Why can’t America do big things anymore? Marc Dunkelman, a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, addresses this question in his new book, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Get It Back. The book’s inspiration came from his thinking about the now-vanished Pennsylvania Station, formerly New York City’s majestic gateway, which was one of the most beautiful buildings in the country and a monument to metropolitan greatness. Its closure and demolition in the early 1960s amounted to what a New York Times editorial called a “monumental act of vandalism,” made more painful by the ugliness and disfunctionality of the modern facility that replaced it. 

New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, starting in the early 1990s, made it his top legislative priority to build a new train hall in the nearby neoclassical post office building. Moynihan was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and one of the most powerful Democratic politicians in the land, and he secured agreement and funding from all of the relevant stakeholders — but still he could not get the new station built. The Moynihan Train Hall would not open until 2021, after nearly three decades of delays and setbacks. 

Marc Dunkelman for many years commuted into the seemingly unfixable Penn Station and wondered why New York’s Democratic leaders were unable to make any progress in replacing it. The stagnation struck him as a vivid contrast to Robert Moses, the towering urban planner and public official, who had run roughshod over all opposition in mid-20th-century New York in the course of his massive redevelopment of the city, as described in Robert Caro’s 1974 bestseller The Power Broker. 

When he looked into the history, Dunkelman realized that progressives have long swung back and forth between two opposing impulses. One is what he calls Hamiltonianism: the desire to achieve progress by empowering government and institutions to tackle big problems at the direction of strong leaders (like Robert Moses) and informed experts. The other is what he calls Jeffersonianism: the desire to prevent unaccountable centralized authorities (also like Robert Moses) from abusing ordinary citizens by empowering them to fight back. 

In this podcast discussion, Dunkelman analyzes the historic roots of these opposing impulses and explains how progressives ever since the 1960s have swung too far toward the Jeffersonian extreme. He describes how progressives lost working-class support by rendering government unable to deliver public goods like abundant and cheap housing, energy, and infrastructure. And he warns that incompetent government inevitably plays into the hands of populists who vilify government and claim: “I alone can fix it.”