In this WhoWhatWhy podcast we talk with Marc Dunkelman, whose recent book, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — and How to Bring It Back, uncovers the real reasons why America has lost its ability to build and manufacture. 

The nation that constructed interstate highways and reached the moon now takes decades just to fix a bridge or add housing.

The culprit? A fundamental shift in progressive thinking itself.

Dunkelman reveals how a deep distrust of and “cultural aversion to power” emerged in the 1960s and gradually transformed governance. 

What began as well-intentioned safeguards against political overreach has created a paralysis where anyone can veto almost anything. Progressives replaced discretionary authority with procedural obstacles — environmental reviews, endless community meetings, and litigation tools that allow virtually anyone to block progress.

The frustrating result: Billions in infrastructure funding sit idle while America’s competitors — especially China — continue to construct megaprojects at breathtaking speed: entire cities, thousands of miles of high-speed rail, and advanced infrastructure that makes America’s aging systems look increasingly obsolete.

This isn’t just about slow permit approvals or environmental reviews. It’s about whether America can maintain its global position when planes literally fall apart midair and our most vital systems crumble. And, as Dunkelman explains, this is fundamentally a cultural problem that tariffs, trade policies, or traffic studies can’t fix — it requires rethinking our relationship with power and authority at the deepest level.

Dunkelman, a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute and former Democratic political staffer who worked in both the Senate and House of Representatives, makes the case that progressives must rediscover their Hamiltonian roots and strike a better balance between oversight and the concentrated authority needed to accomplish big things again.

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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)

Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. Why can’t America seem to get anything done anymore? Why has a nation that once built the interstate highway system, won World War II, and landed on the moon, now become a place where fixing a bridge or building new housing can take decades? My guest, Marc Dunkelman, has a provocative answer and it’s not the one you might expect. In his new book, Why Nothing Works, Who Killed Progress and How to Bring It Back, he argues that progressivism itself, or at least a particular strain of it, bears significant responsibility. This conversation couldn’t be more timely as we’re witnessing a surge of interest in what’s being called progress studies or the abundance agenda. From Catherine Boyle’s work on building to Ezra Klein’s discussions of supply-side progressivism, there’s a growing recognition across the political spectrum that America has lost its ability to build and execute at scale. The issue strikes at the heart of America’s position in the world. The recent Boeing crisis, with planes literally falling apart in midair, symbolizes how even our most iconic industrial champions have lost their edge. Meanwhile, China continues to construct megaprojects at breathtaking speed. Entire cities, thousands of miles of high-speed rail, massive bridges, and advanced infrastructure that makes America’s aging systems look increasingly obsolete. These aren’t just quality of life differences. They represent fundamental questions about governance, industrial policy, and national competitiveness in an era of renewed great power competition. As trade wars intensify and supply chains become weapons in geopolitical struggles, America’s inability to build and maintain crucial infrastructure and manufacturing capacity has become a national security vulnerability. This isn’t merely a progressive or conservative issue, but an existential American challenge. Joining me to talk about this today is Marc Dunkelman. He’s a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and a former fellow at NYU’s Marin Institute of Urban Management. During more than a decade working in politics, he worked for Democratic members of both the Senate and the House and as a senior fellow at the Clinton Foundation. He’s the author of the previous book, The Vanishing Neighbor, and his work has appeared in numerous publications. It is my pleasure to welcome Marc Dunkelman here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast to talk about why nothing works, who killed progress, and how to bring it back. Marc, thanks so much for joining us. Marc Dunkelman Thanks so much for having me. I’m thrilled to have this conversation. Richard Averbeck Well, it is a delight to have you here. Certainly, this change, this lack of progress didn’t happen overnight. Talk a little bit about what you see as some of the inflection points in all of this because certainly there was a time when we could build, when we could do big things, when we could make progress.

Marc Dunkelman: Marc Dunkelman Well, the crucial inflection point for progressives, I think, happens in the 1960s and 70s. Previous to that, the progressive movement had really, while being conflicted as it always has been, was really largely focused on moving power into bureaucracies that could do big things. The movement had been born at the turn of the century from a notion that robber barons and parochial politicians and political machines had distributed power so thoroughly that it was all self-interested. It was all wheeling and dealing. There was no ability to do a big thing. If you read the power broker, Roderick Carroll’s biography of Roderick Moses, sort of talking about the state of government in the early 20th century, it really is a frustration that the country has so much potential but it can’t organize itself into a way to do the things that it would later do. And so for a long time, progressivism was about investing bureaucracies like the Highway Administration or the Tennessee Valley Authority or the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, various blue-ribbon commissions and public authorities of all sorts. These were institutions that were able to cut through all the morass and just do the big thing, whether it was to build a dam or to wire the rural countryside or to establish a transit system or a sewer system or a school system. That was the progressive idea, was to build up these big institutes. And then in the 1960s and 70s, progressives woke up to see that the establishment that they themselves had helped to erect over the previous half-century was, in fact, itself a skirt. So it was the Robert McNamara types who had gotten us into Vietnam. It was the Robert Moses types of New York infamy from the power broker, which had ruined New York by building expressways through vibrant various neighborhoods. It was the bigwigs at the agriculture companies which had corrupted the regulatory bureaucracy that had allowed DDT to be sprayed on crops such that people were having horrific birth defects. It was the regulators who were in the pockets of the big three automakers who had allowed, as Ralph Nader put it, the GMs of the world to build cars that were unsafe at any speed. And so in that period, progressivism turns from an impulse to empower government to one which was really much more centrally focused on tying government down, on putting guardrails against the would-be Robert McNamaras and would-be Robert Moses who would do terrible things if put in positions of power. And so we’ve spent really the last 50 or 60 years, the progressive movement itself, not trying to empower government, but rather to put guardrails around the bureaucracies themselves. And we have essentially ourselves rendered government income.

Jeff Schechtman: It was also a broader cultural as much as political distrust of institutions that came out of that period, whether it was the idea of don’t trust anyone over 30 or just the failure of belief in the institutions of government and the institutions of bigness, even on the corporate level.

Marc Dunkelman: That’s exactly right. You see it begin to bubble up in the late 50s. C. Wright Mills writes about the power elite, and that begins to sort of inspire a sort of…exactly right, a cultural shift. You see it in some of the…in sort of the poetry, you know, Allen Ginsberg, you see it in the New Left. The Port Huron statement is sort of seminal in the notion, comes out in 1962. It’s these sort of…these buttoned-up liberal dudes who made it a labor retreat in Michigan. And they’re writing basically as progressives who hate the Kennedy administration. They don’t like this best and brightest stuff. They don’t like the sort of notion that Kennedy has, which is born right from the New Deal and from even Wilsonian internationalism, that government and centralized bureaucracy, putting real experts in charge will somehow solve things. What the Port Huron statement says as sort of a cultural document is that power should be returned to ordinary people, that there is…it’s sort of a back-to-the-land kind of mentality. The notion is that ordinary people are being oppressed by this establishment. And you’re absolutely right to say that, like, that is the…Walter Libman would call it the story in our heads. But that is the sort of…that becomes the preeminent idea in the minds of the progressive culture, which is, you know, sort of in funny ways is tied to the counterculture, to the civil rights movement, to the women’s rights movement, to the anti-war movement. You see it in all these things. But the element that ties them all together is this notion that there is some coercive force sort of situated above all of us, and that true happiness and true progress would come only from sort of retrieving that power and re-delivering it to ordinary people on the ground.

Jeff Schechtman: And it’s almost as if a step was missing because the movement becomes, as you say, about transferring power to ordinary people in a kind of self-actualizing way of the period, and it skipped the step of simply bringing that power to local government, to state government. It’s as if federalism didn’t exist as an idea during that period.

Marc Dunkelman: I think that’s right on some level. You know, what I would call a cultural aversion to power that emerges within the progressive movement isn’t directed exclusively at the federal level. It’s not just that they’re mad at the Pentagon for getting us into a bad war or Nixon or Johnson. It’s that they begin to look, progressives begin to look even within their own community at what they see as nefarious forces working behind closed doors. There’s a, you know, the sort of the degree to which today transparency is sort of the watchword of whole portions of the progressive movement, the sort of notion that something nefarious is happening behind closed doors. It’s during the same period that community boards become much more powerful in zoning in the sense that we’re trying to establish new institutions at the local level as well that are going to stop the local developer who has some special in with City Hall from, you know, demolishing a block or a neighborhood in order to put up some sort of, you know, Ayn Randian, Fountainhead supported project. And so in sort of all aspects, the notion is that if you hold power at the federal level, at the state level, at the local level, whoever hold power is corrupt. You know, there’s the old Lord Acton’s old aphorism, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Acton is a conservative, but it really becomes a watchword of the progressive movement. And you see it sort of in every nook and cranny. You know, there are these…to answer your previous question about how does the cultural change, by the 70s, there’s just a whole series of, you know, you see in the popular culture, the movies that are popular, The Graduate, right, is about, you know, the guy who recommends that the dust-evolving character go into plastics. He’s a symbol of the establishment. And the idea there is the establishment is inherently corrupt. In Network, right, the tagline is, I’m mad as hell, I’m not gonna take it anymore. In Chinatown, the evil character is a guy, a local character who is trying to…the villain is trying to steal water from the valley and bring it to LA. One flew over the cuckoo’s nest. There, Nurse Ratched is sort of a personification of the old establishment, which is so corrupt. The narrative that become central to progressive during this period is the narrative that informs that 1984 iconic ad in Berklee or Apple, where in 1984, and people are grayed out marching in uniform to the sound of a dictator, and someone uses a slingshot and brings freedom to everyone by tearing down the screen, and everyone is restored to humanity. And that is the feeling of the moment.

Jeff Schechtman: And it’s a reminder, and even with relevance to today, that we forget all too often that politics is really downstream of culture.

Marc Dunkelman: It’s absolutely true. It’s absolutely true. The impulse, particularly in the world of scholars is to look what happened within the civil rights movement at this moment, or trying to understand second wave feminism, or trying to understand the war, how the media interpreted this or that. But these are feelings, right? This is sort of a way of understanding the world. The previous progressive incarnation of the problem in the world was that the power was too diffuse, right? The problem back in the early 1900s was that you had all these robber barons and machine bosses, and they weren’t properly coordinated, so you couldn’t do big things. So Woodrow Wilson created the Federal Reserve, which was a centralized institution that would do monetary policy for the country. The problem when you got to issues like rural electrification, in the Tennessee Valley, the Upper South, there was a notion that people in the 1930s and 1920s were living 19th century lives, whereas the rest of the country had moved into the 20th century with electricity and modern conveniences, appliances, whatnot. And that the problem there was that left without a centralized note of authority, the private Marcet was not serving these people who lived in dire poverty. And so the notion then was the solution to this problem is to centralize before it, to put it in the hands of someone who is responsible and publicly minded. That was cultural. That was a cultural desire. And then in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, that switches. The notion is that those same institutions that progressives a generation earlier would have wanted to empower are actually coercive and need to be stripped down. But again, the story of power once venerated becoming vilified applies sort of across the board, sort of spread like butter across all of the various nodes of policymaking. And so it informs almost everyone everywhere who considers them a progressive when you ask them, what is the central challenge for progressivism beginning in the 60s, 70s, is how do we thwart the man or the system or the establishment so that it isn’t doing bad things? How do we re-diffuse authority?

Jeff Schechtman: And yet, come 1980, when Ronald Reagan comes along and argues for shrinking government and shrinking power, that becomes the conservative mantra and the progressives oppose that.

Marc Dunkelman: They do and they don’t. You know, it’s interesting when you look at the Harvard administration, this is sort of the moment that there’s a pivot. You see this strange coalition during the airline deregulation fight where Ralph Nader and Ted Kennedy, who represent the far left, and the sort of the Milton Friedman conservative economic University of Chicago crowd are aligned together against the big airline and the airline regulators. The CAB is the organization inside the federal government that is the Civil Aeronautics Board. And so you have this notion that it’s not exactly like the way we remember it today that Reagan was a Milton Friedman and the conservatives came and chopped away at government. But if you actually look back at the record, it’s pretty remarkable the degree to which the averting to power is really bubbling up in a powerful way within the progressive mindset. And so there’s a terrific book, the author, Paul Saban, wrote a book called, Public Citizens, who wrote a terrific book on Nader himself and sort of traces this shift within progressivism. But it’s not entirely fair, I think, to sort of lay at the feet of conservatism, the sort of notion that government was being vilified. Like post-Watergate, you look at the rhetoric from Democratic candidates like Gary Hart, who’s running for Senate from Colorado, and the central message of his campaign is, we are going to check the power play. I mean, it’s funny today because even in our own self-perception as progressive, people, and my peers, think of themselves, we are the party of government, we wanna build government up, we wanna build up social security, and we wanna do a more expansive healthcare network, and we can go through the various things that we wanna do. But the zeitgeist, sort of a division between the head and the heart, the zeitgeist, certainly then, and still to this day, in ways that I think we don’t appreciate, is to be suspicious of centralized authority.

Jeff Schechtman: But the solution for progressives, it seems that the solution they came up with is that, yes, we wanna do big things, and yes, we will need government to do these big things, but maybe we can deal with that or we can mitigate that by process.

Marc Dunkelman: I think that’s exactly right, that there is…the thing that was so remarkable about the old progressive approach was that when we decided to do the Tennessee Valley Authority in the early 1930s, or we decided to do MAS, or we decided to do the highway program, which was, by the way, a Roosevelt idea, even if the financing came through during the Eisenhower administration, which Roosevelt had wanted to do interstate. When we did those programs before the 50s, 60s, and 70s, or in the early days, the notion was to invest real decision-making authority, real discretion in the hands of these expert men generally, who were running these various institutes. You gave the parks commissioner in your town the power to say, this is going to be the park, this is the amenities that are gonna be in the park, this is when the park’s gonna be open. That man, almost by himself, could make changes and exercise his own discretion in making the rules and, you know, paving over this part of the park or making another part wild. That was the frustration with Robert Moses that Robert Caro expresses in The Power Breaker, is that Moses, during his 40-year reign as the most powerful man in New York City, is able to use his discretion to do all sorts of projects that ordinary people wouldn’t support. So he drives the Henry Hudson Parkway through Riverside Park, and he most famously drives the Cross-Bronx Expressway across the South Bronx through neighborhoods where he could have used alternative routes that were more disruptive. No one could stop him from using his discretion. And so the notion among progressives who see this as the real scourge of the establishment is how do we create a process by which the people who would otherwise be bulldozed or whose park would be closed or who were being affected by whatever government decision was being made would have entree into the process. And that meant creating mandates for community meetings, creating new moments where people could litigate if they didn’t agree with the decision, creating new studies that had to be done before government could move forward with a decision. But you’re absolutely right. The idea is we are going to replace the absolute discretion that existed during the establishment’s reign into a procedural republic where people are going to protect themselves.

Jeff Schechtman: And nowhere was that worse, arguably, than in California. I think that’s right.

Marc Dunkelman: You know, that is the broad view, is that there was a moment in 19…Richard Nixon signs the National Environmental Policy Act into law on January 1st, 1970, which is the law that is generally viewed as the beginning of the environmental impact statement movement where the federal government, if there’s going to be any federal money in a project, the initial idea is that they need to do…they need to essentially just have a conversation about the environmental implications of whatever that federal project is. But through a series of lawsuits and whatnot becomes that sort of this enormous burden of having to do endless studies. California then sort of mimics and, in fact, raises the stakes with the California Environmental Quality Act, which is signed into law, ironically, by Ronald Reagan. That sort of says…it applies not only to public projects, but to private projects. And the standard is not just that they need to discuss it and consider the environmental implications, but they need to mitigate. And so, like, those are distinctions that make the process more burdensome in California. To your point earlier, cultural shift in California, being liberal as it is, took the baton of trying to insert procedure over discretion and probably led the race.

Jeff Schechtman: And added one other layer onto that, which was this idea of trying to build consensus for projects and wanting those consensus to be almost universal.

Marc Dunkelman: I mean, this is the idea, the dream, the progressive dream, I think, is that on issues of public import, that there is some way, if everyone has their voice heard, that you will arrange a solution that serves everybody’s interest. So that if you present the public with, look, we need to build a water filtration plant somewhere in our municipality. No one really wants a sewage facility near them. But if you present that challenge to the community, that somehow there is a way to fight that facility in a way that will satisfy everyone. The reality, different from the hope, is that there is almost nothing you can do, no amount of explaining, no number of meetings, no meeting will build you an ice skating rink nearby that will make it so that people welcome a sewage filtration plant in their particular neighborhood. Everybody wants it built elsewhere. And so it is nice to dream that simply having a conversation or giving everyone voice will eventually bring the whole community together in support of whatever solution there is. But the reality is that there are trade-offs to be made in public policy. Nobody wants the highway to go through their neighborhood. Nobody wants the transmission lines to be near their child’s school. Nobody wants the filtration plant. Nobody wants the homeless shelter. Nobody wants this to affect them in particular, even if they understand that the community as a whole needs it. And so the notion that you can develop a process that will create universal acclimation for any proposal is fanciful. And if you give everyone at the table, that means, if you give everyone at the table a veto over any given proposal, it’s likely not to go anywhere. Because everyone will just say, well, I’d rather have it somewhere else. And this creates a dynamic of utter dysfunction. Someone in the end needs to choose when and where the bridge is built. Someone needs to choose where the filtration plant is constructed. Someone needs to make the trade-off about whether you’re going to put the transmission line across a forest in a way that endangers the species or near a school, because there are only so many different routes that you can take to get the clean energy from the place that it is generated to the place where it’s going to be expended. And if you can’t satisfy everyone, then someone needs to be empowered to make a trade-off or nothing will happen.

Jeff Schechtman: Which is what essentially has happened. And to add to all of this, what’s made it even worse, if one can imagine that, is that of a number of court rulings with respect to how district, local districts are drawn in communities, for boards of supervisors and for city councils, that there has been this push towards district elections versus at-large elections that has had a profound effect in slowing things down, because every politician is out for their own community.

Marc Dunkelman: There’s, you know, it’s sort of interesting to look at New York City as an example of this. You know, it used to be that Martin Latinosus was this sort of towering character that no one could even touch. He had an office on Randall’s Island, which was sort of set apart from all the rest of the five boroughs, set in the middle of the East River, which was sort of symbolic of the fact that, like, he was just remote. He wasn’t accessible in the way that you would expect someone who was making big policy decisions to be accessible. And as New York City moved away from the Roderick Moses mold, it wanted to push power down to, you know, the ordinary city councilmen and the mayor who were publicly accessible in a different kind of way. And one of the shifts to the point you just made was that there was a time when making zoning changes and approving projects was, you know, there was a process. It would go through the community board, it would go through the zoning commission and the planning commission, and then it would come to the city council for approval. And if there was something that was good for the city but bad for the immediate community surrounding a, you know, whatever it was, a homeless shelter or a waste transfer facility or what, the local member of the city council might vote against it, but that person would be overridden by the broad majority of members of the council who supported the idea. And then a few years ago, almost with very little notice, a new…it wasn’t by law, it was by practice, something emerged in New York, which was what is known in the world of political science as aldermanic privilege. Aldermanic privilege means that if you are the council person from whatever district it is, the council as a whole should vote with…should take your lead in how it judges any given proposal. So it might have been at one point that the rezoning of this little parcel in, you know, in the 7th council district was not something that people who live in the 7th council district like, but it was very important to the city as a whole. And so the city council would have voted for it even though the council person from the District 7 would have voted against it. Now, if the council member from District 7 says, I don’t like this, the other council members aware that when something happens in their district that they’ll expect everyone else to vote with them now vote in the same way. And the result is that each individual council member essentially has created for themselves a fiefdom where they can choose whether or not a project moves forward. And there are lots of stories of projects in New York, and this is true in other places around the country, of projects not going forward, not because the council, if given their, you know, if you look in the hearts and minds of members didn’t understand that the project was important for the city as a whole, but because the tradition now is to give the local community veto power over changes that might affect that community in particular. And like, you know, I think we should be careful here. Like that, like the other extreme, which is Robert Moses making the decision and there being no recourse is terrible, but one in which the local community has exclusive rights over what might happen even as it affects the broader region, that’s not terrible either. There is some balance of these two impulses that we need to find so that it can’t be that Robert Moses can pursue bad projects with no recourse, but it can’t be that good projects are perpetually orphaned because anyone objects.

Jeff Schechtman: Also, there’s the reality, and we see this over and over again in communities where projects are labeled as bad projects, and in some rare instances, they manage to get approved and get through, even though they may take a major protracted period of time. And then over time, they turn out to be good projects, and people look at them and wonder, what was the big deal about that? Why did we get so upset?

Marc Dunkelman: I think that’s right. You know, I don’t know how often the people who lead the effort to oppose a project have a change of heart later. I think in many cases, they have parochial self-interested reasons for opposing the project, right? They live in a nice suburb. They don’t want a multifamily erected in their neighborhood. And when it is, it may be that the value of their home comes down a little bit. Maybe it won’t, but maybe it might. I think, you know, there are quite cases where you’ve got marginalized communities, and they are afraid that if a new housing project is erected there, that it will be a beachhead for gentrification in the neighborhood, and that rents will rise, and that they’ll be forced to move to a new neighborhood. Like I think that really does happen. Like that is a risk of development. I don’t think that we should mitigate the notion that there are downsides to these projects. But you’re right, in a lot of cases, you know, there’s a long story I tell in my book about an effort to build a transmission line from Quebec, which had a surfeit of hydropower, meaning clean power generated by dam. And they wanted to use some of that extra power and bring it down into the Massachusetts grid so that Massachusetts could wean itself from its dependence on fossil fuel for, you know, for burning gas in order to power their grid. And this effort began more than 10 years ago, subsidies were offered to build the line in 2016 when Governor Charlie Baker, a progressive Republican from Massachusetts, signed a bill. And now we’re a decade later, and we can’t do it, or we haven’t yet done it, largely because of opposition, for fear of disrupting small sections of the north woods of Maine where the line would go through. I think that probably there would have been environmental impact, or there will be environmental impacts to building that transmission line. There is a rare species of orchid that few people have seen that lives in the northern woods of Maine, and its habitat will be impaired on the margins by this new transmission line that would come down south from Quebec through Maine and into Massachusetts. But the upside of doing that would be to essentially take 700,000 cars, you know, with tailpipe emission, take them off the road every year, the equivalent of taking 700,000 cars off the road. And that’s, to me, I’m not an orchid lover, but to me, that’s a trade-off worth doing. And so you wonder, if people approved that, and if we had had, you know, consider 700,000 cars, that’s been a decade, that’s 7 million cars annually, or collectively, taken off the road, that seems worth doing. And you wonder whether the people of Maine, seeing how that would impact, you know, the quality of air, the America’s effort to stem climate change, you know, of course, there’s another risk to those orchids. Would they have supported it? Probably 10 years seems too long to have as a gestation period for what is essentially some poles and a wire. But that’s where we are.

Jeff Schechtman: And, of course, we see it almost as a contagion where it has impacted so many communities and so many places and so many governments that the rules and regulations have become so extreme that nothing gets done, to get to the broader point of your book, that we can’t accomplish anything. And perhaps nothing proves that more than the attempt for high-speed rail in California.

Marc Dunkelman: I mean, I think, you know, to your earlier point that politics is downstream of culture, we’ve had a cultural shift. The cultural shift has made us culturally averse to power, to sort of jump to the conclusion that whoever wields control is inherently suspect. That impulse has created the impetus for us to create checks on power every quarter to demand transparency, to demand recourse and public meeting and more deliberation and further study in sort of all these ways that overlapped and interact. And the result is that a series of good intention, right? Nobody built these guardrails because they wanted to thwart all progress in all cases, I don’t think. I think in most cases, these programs and judicial opinions and procedures were created with the best of intentions to make sure that bad decisions didn’t get moved forward. The sort of the ulterior impact is that the even good ideas can’t get done. And you know, just for progressives who are overwhelmingly Democrats now, you know, the Democratic Party is the party of government, right? Like that is like whatever you think of us, you know, in the broader scheme of things, people view Democrats as the party of government and Republicans as the party of free enterprise, whether that’s exactly right or not, whatever. Like those are the thumbnail impression. And if government doesn’t work and Democrats are the party of government, that’s a real political lie though, right? Like we associate a party that means to use government to do good thing with a bureaucracy that fundamentally doesn’t work. And so, you know, the experience that we’ve all had at some point or another, we’re going to some government bureaucracy like the Department of the Motor Vehicle, and you know, you need to get your license renewed or your registration renewed or whatever it is, and you walk up to the front desk after standing in line and you say, I brought these documents and they say, oh, you brought only three proofs of your residency. We need four, right? And you realize you have to go back home and come back and it feels like, what is this? Right? It’s just a sort of a, throw up your hands, this is why government doesn’t work. We ought to privatize the whole thing, that feeling of frustration now applies across the spectrum. Our presumption is that government is inefficient. And it’s not just a presumption, people are seeing the effects, right? They are experiencing the rise in rents and housing prices. It’s harder and harder to afford a home because there aren’t enough homes, because we can’t build enough homes, because bureaucracies that feel and look like the Department of Motor Vehicles are holding up in their mind, and sometimes in truth, are holding up the opportunity to actually develop more units.

Jeff Schechtman: The irony is that it’s the progressives that have become traditional conservatives. They’ve become Burkean conservatives. We don’t want to change anything. We want it just the way it is now.

Marc Dunkelman: Yeah. And I don’t know that they think of it that way, but they do hear like something like about Elon Musk and Doge, or Donald Trump talking about the deep state, and their reaction isn’t, well, maybe there is some underlying kernel of truth to their indictment that government isn’t working. They say to themselves, ah, well, if Trump wants to cut government, then I want to preserve it. If Doge wants to eliminate this bureaucracy, then I want to preserve it. I don’t support Doge, or Trump, or any of those proposals, but they are getting at something the progressives need to get on with themselves, which is that if government isn’t working, that should be our hire. We should be angry about that. We should be making it so that decisions are made expeditiously, and that the processes aren’t so burdensome that developers choose not even to go out and bid on building new units in places where there’s clearly Marcet demand. It should be our mantra should be how to make government work more effectively. And absent that, it’s seemingly understandable to me that many people who would typically have supported us end up supporting the people that are at least acknowledging the fact that government isn’t working up to the standard that people should be right to expect.

Jeff Schechtman: The other part of that, to bring it back to where we were earlier, is that it’s not just about government working or not working, that there has to be an attitudinal change, a cultural change that goes along with that, because one without the other doesn’t solve the problem. Exactly right.

Marc Dunkelman: I mean, you know, there is this thing that happens in drag racing, which you may be familiar with or maybe some of your listeners, where at the beginning of a drag race, the drivers try to warm the tires, it’s called warming the tires. And what it means is that they press down on the accelerator brake at the same time. And the effect is to make it so that the tires spin and spin and spin, but the car doesn’t move anywhere. It creates a whole plume of smoke, probably exciting for the spectator to see. But that’s essentially what Democrats and progressives have done, is that they have created a system where we are pouring more and more money and more and more resources and more and more attention into various projects that we want to get done and talking about those projects to, you know, constituents and Americans generally. It was true throughout the Biden administration. He poured, you know, huge fortunes into the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips and Science Act, you know, to do big projects, to recreate the manufacturing base, to shore up the nation’s infrastructure, to do rural electrification, to create EV chargers everywhere. And what they’re seeing is that they’re pouring all this money in, but then they are, we are simultaneously putting more and more checks and barriers to being actually able to deploy that money in a way that is useful. We are warming the tires. And that is the thing that progressives need to understand. It is one thing to put resources against a big problem. In the world of Washington, in the world of inside government, they call it implementation, right? After a big law is passed, it has to be implemented. We have not paid attention to the fact that we are, in many cases, champions of the provision that make implementation so difficult. And so, yes, you’re absolutely right. The one part is for us to acknowledge that we need to embrace reforms that make it more expeditious for government to make decisions. The second thing, though, is, which also gets back to something we were talking about earlier in the conversation, we need to acknowledge that in many cases, the problem here is that someone is going to be hurt by the decision. Someone is hurt certainly by the status quo. If the bridge collapses and you can’t get across the river, that affects a lot of people. But when the new bridge has to be erected, the foundation for that bridge needs to be built on some plot of land. The new bridge is going to block someone’s view of the harbor. The new bridge is going to create traffic at one end or the other. Someone is going to be affected by that in a way that isn’t necessarily beneficial to them locally, even if the new bridge is a benefit to the community as a whole, to the region as a whole, to the country as a whole. Our problem as progressives is we are very uncomfortable currently allowing for someone to make the discretionary decision that they are going to put the bridge here rather than there, right? The conversation in which two people who would, one of whom is going to lose their home because the foundation is going to be built on that plot of land. That person is going to throw up a whole series of objections of why it should be on the other place. The truth is their objections are going to create sympathy from us, and they should create sympathy. If your home is going to be taken in the service of building a new bridge, that’s lousy. We should be sympathetic to them, and they should certainly get fair Marcet value if they have to give up their home. But we should be clear, that’s the challenge of government. Government’s job is to say, is to be able to weigh these various competing impulses. We’d rather not have more cars here, but we need some way for vehicular traffic to traverse this body of water. We’d rather not take land, but in this case, we need to. This community is probably going to see property values diminished because there will be more traffic, more tailpipe emissions, more et cetera, et cetera. These are the decisions that Robert Moses made probably in a not particularly sympathetic way. He was a star chamber in and of himself and made these discretionary decisions on a whim. There should be some mechanism by which those who are making the decision hear and understand the implications for the people who are going to be negatively affected. But in the end, that decision needs to be made. And we as progressives need to be comfortable with the idea that not everyone is going to benefit from every decision.

Jeff Schechtman: And finally, the other part is the way this obsession with process has filtered down into so many other regulations, and that it has also had an impact on business, small business as well as large, and that it has been a kind of governor on the progress of a lot of business.

Marc Dunkelman: I think that’s right. I think that the vector of process probably in many cases is a scourge on even proposing new ideas. That was certainly true. I keep on… I realize you’re in California. I’m on the East Coast and I keep on talking about New York. In New York, there’s now, after the 1975 fiscal crisis, they created something called the Public Authorities Control Board, which was designed, again, with the best of intentions because New York had gotten over its skis and almost gone bankrupt. But the effect was to give both leaders of each chamber of the state legislature the ability to veto any major expenditure of capital money in the state, including any major project. And so that meant that the process of doing almost any development required the governor, the speaker of the assembly, and the majority leader of the state senate to approve that project. And it got to the point where if you’re a developer in New York City, you quietly approach all three of those offices before you propose anything. And if any of them even sort of twitches at the idea, you know not to pursue it. Don’t spend the time drawing up the plans because it will be vetoed by one of these three characters. That’s not a great way to think about what is the best development strategy for the New York region. The same is true everywhere. The exact process is different one to the next. But the notion that there is a labyrinth ahead of you, you don’t exactly know where it is, but you know it’s going to be long, expensive, and opaque, means that people are not going to try to do the things that we know we need. We need more infrastructure. We need better clean power transmission. We need high-speed rail. We need all of these things, and we can’t get them.

Jeff Schechtman: Marc Dunkelman, his book is Why Nothing Works, Who Killed Progress and How to Bring It Back. Marc, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.

Marc Dunkelman: Thanks so much for having me.

Jeff Schechtman: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the Who, What, Why podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Sheckman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.