A new book explores why progressives made it impossible to build in America

The excesses of urban renewal are well known. Highways rammed through lower-income neighborhoods. Communities displaced for new developments that failed.

In the decades since, urban planners and local politicians have adapted to the lessons of the 1950s and 1960s, instituting veto points to give communities a voice, require environmental reviews, and protect historic buildings.

A new book by politics expert Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — and How to Bring It Back, argues that these protections have side effects. In the age of climate change and housing crisis, it is too difficult to build new rail transit lines, clean energy infrastructure, and affordable homes, he writes.

Dunkelman says that while conservatives argue for lower taxes and a weaker government, the post-1960s progressive crusade against centralized power also shackles the public sector. And that makes their pitch to voters more difficult: Why vote for the party of big government if it can’t get anything done?

Dunkelman’s conversation with The Inquirer has been edited for length and clarity.

From the beginning, progressivism has been defined by two warring impulses.

There are big challenges that we face that none of us can solve by ourselves and the only effective response is to lift power into authority that will collectively respond to that challenge.

There are other moments in the progressive narrative where the terms are flipped such that it seems not that the problem is too little authority, but too much. There are bureaucrats doing things that seem to oppress or coerce ordinary people. So its important to diffuse power to ordinary people so they can control their own lives.

That first impulse really prevailed from the beginning of the movement in the late 1800s to the 1960s, at which point the establishment was represented by Robert Moses in New York, Robert McNamara sending kids to the Vietnam War, or Richard Daley in Chicago.

These are very powerful people with unimpeachable authority who the population turned against. They didn’t like the highways, they didn’t like urban renewal, they didn’t like DDT on their crops. They didn’t like sending their kids off to war they couldn’t win.

So for the last 50 years increasingly progressivism has been about speaking truth to power and curtailing the authority of the establishment. We’ve created all sorts of roadblocks to public authority. Environmental reviews, community input, abilities for ordinary citizens to litigate against government decisions. They have had the cumulative effect of making it impossible for government to function.

Everyone should have a voice, and no one should have a veto.

Robert Moses was able to turn a completely deaf ear to community concerns. That’s one extreme.

The other extreme is what we have. You’ve got situations where, even if the broad majority of people in and around a locale are in favor of a project, if one person doesn’t like it they can delay the project extensively through various opportunities for community input and then litigation. And sometimes they can delay long enough to win.

The challenge for progressives is to find a balance between the two. You don’t want [a planner like] Robert Moses to be able to act with impunity, and you don’t want any single objector to be able to win out when the vast majority of people would benefit from a project.

There’s no formulaic way to ensure the outcome is right in every case. How do you find the right balance that allows some community input, but not be able to veto things that are in the broad public interest?

When Biden got into office, people didn’t expect him to be as successful as he was getting the money appropriated for various projects, or to be as unsuccessful as he was actually getting things done.

It is a reflection of the fact that even those of us on the left four or five years ago did not realize just the degree to which the government is fundamentally incapable, in its present incarnation, of expeditiously getting projects off the ground.

The Biden administration poured money into the system to get it going, but didn’t get anywhere. I wrote a piece in the Washington Post about the EV charger system. Everybody in that process was well intentioned, but three years after the infrastructure law only 50 chargers were built. It’s a classic example of government not being able to execute its own plans.

At the turn of the 20th century, power was so widely diffused that we couldn’t build the sewer systems or the transit systems or the electrical systems that we needed. The middle class in America rose up and demanded a better system and empowered scientifically-minded expert bureaucrats to do this stuff. It was impossible to imagine in those early frustrating days that there would ever be a regime powerful enough that they could do things that happened in the New Deal.

The notion of what the Tennessee Valley Authority accomplished in the short time that [Franklin] Roosevelt was president was beyond comprehension during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. That a big bureaucracy could accomplish so much was almost beyond the realm of imagination.

Then in the 1970s, there were powerful figures who were so imperious and coercive and frightening it was impossible to imagine a system where there wouldn’t be some establishment figure who could just ram his way across a neighborhood. The establishment was so entrenched.

Now we are back to a moment where it feels impossible to imagine someone could get anything done. It’s always impossible to imagine what the future will hold. I think inevitably, people will not allow for us to lose the global competition to China because we weren’t able to build things. We will find a way to come together and do big things again, even if it’s hard to imagine right now.