Book Review: Why Nothing Works - Who Killed Progress and How to Bring it Back

I don’t normally do book reviews, most of these articles are the result of me going into a shaman-like mystical trance and regurgitating info pulled from many different books, informational plaques, news articles, and fortune cookie inserts that have lodged in my brain over the decades like so many leaves trapped in a pool filter. But I just finished reading a book that does a good job, Distilled History style, of explaining why large-scale projects don’t happen in America anymore. So today we have a special feature: a review and summary of Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Bring it Back, by Marc J. Dunkelman.

First, the problem statement: it’s odd to consider that the American government, which used to be very good at doing massive, complex projects (the interstate highway system, the Apollo program, the Manhattan project, etc.) now gets completely stymied and bogged down by the simplest things. Prime examples include California’s high-speed rail project: $11B spent so far over 17 years without a single mile of operational track, a public toilet in San Francisco that cost the city $1.7M to install, and a wind power mega-project off Cape Cod that spent 12 years being argued about in court before being cancelled. A country that used to be the envy of the world when it came to doing ambitious things is now incapable of doing anything right.

There are a few suspects that usually get blamed. The standard conservative argument is that government is congenitally incompetent. But that seems incorrect, considering the 20th century achievements of the federal government (moon landing, atom bomb, et al.), and the fact that government-led infrastructure development in China has made the US look like a third-world shithole by comparison. If any government project anywhere is destined to fall into Three Stooges-like buffoonery, how has China been able to build 28,000 miles of high speed rail in less than 20 years? Why are governments in Turkey and Azerbaijan able to quickly build gleaming new airports while the US hasn’t built a single new airport this century?

The usual explanation from the liberal side is that we could have nice things, but the Republicans are bad and block everything. While there is some truth to this (many Republicans have killed clean energy and transit projects) it also seems incorrect because many of the most high-profile failed projects are in Democratic-dominated states and cities. If California has failed to build high-speed rail or new housing, if Massachusetts has failed to approve offshore windpower, and if Seattle has failed to select a site for a new airport, it’s not because Republicans dominate the state and local government in those places. Quite the opposite: these places usually have Democratic supermajorities at every level of government, from city council all the way to their Congressional delegations. So why has the political party that’s supposed to believe in the power of government to get things done consistently failed?

Dunkelman explains in the book that throughout American history there have been competing strands of liberal thought, which he calls the “Hamiltonian” and “Jeffersonian” tendencies. The Hamiltonian tendency is named after the guy from the musical, who believed the United States needed a strong centralized government to get things done. By concentrating power in DC, the federal government could take on nation-building projects that would enhance the overall economy and standard of living. The Jeffersonian tendency, named after Hamilton’s rival, is the opposite: suspicious of central authority that could ride roughshod over the population, Jefferson wanted to diffuse power down and outward to local authorities and citizens. Dunkelman gives a detailed history of the US explaining how there have been constant pendulum shifts between Hamiltonians who wanted to centralize authority in the public interest, and Jeffersonians who instinctively distrusted power. The pre-WW2 examples he gives in the book are not very interesting unless you’re a weirdo like me with strong opinions about William Jennings Bryan, but he does cite examples and make a valid case: these two strands have been part of American political life since the beginning, and they’ve experienced alternating periods of ascendance and decline.

The Hamiltonian tendency reached its high water mark during the period of Democratic dominance between the FDR and LBJ administrations (1933-1969). Due to the crisis of the Great Depression there was a strong Hamiltonian push to centralize power in the federal government and give it powers it never had before. Overnight, the government created new agencies to put people to work and build things, all of it directed from Washington DC by bureaucrats who didn’t have to answer to the public or worry about reelection. And they were able to do things at speeds that seem insane today: the Civil Works Administration was created in November 1933 to build infrastructure projects, in just a few weeks it had employed 4.25 million people, which was 8% of the US population at the time. The Tennessee Valley Authority rapidly constructed massive hydroelectric dams across the South, providing jobs to tens of thousands and government-subsidized electricity to millions (while also displacing more than 125,000 people whose homes were flooded by dam construction). This was the age of high-speed, big-impact megaprojects, with the full power of the federal government pushing aside any opposition. But it was also different from our era in one key respect: if you were someone whose town was about to be flooded by the construction of a new dam, or family about to be kicked off your land so the government could test nuclear bombs there, there wasn’t much you could do about it. The massive bureaucracies of the Hamiltonian era didn’t really care what little people thought, and jurisprudence at the time meant that filing a lawsuit against the government was unlikely to get you anywhere.

Mid century liberals believed that rather than put your faith in the private sector or corrupt politicians, it was better to centralize decision-making power in the hands of experts who could be trusted to guide the country towards the right path. The world was too complex, and people were too selfish and stupid to leave the fate of the country to its own devices, so central planning was the way to go. It’s hard to completely grasp this mindset in 2025 because it's so different from how we think now: but before the mid-1960s a majority of people in the US had confidence in the government, believed the President would always tell the truth, and thought that authority in any particular incarnation could be trusted. This consensus lasted for about 30 years, until the sixties, when things swung permanently in the other direction, towards what Dunkelman calls the Jeffersonian tendency.

In the eyes of activists in the 60s & 70s, those same experts and authorities that had been so admired back in the FDR era were responsible for creating an oppressive society. The Establishment was dropping napalm on Vietnam, promoting a shallow consumerist culture, polluting the environment, and fostering a cozy symbiotic relationship between government and big business. Power needed to be taken away from central authorities and dispersed downwards. The intellectuals of the 1960s questioned all authority, whether that was the government, the military, universities, or business. At this time “Critical Theory” emerged from American & European academia, which states that all power structures are inherently oppressive, history is a never-ending battle between evil oppressors and the righteous oppressed, and all authority, no matter how seemingly-benign, is just waiting for its chance to start rolling cattle cars towards the gas chambers. Because of this radical change in mindset, the 1960s-70s marks a breaking point from the traditional back-and-forth pendulum shifts between Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian tendencies: no one in America believes that the government can be trusted with power anymore. We’re all Jeffersonian now. While this is most obvious with regard to anti-big-government conservatives, it’s also true of “progressives”, who in theory are supposed to believe in the power of government to solve problems. Critical theory has thoroughly-permeated the online discussion sphere (all modern left-wing/social-justice ideology is based on critical theory), so now progressives would prefer to debate utopian projects (“abolish the police”) rather than give the government new powers (increase police professionalism, oversight, and standards by putting all local police under a central authority? Oh no I accidently created the Gestapo. See the problem?) The result has been a 50-year program, endorsed by liberals as well as conservatives, of clipping government’s wings in the Jeffersonian tradition, rather than empowering Hamiltonian-style authorities like we had in America’s mid-20th-century heyday. Many of those limitations were placed on government by liberals who wanted to empower citizens, but as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The Jeffersonian pushback led to a lot of changes and genuine progress in society. But each Jeffersonian diffusion of power away from central authority opened up new angles of attack whereby large-scale projects could be shut down. Previously, the courts had limited who had standing to sue and had deferred to government agencies regarding the scope and impact of their projects. But in the late 60s, the federal courts began to rule that people could file lawsuits in the “public interest”, even if the plaintiff was not directly impacted by the matter at issue. Back in the Tennessee Valley Authority days, if your farm was going to be flooded by a new dam the government would offer you some compensation and then that would be the end of it: you couldn’t sue because you had been compensated, and an outside interest group wouldn’t have standing to sue on environmental grounds because there was no environmental legislation back then. But new laws meant to protect the public from oppressive authorities meant that agencies had to complete painstaking reviews to avoid stepping on any toes before embarking on any project. Nowadays the environmental impact statement for a new infrastructure project runs to an average of 700 pages and requires 4 years to complete. The ability to file a lawsuit in the “public interest” means that anyone, anywhere can sue and claim the 700-page review was improperly conducted. Rather than the onus being on the plaintiff to show they had been wronged, the burden of proof was now placed on government agencies to show they had made immaculate decisions that would never harm anyone. These rulings usually mean re-doing the review, or re-engineering the project, which adds to the timeline and cost. Anyone could create a new public interest group and sue, and any decision that once would have been made in private smoke-filled rooms by Hamiltonian bureaucrats was now liable to be dragged into a courtroom and picked apart in a lawsuit. The Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society had only ever been party to 1 environmental lawsuit before the shift toward public interest suits in the 1960s, but by the 1990s these organizations were filing hundreds of lawsuits. We may think environmental conservation is a good thing, but these types of suits have been used to block projects that would genuinely benefit the environment: many wind power installations that could reduce CO2 emissions and train lines that would cut down on car traffic have been cancelled due to “public interest” lawsuits. And having a financial conflict of interest doesn’t prevent you from filing suit: coal companies can sue on environmental grounds to block the construction of power lines to a competing renewable energy project, and NIMBY homeowners can sue to block the construction of affordable housing that might affect their property values. Even projects that are successful end up having to spend years fighting in court and re-planning their work, meaning that they are always late and over budget. The California high-speed rail project is a perfect example: every twist and turn of the route has been litigated several times, and there’s probably not a mile of it that hasn’t aggrieved someone. From the old Hamiltonian system where the government could pretty much do whatever they wanted, we now have a system where any citizen can veto any project.

The shift from implicit trust in authority to a Jeffersonian diffusion of power has stymied any large scale projects in America today. As Dunkelman explains: “In a system full of vetoes, no one has sufficient power to push through a worthwhile endeavor”. While Dunkelman clearly admires the FDR-era big projects, he explains that the authorities in that era quite literally bulldozed over people and left them without a voice. The old system got things done, but it wasn’t democratic, and that’s the way things work today in China and other countries. But he brings up valid points that will make liberals uncomfortable: it was the progressives pushing to question authority and democratize institutions that landed us in the mess we’re in now. And while we think it’s morally correct nowadays to give everyone a voice, we have to consider whether that voice should act as a veto. For any project, whether it’s a highway, a train, a wind turbine, or an electricity transmission line, someone is going to be negatively impacted. You can make the decision-making process transparent and open to public inspection and comment, but eventually that new train line is going to have to cut across someone’s property. If we’re committed to fighting climate change, then we need to build wind turbines and solar installations and put up several thousand miles of new high-voltage transmission lines, which will inevitably impact someone. Do we think it’s better to have a system where everyone’s voice is heard, but one “no” can shut down a project that would benefit millions? Or can we accept that there needs to be a centralized authority that listens to these objections, weighs the pros & cons, and then has the final say on things like this? The problem, though, is that the same progressives who want to see government muscle put towards building housing, transit, and renewable energy projects are the same people who instinctively distrust authority and find the idea of silencing people’s voices abhorrent. So as a result, nothing gets done.

I thought this book gave a good guided tour through both the legal and legislative history of how things changed in America, as well as illustrating the cultural shifts that took us from the Hamiltonian to the Jeffersonian era. If I have any criticism, it’s that the author gives waaaaay too many examples to illustrate the problem when just a couple would have sufficed. Like, I didn’t need that many instances of power line projects from the mid-2000s or highway projects in the 70s that were blocked on environmental grounds. The first chapter dealing with 19th century railway case law is snooze-inducing. Additionally, while the author admits his own political leanings, he does seem to have a blind spot towards some of the downsides of central planning: FDR’s big housing project that put Japanese-Americans in concentration camps isn’t mentioned. But overall, I think this book is useful at laying the blame where it belongs. It wasn’t nasty Republicans or crusty racists who made America incapable of building things, it was liberals who distrusted authority so much that they ensured that “government” would become synonymous with “incompetent”. And Dunkelman makes it clear what the consequence of this was: in one story, he explains how New York City’s government flailed around for years and wasted millions of dollars in the 1980s restoring a city skating rink. City government was tied down by too many well-meaning rules that required the buy-in of different parties with competing interests. Eventually the mayor gave up and handed the skating rink project off to a private real estate developer who completed it in 6 months at 1/6th the cost. The developer’s name? Donald Trump. Giving power to the people had a price.

If you have a question or topic you want me to write about next, email distilledhistory@substack.com