WHY NOTHING WORKS

A progressive takes a stand against gridlock and NIMBYism among his fellow activists.

Dunkelman opens with a thought exercise: Wending through the inferno that is New York’s Penn Station, he finds himself wondering how it can be that the city has long been “allowing its most important gateway to fester as a rat’s nest.” In the days of the powerful urban planner Robert Moses—a figure for whom Dunkelman, while not exactly resurrecting him in glory, expresses some admiration—Penn Station would gleam, just as traffic would zoom across the boroughs and the trains would run on time. Progressives, Dunkelman notes, are torn between what he deems Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian ideals. A Jeffersonian would seek to diffuse responsibilities and authority such that a Moses-like figure could not take charge and get the big things done, while a Hamiltonian would seek to appoint a czar and accomplish the pressing concerns: battling climate change, solving the housing crisis, rebuilding infrastructure. These core tenets, Dunkelman argues, “flow from wildly different and contradictory narratives about power,” and they need to be reconciled. In the face of reality, Dunkelman observes that the big projects—the Tennessee Valley Authority in the days of the New Deal, the battle to rein in climate change today—come with painful decisions that must be made, despite “our cultural aversion to power.” Foremost among them is the hard recognition that for the most part, “there is no way to serve the greater good without exacting some cost on at least someone,” and there’s no use pretending that this isn’t the case. Given that widespread aversion, we have governments to determine who will pay such costs—and if not, he warns, “a government too hamstrung to serve the public good will fuel future waves of conservative populism,” the very thing progressives should wish to avoid.

Provocative reading for anyone with a stake in public works writ large.