Mr Dunkelman offers Why Nothing Works as advice to the self-styled progressives among Democrat politicians, which is to say, to the people who "have an affirmative view of government and its effectiveness," to quote the very effective as mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel. His thesis, plainly stated, is that progressivism, as he understands the term, "is undermining itself." Why? First, although the "affirmative view of government" is as old as the Republic itself, in policy form it might be the Supervision of Wise Experts, which begins with Alexander Hamilton and the American System, or it might be Skepticism of Overweening Authority, which begins with Thomas Jefferson and those unalienable rights, with the small platoons checking the powerful. Second, the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian impulses wax and wane, both among the political classes and the people. Third, he argues, nothing works because the Jeffersonian impulses among the self-styled progressives of today, who mostly argue with but vote for Democrats, are currently too strong. To borrow from Archie Bunker, in the course of Mr Dunkelman's investigation of why The Pennsylvania Station remained a rat-run despite efforts from everywhere to fix it, more than one of his interlocutors noted, "Mister, we could use a man like Robert Moses again."
Book Review No. 2 will note both strengths and weaknesses in his argument. It is hard not to like a book that often validates my "process, nuance, failure" lament over the procedural politics whether of the academy or of government. It's encouraging to read a younger man who has an understanding of how Congress delegated its power first to the independent regulatory commissions and latterly to the administrative state and administrative law and Chevron deference. It's also encouraging when a younger man sees the way in which the values regime that allegedly tamed the Depression and then won the War took a shape well-suited to taming the Depression and winning the War: and proved unsuited to the peace and prosperity that followed. And yet, his fear that an excess of Jeffersonian dispersal of powers to the groups is what midwived populism fails to convince.
His story begins in medias res with an obscure insurance executive, George W. Perkins, who during the 1912 Republican convention, argued, see page 28 for technocracy: "everyone would benefit if power was simply better coordinated in a scientific way — if rather than a mess of competition, those with authority in both the private and public spheres acted in cooperative consultation." That is an argument capable of satisfying the socialist, the intellectual, the associationist sort of businessman, and elements of both political parties. I call that in medias res as governments local, state, or federal had for nearly half a century been dealing with the large-scale enterprise; and the independent regulatory commissions had a record already of (take your pick) regulating the rates of monopolies in the public interest or stabilizing the pools of large companies that the managements were incapable of stabilizing themselves. As the arguments from Woodrow Wilson or Herbert Croly in favor of expanding the scope of regulation by Disinterested Experts gained purchase, thus extending the treatment of the independent regulatory commissions as initial triers of fact into what later became codified as administrative procedure and administrative law. An excerpt from his Penn Station essay summarizes. "Progressives fought to establish blue ribbon commissions and public authorities, institutions like the Federal Reserve and the ever-expansive Interstate Commerce Commission. Each reform was designed to insulate technocrats from the meddling of small-minded legislators." To some extent, the "small-minded legislators" went along with the creation of the independent regulatory commissions and later with administrative law as a way of washing their hands of the complexities. Indeed, defenders of the administrative state will argue that the proliferation of "shall-issue" regulations is necessary given the subtleties of what Congress intends to do. Process, nuance, failure.
But as the independent commissions and the administrative procedures grew, so, too, did the skepticism from the Jeffersonian left of those agencies as too subject to capture by the industries subject to that regulation. That's a point the Jeffersonians share with libertarians and some Republicans, but it is not to them that Mr Dunkelman wishes to speak. None of which prevents him from having a productive conversation with Geoff Kabaservice of the Niskanen Center, complete with a photo of another empty railway station.
In the course of that conversation comes the end of the Rooseveltian values regime.
The impulse of the “Greatest Generation” was to venerate centralized repositories of power, and for good reason. The New Deal, and the various people who led the bureaucracies in the alphabet soup of New Deal programs, and the generals who had led us to victory in the Second World War, and George Marshall who had led the rebuilding of Europe as Secretary of State under Truman — in all of these cases, there were these heroic figures. And that was a generational response: that centralized authority was, for the most part, good.Do you recognize, dear reader, the way in which the four turnings unfold? Those "heroic figures" put together the right sort of High Modern Authoritarianism to win the War, that despite a Depression-era record that is mixed; and it's no surprise that doubling down on the High Modern Authoritarianism was the way to go? More blue-ribbon commissions. More allocation tsars. See page 261 of Nothing Works! "Better planning. Wiser decisions. Savvier engineering. If experts were given greater authority to fashion their plans with fewer hurdles — if they were liberated to deliver utopia more expeditiously — the doubters could finally be made to see." It's not that we didn't have that sort of thinking before: consider the various give-aways to rent-seekers under the rubric of "internal improvements" since the Founding (at page 157 a "bait and switch that benefited the wealthy and powerful" — see also William James and his "moral equivalent of war" talk.) Lyndon Johnson, though, was the most loyal protege of Franklin Roosevelt, and Mr Johnson, see page 110, favored "whatever legislation was necessary to let the Federal Government do it. If that be enlarging the power of the Federal Government, and if that be centralizing more power in Washington, [we should] make the most of it." And after Lyndon Johnson's death, Washington senator Henry Jackson introduced legislation to "establish a more rigid national planning regime" for land use, see page 221.
The regimentation that helped win the War, however, was unsuited to the new birth of freedom and prosperity that was the American High. In Nothing Works we encounter the same literature of social criticism that led to Awakening and Unraveling in Fourth Turning stories: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Growing Up Absurd. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The Affluent Society. It's even possible, dear reader, that Father Knows Best was intended as an ironic rebuke of The Best and The Brightest, before David Halberstam made the rebuke explicit. Again, the conversation with Mr Kabaservice covers the bases.
And then in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s, you begin to see the rumblings of a younger generation that does not have this fealty to centralized power at all, and is fundamentally and culturally averse to it. It starts with C. Wright Mills talking about “The Power Elite” in the late ‘50s, The Port Huron Statement of the New Left in the early ‘60s. And if you read the Port Huron Statement, which is sort of the founding document of the New Left, you see that is a statement that is indicting the Kennedy administration. That is a fight within progressivism.In Strauss and Howe's Fourth Turning tales, the Boomers "jammed the gears" of the Silent Generation's treadmill, and then moved on to establish a new treadmill for yuppie power couples. By contrast, Why Nothing Works concentrates on those "elements of progressivism" that continued to concentrate on politics, establishing ever more nuanced processes to "manacle the octopus" that was those Wise Experts managing everything, mostly for their own gain. Again, those impulses to add more process have long been with us, inducing Trains editor David P. Morgan to quip about making Marxists giggle. But under the modern Jeffersonian dispensation among the self-styled progressives, all that devolution, and empowerment, and inclusion precludes Anything Happening. A lament about the electrical grid at page 317 captures the dynamics. "Progressives, fearful of centralized power, have inserted so many checks that building the grid is an exercise in futility." So it often is with a quest for consensus, isn't it? If the Roman Catholic Church ran its conclaves like Quaker meetings, would there ever be a Pope?
And their view is that what David Halberstam would label derisively “The Best and the Brightest” — these very competent figures inside the Kennedy administration who were supposed to fix everything for us — were in fact not working in the public interest. They were themselves corrupted and self-interested and incompetent. And so there they took an explicit… The Port Huron Statement is an explicitly Jeffersonian doctrine, in the idea that it is designed to steer progressivism away from its old Hamiltonian doctrine and return power to ordinary people. And that is the same mentality that runs through almost all the movements that define the ‘60s: the counterculture, the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement… From soup to nuts, the thing that draws these elements of progressivism together is an aversion to the establishment, an aversion to power.
Mr Dunkelman uses his argument as a way of making sense of more Trumpism, a plot device that figures in a lot of political writing of late. The argument is straightforward: where there are so many checks, and every stakeholder gets a veto, populist types, perhaps (gasp) Less Enlightened, can make hay over the downside of all that process-worship, and Why Nothing Works teases the reader with a mystery story about a New York developer who gets a contract to fix a skating rink after the process worshippers couldn't. The night Donald Trump secured the 2016 Republican nomination, he told that story, and if that Donald Trump presents in meetings when nobody is watching, the country is not in the dire straits the self-styled progressives claim it is. In the book, and in the Niskanen conversation, however, that mystery developer is only revealed at the end of the story. It probably works for people who weren't following the Trump campaign too closely: and the palace guard media did not cover that speech.
That quest for consensus, though, causes frustration beyond Democratic partisan circles. The Pennsylvania Station renovation that opens the book came a cropper because "nearly every player involved in the negotiation had something significant to lose." Put another way, a Rashomon (or perhaps, to continue the railway metaphor, a Murder on the Orient Express). But is that not the reason peace processes fail to produce peace? Participants agree on the minor things, but perhaps to obtain peace somebody has to give up power, or land? Is that not the reason "stakeholder capitalism" fails? "Because the goals of the Great Reset depend on the obliteration not only of free markets, but of individual liberty and free will, it is, perhaps ironically, unsustainable. Like earlier attempts at totalitarianism, the Great Reset is doomed to ultimate failure."
In commerce we can understand mutually beneficial trade, but creating new interest groups with "something significant to lose" and something resembling a veto power has the potential to reduce the locus of contract to an empty set. Consensus is not always possible, and sometimes simple rules function to coordinate human action, and perhaps a Robert Moses figure to say "As you were!" is necessary.
Ultimately, Why Nothing Works fails to work as advice to the self-styled progressives in striking a better balance of the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian impulses for the simple reason that recent events reveal a greater failing of the progressive project. Mr Dunkelman did not write the book in anticipation of a second Trump run, but a book with a publication date of 2025 that says almost nothing about, say, two events in 2020, undermines its own argument. I am thinking, of course, of the most spectacular failure of the Hamiltonian impulse, which is to say the corona tyranny, with the public health establishment exercising arbitrary powers that Robert Moses could only envy, with the end result being the discrediting, perhaps for a generation, of the Credentialed Experts. Then an arrest in Minneapolis went spectacularly wrong, with the most Jacobin of the Jeffersonian impulses running riot in the major cities, and metastasizing on the campuses in the wake of a terrorist attack overseas. So much for an excess of consensus-blocking veto powers by the groups making the populists look good. There's nothing either in the Rule of Expertise or in Empowering the Groups for what might be a majority of voters.
That puts Mr Dunkelman's concluding words in a different light.
Populism takes hold not when democracy works well, but rather when it doesn't deliver. No amount of righteous sanctimony can substitute for the political benefits of making public authority serve the public interest. Moving forward, that should be the progressive movement's north star.That movement is so far off course that Trumpian populists or libertarians or social conservatives need do little more than note the fruits of the Credentialed Experts and the Jacobins among the Jeffersonians and suggest it's very easy to do better. Mr Dukelman is correct that his call for some sort of compromise between the Jacobins and the Wilsonians is valid "without incorporating the (generally nettlesome) influence of conservatism," page 146, and that progressivisms detractors will carp, as did I when I came across his Penn Station Stinks essay nearly six years ago. "Mr Dunkelman is still a believer in the power of Governance by Wise Experts. 'To rebuild faith in the power of government to do good, responsible leaders need the power to pursue the public interest." I fear, though, that he has really made the case that the best thing for the Wise Experts to do is to go away."
Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.
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