Marc J. Dunkelman > Quotes

“This book’s first argument is that both of these narratives—one Hamiltonian, the other Jeffersonian—frame elements of the progressive worldview. They were both part of the movement’s origin story in the late nineteenth century, and they have both framed progressive thinking ever since, despite being largely at odds. When progressives perceive a challenge through the Hamiltonian lens, the movement tends to embrace solutions that would pull power up and in. When, by contrast, a problem appears born of some nefarious centralized authority, the movement argues for pushing power down and out. But rarely does anyone notice that these two narratives, and their ensuing prescriptions, cut directly against one another. That’s not always a problem—the two impulses can, and do, coexist. Few, for example, would so much as raise an eyebrow if a young progressive today professed that her two top voting issues were reproductive rights and climate change. What is remarkable is that they are each respectively born of the two antithetical narratives. The fight for reproductive freedom is an explicitly Jeffersonian endeavor—it’s designed to protect women from outsiders intent on controlling their bodies. The fight against climate change, by contrast, is explicitly Hamiltonian—activists want to imbue some institution with the power to stop people and businesses from spewing carbon and destroying the planet.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“A region as a whole may benefit from a new rail line—less pollution, fewer traffic jams, improved mobility, a surge in economic growth. But as is true in any tragedy of the commons, the individual neighborhoods and hamlets inconvenienced by a new line are almost sure to be worse off. No tax break, no promise of a new community center, no noise-controlling barrier is going to convince them that they should bear the burden of the broader region’s progress.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“However much Americans prized stability through the 1950s, progressivism’s fear of chaos was eventually eclipsed by something else—cynicism. Municipal scandals, seemingly rampant through the Eisenhower years, nibbled away at the public’s faith in city fathers. New Dealers who had presumed that dispassionate experts would sit atop the growing administrative state were horrified when Republicans installed political hacks in positions of vast responsibility—a reality pointedly illustrated when President Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, was exposed for having accepted an expensive fur coat from a businessman being investigated by the FTC.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“During the First World War, the federal government had initiated construction of a dam near Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The gigantic facility was designed to harness the river’s flow to power the machinery required to produce nitrates for use in both bombs and fertilizer. At the end of the war, War Industries Board chairman Bernard Baruch proposed selling the facility off to Henry Ford, who promised to use the dam to power a “Detroit of the South.” But Senator George Norris, a progressive Republican from Nebraska, balked, arguing that what had been a federally constructed facility should be used for the public’s benefit.4 And that disagreement led to a long stalemate. Both Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, avatars of private industry, vetoed bills that would have used the dam to provide “public power.”5 Through the 1920s, laissez-faire prevailed, leaving those farms and families in the region that were not served by private electricity producers largely to go without.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“Here, taken together, was a Hamiltonian approach to solving the problem Jeffersonianism had tried to crack with an entirely different formula. Rather than chip away at the centralized institutions that were wreaking havoc on American life, the Hamiltonians would create new, publicly minded bureaucracies capable of keeping any rapacity in check. The problems of industrialization wouldn’t be solved with renewed competition, but rather with new, competent organization. The nation’s scientifically oriented middle class would swoop in to save the day.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“From the outset, many of the airline industry’s pioneers appeared grateful for Washington’s intervention. Caught in precarious financial straits, outsiders had begun to worry that some of the industry’s cowboy executives might be tempted to cut corners on safety and maintenance. Roosevelt’s CAB was designed to incentivize the industry not to put the public in that sort of danger—its mandate was to help the industry grow safely and steadily by limiting competition to those companies who earned, from the CAB, a certificate of public convenience and necessity.2 And the scheme succeeded. Over the following two decades, what would become the sixteen “trunkline” airlines would grow with the confidence that government bureaucrats would protect them against upstart competitors. Washington, by some turn, had saved a fledgling industry from competing itself into extinction.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“This turn toward Jeffersonianism wasn’t entirely born from bad-faith arguments or what some now term NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard). New housing developments can impact the environment. They can worsen traffic. They can imperil endangered species. They can force the demolition of historic buildings. With that said, the composite effect of all these objections has drastically curtailed the nation’s supply of homes. And curtailing the supply has served powerfully to drive up prices. The old growth machine model had allowed the Establishment to impose its will on the powerless without paying any heed to the social costs. But the new system was so rife with veto points that society had no way to meet the demand for homes. Progressivism had swung from one extreme to the other—the first Hamiltonian, the second Jeffersonian. And that shift has had profound effects on the housing market across the country.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“It’s a tragedy of the commons in reverse. Everyone is boxed into pursuing their own interests even as the proverbial asteroid speeds toward Earth.110”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“Over the decades that followed, and as New York emerged from the detritus of the fiscal crisis, the PACB remained little more than an afterthought—a bit of red tape to clear near the end of consummating any state-financed project. Indeed, few thought much about it until, in 2004, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed to construct a new football stadium in Manhattan as part of a bid to host the 2012 Olympics. Fearing the new stadium would steal convention business, members of the Dolan family, who controlled nearby Madison Square Garden, objected, turning to a friend in Albany, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, for help. The Speaker, who would later die while serving a long prison sentence for public corruption, didn’t care that the stadium was the lynchpin of New York’s Olympic bid. He was perfectly willing to use his PACB veto at the Dolans’ behest. And much to many an observer’s surprise—many hadn’t heard of the PACB beforehand, let alone been aware of its power—that’s just what he did.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“Put succinctly, it wasn’t just that reformers wanted to exchange the government’s incompetent hacks with educated experts—it’s that they wanted those experts to wield authority unencumbered by the political patrons who had undermined faith in public bureaucracy.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“Put more simply, if housing remains forever a symbol to ordinary citizens of why progressives can’t be trusted with power, the movement undermines its own viability. To make a serious claim on shaping the nation’s future—to offer a more compelling argument than the conservatives, populists, and demagogues—progressives need to make the public-sector work. And while acknowledging that perfect balance of Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian impulses will always prove elusive—that any public policy decision comes with trade-offs—progressivism’s best foot forward is to create a system that can be trusted to look at public concerns, weigh the choices, and come to a reasonable decision.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“By curtailing opportunities for centralized power brokers to wreak havoc, reformers risk immobilizing the public sphere, rendering the big, hulking bureaucracies that were once the apple of progressivism’s eye incompetent.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“No one should be denied an opportunity to voice their opinion on a question that affects them in general or in specific. But neither should voice give any figure the ability to hijack the decision-making process altogether.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“Many of the figures who had so enthusiastically championed centralized bureaucracy before 1912 came away from the First World War disillusioned. For as much as the War Industries Board appeared a beacon of professionalized management, insiders knew that it had often been twisted in knots, paralyzed by infighting.138 Many of the same figures took umbrage at the way Wilson’s administration had used public authority in a seemingly coercive way.139 Wilson’s decision to join the hostilities sparked a wave of domestic unrest, prompting the federal government to what some viewed as political suppression.140 More than two thousand people were arrested during the war for speaking out against American involvement, some sentenced to as many as twenty years in prison.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“Here, history took a fateful turn when, amid the drama that surrounded Roosevelt’s controversial second-term plan to pack the Supreme Court, the high court became remarkably pliant. In what is sometimes remembered as the “switch in time that saved nine,” Justice Owen Roberts doubled back on a previous ruling barring the imposition of minimum wages—suddenly, in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish the court ruled 5–4 that government could interfere to limit the discretion businesses had to pay at miserly rates.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“Here, reformers faced elements of the same skepticism that thwarted fanciful desires to break up the trusts. Patronage was a staple of the nation’s political system. During Democrat Grover Cleveland’s first term as president, he forced forty thousand Republican postmasters out of their positions, replacing them with Democrats. When Republican Benjamin Harrison subsequently defeated Cleveland, he replaced fifty thousand Democratic postmasters with Republicans. This churn was based not on ability or talent, but on political connections—those seeking appointments were required to contribute financially to their local parties.84 For Hamiltonian reformers, the policy salve for this corruption was just as apparent: They would have to replace the “spoils system” of executive appointments with a civil service system based on merit—a project begun when Congress passed the Pendleton Act of 1883.85 To insulate a new breed of publicly minded public servants, they would pull power up and away from the vulgar political class.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“The regulatory state, as it evolved, wasn’t merely preventing an excess of competition from upending the economy, as Theodore Roosevelt and George Perkins had imagined a half century earlier. It was being used to weigh economic growth against other noneconomic interests. And it wasn’t always clear that the experts making those determinations knew what they were doing. Borrowing from the broader theory of pluralism, many regulators appeared more driven to balance the interests of various constituencies than they were to champion the greater good. Here was the gospel of balance—the fear of chaos—woven into a political agenda. Regulatory complication was a weapon taken up explicitly to keep things stable, and regulators used it with abandon. The Federal Register compiling government decisions grew from 2,400 pages in 1936 to 20,000 in 1970, to a remarkable 60,000 pages in 1976. From 1970 to 1975 alone, the Code of Federal Regulations grew by a third.18”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“Reformers tout an achievement, but then a housing plan is abandoned after local opposition, a high-speed rail line is shelved for exorbitant costs, or an offshore wind farm is blocked by local fishermen. Often enough, both sides in any given debate—those who want to change things, and those who fear that change will be destructive—are well-intentioned. But the movement’s inability to resolve its conflicting impulses has turned progressive policymaking into what drag racers call “warming the tires.” A driver steps on the brake and accelerator at the same time. The wheels spin. The track screeches. But the car remains in place.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“The same year that Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, a professor at Yale Law School wrote a law review article that would take this notion a crucial step further. Charles Reich’s “The New Property” framed the bureaucracies progressivism had once celebrated less as salves than as scourges. In Reich’s view, the administrative state had become such an omnipresent force in everyday life that, by the 1960s, a bureaucrat’s decision to deprive an individual of any certain service was tantamount to stealing that citizen’s personal property. People needed to drive their cars to work, for example, so if a bureaucrat withdrew an individual’s driver’s license without cause, or for some reason that might be deemed “arbitrary and capricious,” the government was essentially robbing that citizen of their income. Reich argued that administrative agencies should have no more discretion to deprive someone a routine privilege than they had authority to summarily lay claim to someone’s home or business.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“It’s worth taking note of the narrative arc here because it tracks a pattern that will be made evident again and again in the chapters that follow. A policy conceived before the 1960s, imbued with an explicitly Hamiltonian ethos, becomes the object of Jeffersonian ire. Well-intentioned reformers then begin to conceive of ways to push that centralized power down and out—to disrupt the Establishment’s hold on its victims. In order to manacle the octopus, reformers work to endow the victims of the old regime with new rights—leverage of the kind Charles Reich conjured in “The New Property.” Last, amid generalized frustration with the end result, government is made to appear generally, and specifically, incompetent. To wit, nearly every element of the story can be explained without incorporating the (generally nettlesome) influence of conservatism. Progressives serve at the forefront of every successive change. And yet there was no doubting who benefited politically from the change: the right.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“Amid all the public frustration, the image of bureaucracy shifted even more bleakly to give the impression that a sinecured workforce enjoying guaranteed retirement benefits simply did not care to do their jobs well. This pattern was repeated across the government, but perhaps no place was it more pronounced than at the Environmental Protection Agency. Conceived during the Nixon years, the EPA had originally been given a wide berth to make rules, issue sanctions, and even police other government bureaucracies. But as was the legislature’s wont, Congress imposed new mandates on the agency.68 During that same period, the White House tightened its grip on agency decision-making, often through standards and regulations designed to ensure the agency’s bureaucrats weren’t captured by polluters.69 And of course those same polluters, along with their Naderite adversaries, were rarely bashful about drawing on the courts to require the EPA to steer policy in one direction or, often enough, entirely in another.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“In an age when the entire electrical marketplace was immature—when, in many cases, little companies were setting up their own little plants, importing the raw materials required to manufacture power, and then serving that “load” through largely unregulated networks of wire—these sorts of disputes were rampant. In 1889, the mayor of New York City was so incensed by rooftop wires that he dispatched city employees to chop them down with axes. One journalist, describing the “copper and steel wire octopus that has so encircled our streets,” reported that crowds cheered on Broadway when electrical poles fell.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“Beneath their good intentions, many progressives came to believe that, to put it indelicately, the general public was too stupid to be trusted with any real influence. And that wasn’t simply born of prejudice—it reflected the country’s newfound draw toward new sources of expert wisdom. Progressivism, in short, was being shaped by a cultural turn toward science. And the progress, driven by rationality, appeared to be everywhere. Researchers were unveiling new approaches to treat and protect against horrors ranging from cholera to scarlet fever, diphtheria, tuberculosis, smallpox, and typhoid. Engineers and doctors were spreading the miracles of improved sanitation, vaccinations, and medicine. And to the degree that the promise of scientific and engineering expertise spurred many progressives to call for replacing backwater public health officials with trained professionals, the same worldview began to frame the movement’s approach to public policy more generally.42 Matters of state, in the progressive worldview, should not be left in the hands of charismatic country bumpkins; they should instead be placed in the responsible hands of professionals, of experts, of the well-heeled and well educated.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“Academics, including Harvard’s Samuel Huntington and Louis Jaffe, worried about regulatory independence.15 And the underlying dyspepsia often came from the same place: it seemed, in many cases, as though the regulators were too enthralled by the institutions they were charged with keeping in check. During the New Deal, Hamiltonian progressives had imagined regulators and industry advocates pulling in opposite directions, with the public benefiting from that balanced tension. Now, many feared, the two were pulling in coordination against the greater good.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“In 1955, Sloan Wilson, a military veteran who had returned from service overseas to become a journalist and university professor, published what would become an era-defining novel. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit highlighted the burgeoning resentment within the ranks of the nation’s middle-class businessmen that they were prisoners to a corporate culture stifling their creativity and demanding their deference. Two decades earlier, in the depths of the Great Depression, America had been hemmed in by the ravages of economic catastrophe. Now, however, even as the economy hummed, Wilson captured an emerging impression that life was colorless, monotonous, and oppressive.114 America might now be more prosperous, but those climbing the corporate ladder had been reduced to peons, tools of some overarching “establishment.” That term—the Establishment—wasn’t originally coined to describe the nation’s corporate elite. It first came into broad use to describe the stuffy club of purportedly wise men who, in the postwar years, controlled the levers of the nation’s foreign policy.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“More than a half century earlier, Teddy Roosevelt, channeling George Perkins, had embraced the notion that competition was a scourge on free enterprise—that individual companies were often compelled by dint of greed to do things they purportedly did not want to do: to underpay their employees, to pollute the environment, to ply the public with unsafe or unsanitary products. Responding to that challenge, progressives had worked to shape an architecture of power that countervailed the vices of excessive capitalism. But by the 1970s, that entire approach appeared to a new generation of reformers to be a complete failure.24 The movement’s new crusade was to tear down the very institutions it had previously worked so assiduously to build up. The only real question was how.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“Buffeted by demands from their congressional overseers, from their White House bosses, from various judicial diktats, bureaucrats had little choice but to hunker down, anticipate incoming fire, and deflect blows as best they could. One study completed in the 1980s suggested that policymakers at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had essentially given up on rulemaking altogether, choosing through recalls to react against bad vehicles instead of demanding that carmakers affirmatively improve designs through regulation.73”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“the silent majority didn’t want every authority figure slapped—the White House purposely baited progressives into taking positions out of step with the president’s mainstream appeal.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“Debates inside the new Johnson White House about how to shape what would become 1964’s Economic Opportunity Act pivoted on this same ideological divide. “Liberals,” holding a torch for the New Deal’s more Hamiltonian thrust, wanted the president to champion old-school jobs and education programs. “Radicals,” by contrast, were eager to steer the administration toward institutional reform. And the president, more inclined to one, but not wanting to alienate the other—Johnson worried about making moves that might appear like repudiations of his predecessor’s legacy—decided to split the difference. The legislation he eventually sent to Congress included proposals for both job training and institutional reform.17 Here was Johnson employing a strategy that he’d perfected as master of the Senate—giving both sides of a disagreement something they could count as a win. This time, however, the tactic backfired—and for reasons that might have seemed counterintuitive. As members of Congress began to consider the bill, many of the same mayors and local leaders who had scoffed at David Hackett’s radical ideas appeared to be even more miffed by the liberals’ agenda. Organized labor, for example, didn’t want the government hiring legions of unemployed youths to build projects that might otherwise be constructed by unionized workers. School officials didn’t want federal bureaucrats layering new mandates onto federal money they now spent at their own discretion.18 For decades, progressivism had worked to build up an Establishment—and now the various beacons of that same Establishment, scattered as they were across the country, were intent on maintaining their fiefdoms, whatever the public interest.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“Avangrid was proposing to supply as much as a sixth of Massachusetts’s electricity—enough to power 1.2 million homes. That new supply promised to claim market share from the older, dirtier, less efficient power plants that had long served many of the same consumers. The president of a trade group representing the incumbent generation plants complained that his members had invested more than $13 billion in various facilities on the presumption that they would be able to recover those costs over future years of service.15 And that prompted an archetypical “politics makes strange bedfellows” moment: those wanting to preserve the beauty of Maine’s North Woods were aligned with advocates wanting to protect the fossil fuel industry.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back