as much as possible to address that problem (subject to budget constraints); rather, they’re larded with giveaways to organized labor, various disadvantaged groups, vocal members of the progressive coalition and all manner of consultants and NGOs. “Green jobs” tend to be much more about obtaining these perks than actually mitigating climate change—and not coincidentally, shoring up a bloc of solid Democratic voters. Similarly, it is wealthy progressives (and their “anti-gentrification” cat’s-paws) who are among the most vocal and powerful opponents of building new housing.
Dunkelman is correct that there are deep philosophical divides and contradictions within progressivism. But there is also the cynical self-dealing of members of the progressive coalition who, in seeking rents for their groups and payouts for themselves, deserve more than a little of the blame. At best it’s an example of what Ezra Klein calls everything-bagel progressivism [ [link removed] ] run amok; at worst it’s simply the latest iteration of mau-mauing the flak catchers [ [link removed] ].
Progressive Conservatives, Conservative Progressives
On many of these fronts, conservatives are much more progress-oriented than Dunkelman lets on. Indeed, they are often much more into progress than progressives. Texas, which hasn’t elected a statewide Democrat since 1994, has become the solar energy capital [ [link removed] ] of America in no small part because of Republican policy choices. Red-hued states routinely build more housing [ [link removed] ] than blue states, and progressive cities (especially, but not entirely, in California’s Bay Area) are where constraints on building new homes remain the toughest. On many of the issues where Dunkelman rightly decries the progressive coalition as no longer being able to deliver, conservative states are quietly producing results that would have been the envy of progressives of another era.
Dunkelman is clear that on many of the topics he covers, the left-right divide is not always cut-and-dried. He is quick to point out bootlegger and Baptist coalitions [ [link removed] ], such as environmental groups joining with fossil fuel companies to stop the construction of a distribution line carrying hydropower from Canada to Massachusetts. Indeed, among Dunkelman’s valuable contributions to progressive political discourse is that he pulls back from the popular but ill-founded assumption that the left always wants to grow government and the right always wants to shrink it.
The truth is much more nuanced than that; for instance, as he writes, much of the Democratic energy around deregulation in the mid-to-late 1970s was due to progressive distrust of concentrated power. Earlier in that decade, Dunkelman writes, “Nixon’s promise to fight for America’s ‘silent majority’ against the institutional elite wasn’t so different from cynicism typified by C. Wright Mills, Abbie Hoffman, Eldridge Cleaver, Rachel Carson, and Ralph Nader.”
Both left- and right-wing politics wax and wane in their love and fear of energetic, powerful governments, and expansions and retrenchments occur when those peaks and nadirs synchronize. Through this lens, we can make sense of not only conflicted progressive views of power, but also the current embrace in some right-wing quarters of an activist and interventionist federal government.
Most of “Why Nothing Works” is about physical public projects and bureaucratic institutions: the Tennessee Valley Authority, policing, roads and railroads, welfare, housing. In these cases, progressive energy was once found in building new things and reforming existing ones. But much of modern progressivism is deeply conservative in a way that goes beyond the procedural vetocracy, established in the 1970s and beyond, that Dunkelman documents.
Progressivism today is concerned largely with challenges to progressive cultural dominance and redoubts of power. Success is defined first and foremost as preserving the status quo—the makeup of the civil service, the sway of imperious proclamations of the credentialed expert class, the left-wing slant of an academy that brooks little dissent, a progressive tax code.
Progressives see changes to the status quo—think of the Dobbs decision, or the current dismantling of the immoral and illegal system of racial preferences practiced by the federal government—as anathema. The Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian impulses that Dunkleman identifies as the yin and yang of 150 years of progressive thought may still be present, but they have in the past decade taken a back seat to grubbier questions about social status, group identity, racial spoils and (one might say) standing athwart history yelling “fascism!”
None of this, of course, is Dunkelman’s fault. Indeed, one could plausibly argue that the infatuation with culture warring, signaling and identitarianism on the left today was aided and abetted by progressives’ inability to use the levers of power as they once did to build and reform. When you forget how to do things of substance, doing purely symbolic things becomes all the more important.
Looking Ahead
Progressivism today stands at a crossroads. Dunkelman is right that progressives need to reacquaint themselves with the part of their tradition that once prized building things and reforming bureaucracy. What started as an attempt to create procedural safeguards against a Robert Moses-style colossus bestriding communities and cities has morphed into a Kafkaesque vetocracy that fuels the crises progressives once sought to ameliorate. Fixing this will require progressive activists, intellectuals and politicians to place the substantive above the symbolic and address tradeoffs—including for members of their own coalition—that they typically are loath to admit.
Dunkelman points progressives in the right direction. But ultimately, if they want to succeed, it’s not just their narrative that needs to change—it’s their entire political economy. That means taking tradeoffs, opportunity cost, rights, dispersed knowledge and incentives seriously. Clearing away hurdles that drive up costs or entirely prevent building new private and public projects and infrastructure is a worthy goal, and changing current progressive narratives in this regard is necessary, even if it is not sufficient.
The quality of public services is not fixed: Governments work better in some states and countries than in others, and quality waxes and wanes over time. Some departments work relatively well; others are total basket cases. Some civil servants are hardworking and fastidious; others channel Bartleby [ [link removed] ]. The challenge of our age is reforming institutions that can be reformed, jettisoning those that are no longer fit for purpose and possessing the wisdom to differentiate the two. The knowledge problems inherent in the public sector can’t be overcome with enough models, compute or expertise, and the task will always fall to classical liberals and conservatives to remind progressives of this fact.
We can debate the proper size and scope of government, but both progressives and conservatives should be able to agree that when the public sector sets out to do something, it should do it relatively well and provide value for money to taxpayers. Dunkelman does a great service in reinforcing this with his audience. One hopes that, before it’s too late, progressives will heed his admonitions.

Unsubscribe [link removed]?