“Why Nothing Works”

Marc J. Dunkelman

I’m of two minds about this book. It has definite positives—within the subtitle, “who killed progress—and how to bring it back,” it did a pretty good job of answering the first question.

The books thesis is that, within the ‘progressive’ movement, there’s two approaches to what should be done with power: the Hamiltonian, centralizing power, and the Jeffersonian, decentralizing it. The New Deal was Hamiltonian, creating agencies with sprawling powers to fix the problems facing the nation. But Robert Moses was also a Hamiltonian figure, who sure could get stuff done, but didn’t have much regard for if that stuff was worth doing. And so, in response to the failures of that Hamiltonian mode, we have the Jeffersonian, which I think is best embodied by the National Environmental Policy Act; it created an ability for individuals to block projects on the grounds that the environmental impacts were too great. Which, y’know, was quite often a good thing. But that same Jeffersonian approach has gotten us to where we are now, with the most expensive infrastructure projects in the world, because everyone can block everything, so every big project gets dragged through court time and time again.

My first issue is the degree to which the book discards the impact of people outside the progressive movement. Conservatives do, in fact, exist, and have frequently held both Congress and the Presidency. They’ve got a pretty solid lock on the judiciary of late, too. So acting as though the only source of this Jeffersonian gridlock is progressives is a bit irritating—especially since this same Hamilton/Jefferson divide can work just as well as a lens to examine conservative politics! It’s easy to equate the GOP’s “party of small government” stance with the Jeffersonian plan for power, but they have their Hamiltonian moments as well.

My second issue is the latter part of the subtitle, “how to bring it back.” Because that’s barely touched on at all. The conclusion has a bit of it, but by and large this book exists to point out the problem and state that, golly, we should really work on that. And, yes, there’s value to it; I’m a life-long progressive, but hadn’t ever thought of this ‘balance of power’ question, and now I’m aware of it and thinking about it. It’s perfectly fine for the book’s goal to be drawing attention to the issue, putting some framing around it so we can actually discuss it and figure out our approach to fixing it. But if that’s the goal, the subtitle is marketing it very wrong.

Still, though, I found it quite a useful piece of framing, and genuinely did find value in reading it. So, having spent most of the duration of this review talking about what I didn’t like about the book, I’m still going to recommend it. Worth reading.1

This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩