Marc Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works

Progressives in the 1960s and 1970s created institutions which paralyze government

Nolan Gray asks: why did blue-state, Democratic-run cities switch from pro-growth policies to anti-growth policies in the 1960s and 1970s? And why did this not happen in red states?

In the recent book Why Nothing Works, Marc Dunkelman describes two conflicting ideas in progressive politics, which he calls Hamiltonian, the need for big government to counterbalance big corporations and deliver public services; and Jeffersonian, suspicion and mistrust of power, whether private or public.

Since the 1960s and 1970s, the balance has swung heavily to the Jeffersonian side, and its suspicion of power (including the power of the government) has been institutionalized in protracted public consultation and judicial review.

The upshot is that governments (especially in blue states) seem practically paralyzed, able to do very little without exerting enormous effort.

On public consultation and the impossibility of consensus:

The unspoken presumption was that if everyone was simply able to voice their objection—and if those in positions of power were made to incorporate those concerns into their planning—only worthwhile initiatives would move forward. We wouldn’t have all these problems, reformers told themselves, if we just made democracy more authentically democratic. You wouldn’t need a Robert Moses–type Establishment figure to champion the public interest if you let members of the public champion their interests on their own.

That ethos had girded progressive thinking when a Democratic Congress passed, and President Nixon eventually signed, the National Environmental Policy Act. At the time, legislators had wanted to force bureaucrats to consider all the potential impacts of any given decision. And in their conception, once all the potential concerns were on the table, the people in charge would presumably craft solutions that addressed community concerns. They would steer the highway around the town green, rather than through. They would require “scrubbers” atop polluting smokestacks, rather than let the toxic air permeate the surrounding area. They would restrict new housing construction so that it would not impact those already living in the neighborhood.

Progressives now wanted to apply that approach across the whole of the policymaking landscape. If government had gone wrong, progressives told themselves, it was because ordinary people hadn’t been able to get a word in edgewise. Fix that element, and things could be steered right. For that reason, voice became a kind of sine qua non for many in the movement.

What progressives rarely acknowledged in this turn—what they still struggle to accept today—is that voice is not in and of itself a strategy for weighing the trade-offs born in public policy. It’s not sufficient simply to engage a community worried about getting bulldozed by a highway project, or devalued by a proposed homeless shelter, or skunked up by the rank smells coming from a new factory nearby. Few of those directly affected will be inclined to be more accommodating simply because they’ve been consulted, or given more time to object, or provided a platform to voice their opinion earlier in the process.

No one is ever going to divine a forum where, simply by dint of everyone articulating their concerns, a controversial proposal elicits universal support. The residents of the South Bronx would have been unlikely to support the Cross Bronx Expressway even if Moses had been willing to negotiate the route. And that was (and is) the problem: at its most benign, participation is ineffective; but if given real teeth, it holds the potential to render government incapable of making hard choices.

On judicial review:

McLean’s ruling also pointed the way for aggrieved parties like the Road Review League to utilize the courts more effectively. If the government hadn’t followed the proper procedures—if, in exercising their discretion, policymakers had failed to weigh the relevant concerns properly, or had neglected to investigate the potentially adverse consequences, or had looked past impacts that should have been considered before making a decision—then a purportedly expert decision could be struck down. That sort of procedural oversight could well deem the government’s decision “arbitrary and capricious,” to use the phrase from 1946’s Administrative Procedure Act. In other words, ordinary citizens couldn’t question an expert’s discretion, but they could challenge the process the experts had used to come to their decisions.

While Hamiltonian voices were promising to build more housing to replace what had been lost through programs ranging from urban renewal to Rockefeller’s prized Urban Development Corporation, reformers were more drawn to an alternative strategy. Far from wanting to transfer more power up to the likes of Lyndon Johnson or Nelson Rockefeller, progressives were driven to cut the nation’s power brokers down. And suing over flaws in process proved to be a mechanism to do exactly that.

Best yet, this particular Jeffersonian strategy did not require reformers to hatch grand schemes to repeal the programs big government was employing, or even to divine alternative ways to accomplish the big problems those big programs had been designed to allay.

Using the courts, they could simply argue that even minor elements of the processes the big bureaucracies used to make even minor decisions were, for example, “arbitrary and capricious.” That was all the leverage they would need; here was a way to align the movement’s agenda with its cultural aversion to power.

Dunkelman quotes Michael Skelly, who spent a decade trying to connect wind farms in Oklahoma to the Tennessee Valley grid: “You could have Robert Moses come back from the dead and he wouldn’t be able to do shit.”

More

• America’s Democrats should embrace “abundance liberalism.” The Economist, March 2025. Review of Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and Why Nothing Works.

• This Is Why Your Holiday Travel Is Awful. Marc Dunkelman, Politico, November 2019. A long article on the history of Penn Station and failed attempts to upgrade it.

• Progressives Say They Want Clean Energy. They Held Up This Hydro Project for Years. Marc Dunkelman, Politico, February 2025.