Why Nothing Works, by Marc J. Dunkelman — Summary

Synopsis

Dunkelman argues that modern American progressivism is crippled by a contradiction it inflicted on itself. The movement that built the twentieth-century administrative state — the TVA, Social Security, the interstate highways, environmental regulation — later turned against concentrated public authority so thoroughly that government lost the practical capacity to act. The book frames this as a war between two impulses present in progressivism since 1912: a Hamiltonian faith in expert-led, centralized institutions capable of solving large problems, and a Jeffersonian suspicion of concentrated power that demands dispersal, participation, and procedural restraint.

The argument is built historically, chapter by chapter, through case studies that range from the New Deal and the TVA through the rights revolution, welfare reform, environmental law, airline deregulation, housing policy, highway construction, and electricity transmission. In each domain, Dunkelman shows the same arc: Hamiltonian institutions are built, they achieve real results but also commit real abuses, a Jeffersonian backlash imposes procedural checks and veto points, and the cumulative effect is a system that can block almost anything but decide almost nothing. The method is narrative rather than quantitative, relying on legislative history, legal doctrine, and institutional case studies to trace how anti-authoritarian reforms hardened into structural paralysis.

The book matters for the vault’s ongoing investigations because it provides the clearest available anatomy of how progressive democracies can lose state capacity without anyone intending that outcome. Its framework — the Hamiltonian-Jeffersonian dialectic — is a direct complement to Fukuyama’s concept of vetocracy and offers a domestic American parallel to the institutional decay patterns tracked across other democracies. For anyone studying why liberal democracies struggle to build, regulate, or deliver public goods, Dunkelman’s argument is now an essential reference.

---

Chapter 1: “Servant or Master of the Public?”

The first chapter opens with the 1912 fight over the so-called “stolen plank” from Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party platform, and Marc J. Dunkelman uses that episode as a miniature version of the book’s larger argument. At issue was not merely campaign wording, but a deep dispute inside American progressivism itself. One group of reformers wanted government to attack concentrated private power by breaking up the trusts. Another group believed large-scale business was already an unavoidable fact of modern life and that the wiser course was to build a public authority strong enough to supervise it. The conflict over the missing plank therefore serves as the chapter’s dramatic entry point into a longer historical tension.

Dunkelman presents the radicals in 1912 as heirs to an older democratic suspicion of concentrated power. To them, America’s crisis came from domination by oligarchs, monopolists, and political insiders who had captured the system. Their instinct was to cut large institutions down to size and return authority to ordinary citizens. In this view, the trusts were not simply inefficient or unfair; they were morally and politically corrupting. The state’s job was to restore dispersed power, revive real competition, and defend the public from domination by private empires.

Against them stood figures such as George Walbridge Perkins, who embodied a different strand of progressive thought. Perkins did not deny that large firms could abuse their power, but he thought the radicals misunderstood the nature of the industrial age. Competition, in his view, was often chaotic, wasteful, and destructive. Large-scale organization was not the sickness but the condition of modernity itself. The real challenge was therefore not to resurrect a vanished world of small producers, but to create expert public institutions capable of disciplining the giant structures that industrialization had made inevitable.

The “stolen plank” matters because Roosevelt tried to keep both camps on board. He needed radicals for moral legitimacy and political energy, but he also needed the money and organizational support of the more managerial, business-friendly reformers around Perkins. The resulting ambiguity was not an accident. Dunkelman’s point is that progressivism was, from early on, internally divided between two incompatible political imaginations: one that sought to break power apart, and another that sought to gather power into competent hands. Roosevelt’s evasiveness exposed the contradiction rather than resolving it.

From there the chapter widens into a historical argument about the nineteenth century. For much of that era, the United States operated through highly localized “island communities,” where most people’s lives were shaped far more by nearby institutions than by Washington. Politics was decentralized, and local balances of power were maintained mainly through courts and parties. Judges tended to protect property and elite interests, while political machines, however corrupt, offered ordinary people some leverage and patronage. It was an imperfect equilibrium, often unjust and exclusionary, but it allowed conflicts to be worked out close to home.

Industrialization, above all through the railroads, shattered that equilibrium. Railroads did not simply improve transportation; they reorganized the American economy and redistributed power upward. Decisions taken in distant boardrooms suddenly determined whether farmers could ship crops, whether towns prospered, and whether entire regions were connected or bypassed. Local institutions that once mediated conflict no longer had the scale or authority to protect citizens from the new corporate giants. Dunkelman describes this as a kind of “punctuated equilibrium,” a moment when old arrangements were overwhelmed by a new technological and economic order.

The consequences were not only economic but social and psychological. The spread of railroad power accelerated consolidation across other industries, encouraged monopolies, and made ordinary Americans feel exposed to remote forces they could neither see nor control. Economic dislocation bled into broader anxieties about immigration, urbanization, class conflict, and moral disorder. The old virtues of thrift, discipline, and local autonomy no longer seemed enough to secure stability. In that atmosphere, Americans began searching for new political forms capable of reestablishing some sense of control.

Out of that crisis emerged what Dunkelman calls the Jeffersonian impulse within progressivism. Its core assumption was that the country’s troubles came from excessive concentrations of power above the people. That meant reform had to begin by restoring authority to citizens who had been pushed aside. In practical terms, this instinct first drove the assault on monopoly. Antitrust law, however weak in its first form, expressed a belief that giant combinations should be dismantled because “bigness” itself threatened republican liberty.

Louis Brandeis becomes the key figure for this Jeffersonian strand. Dunkelman presents him as more than a trust-buster. Brandeis believed that concentrated power of any sort—economic, bureaucratic, or political—endangered the republic. His ideal was not merely fairer prices or more efficient markets, but a social order built on many smaller actors rather than a few commanding institutions. This meant that Jeffersonian progressivism was suspicious not only of corporate monopolies but also of overgrown administrative states. Its deepest hope was to recover pluralism, dispersion, and self-government.

Yet the chapter shows that antitrust alone could not answer the new industrial order, especially because the courts initially shielded corporations from meaningful regulation. Dunkelman traces how late nineteenth-century jurisprudence repeatedly frustrated reformers, turning the Sherman Act into a weak instrument and making the judiciary a principal obstacle to democratic correction. Over time, some decisions softened and major trusts such as Standard Oil and American Tobacco were finally broken up. But even these victories were partial. They restored some leverage to government without fully reviving the smaller-scale world Jeffersonians admired.

The same Jeffersonian impulse also flowed into labor reform. Workers did not suffer only at the hands of giant monopolies; they were exploited inside individual firms by employers who controlled wages, hours, and conditions. Reformers therefore pursued minimum-wage laws, hour limits, and child-labor restrictions as ways of redistributing power downward within the workplace. Once again, though, courts often stood in the way, using doctrines of contract and due process to strike down protections. The battle over labor rights thus became another front in the wider progressive effort to curb concentrated authority.

A third Jeffersonian front targeted political machines. If party bosses had once functioned as rough democratic intermediaries, many progressives now saw them as corrupt brokers serving corporate interests rather than the people. Reformers in places such as California and Wisconsin turned to direct primaries, recalls, ballot initiatives, and referenda as tools for bypassing captured institutions. These reforms were all expressions of the same underlying faith: if the public could act more directly, politics could be purified and power returned to its rightful source below.

Dunkelman then turns to the Hamiltonian impulse, which began from a very different diagnosis. Its advocates agreed that industrial capitalism had created dangerous concentrations of power, but they rejected the idea that history could be reversed. Large firms were efficient. Integrated systems were necessary. Modern life required scale. The task, therefore, was not to smash these institutions into pieces but to build a stronger, more competent public structure that could supervise them. Regulation, not disassembly, was the realistic answer to modernity.

This Hamiltonian approach faced its own obstacles because the American public had good reason to distrust bureaucracy. Patronage, incompetence, and corruption made government administration look shabby and self-serving. To overcome that reputation, Hamiltonian progressives argued for a professional civil service staffed by experts rather than political hacks. They also sought to insulate these administrators from machine politics, whether through merit-based appointments, city-manager systems, or independent commissions. In effect, they wanted to replace democratic roughness with scientific administration.

The chapter makes clear that this was not just a policy disagreement but a moral and sociological divide. Jeffersonian reformers trusted the common citizen more than elite institutions; Hamiltonian reformers trusted disciplined professionals more than mass democracy. One side feared domination by concentrated authority. The other feared disorder, amateurism, and the incapacity of ordinary politics to manage a complex industrial society. Both called themselves progressive, both wanted to defend the public, and both could sometimes support the same reforms, but they were telling sharply different stories about where wisdom resided and how freedom could be secured.

Dunkelman argues that the practical result was a hybrid formula that Herbert Croly later described as using Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends. Theodore Roosevelt exemplified that synthesis. He could prosecute Northern Securities under antitrust law while also strengthening the Interstate Commerce Commission and expanding federal administrative capacity. He could endorse direct democracy measures while championing the administrative state. This braid of impulses gave progressivism much of its energy, but it also concealed a contradiction that would continue to shape the movement long after 1912.

Woodrow Wilson’s presidency confirmed how powerful the Hamiltonian current had become. Although he campaigned in a more Jeffersonian idiom through the New Freedom, once in office he adopted much of Roosevelt’s institutional logic. His administration strengthened antitrust law, but more importantly it built durable structures of centralized governance: the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, new fiscal capacities, and a widening network of commissions. By World War I, the federal government’s administrative reach had expanded dramatically, and wartime mobilization seemed to prove that expert coordination on a national scale could work.

Still, the chapter does not present Hamiltonian triumph as uncomplicated progress. War also revealed how centralized power could slide into coercion, suppression, and abuse. Arrests of dissenters, deportations, and the authoritarian temptations of emergency governance reminded reformers why the Jeffersonian suspicion of concentrated authority had never disappeared. By the 1920s, the explicit debate between the two impulses faded from the surface, but Dunkelman insists that the divide remained alive underneath American liberalism. Chapter 1 therefore ends by establishing the book’s central historical frame: modern progressivism was born not as a single doctrine, but as an uneasy marriage between decentralizing democratic revolt and centralizing administrative ambition.

Chapter 2 argues that the modern progressive state was built around a bargain: if Americans wanted large-scale progress, they would have to tolerate concentrated authority in the hands of experts. Marc J. Dunkelman frames this as the triumph of progressivism’s Hamiltonian side over its Jeffersonian one. The Hamiltonian impulse trusted centralization, expertise, and administration; the Jeffersonian impulse distrusted concentrated power and wanted ordinary citizens and local communities to retain leverage. This chapter shows how, during the New Deal and the decades that followed, the Hamiltonian side gained the upper hand. It did so not only because crisis made bold action attractive, but because an entire culture had come to believe that professionals knew better than the public.

Dunkelman opens with the Tennessee Valley to show what failure looked like under laissez-faire. The region was poor, geographically difficult, underdeveloped, and only barely connected to the electrical grid. Private utilities had little interest in serving widely dispersed rural families because the economics were unattractive. The market could justify that decision in narrow business terms, but the social result was stagnation: bad health, exhausted land, low income, and little hope of modernization. The setting matters because it gives Roosevelt a perfect exhibit for the case that private enterprise, left to itself, would not deliver broad public progress.

The early fight over Muscle Shoals captures a transition point in American political economy. After World War I, some wanted the federally built dam sold to Henry Ford and folded into private industrial development. George Norris instead insisted that infrastructure created by public power ought to serve the public directly. At the same time, the broader utility sector was operating under a compromise model: nominally private companies were given monopolistic franchises in exchange for obligations to serve the public. In practice, Dunkelman shows, this often meant distant corporate control, weak public accountability, and little incentive to extend service into poor rural areas. What looked like regulated capitalism in theory was, on the ground, leaving whole regions behind.

Roosevelt responded by imagining the Tennessee Valley Authority not as a narrow utility project but as a demonstration of what a centralized state could do when it chose to plan comprehensively. The TVA would generate and distribute cheap electricity, but it would also manage floods, restore eroded land, reforest hillsides, improve agriculture, and stimulate industry. In other words, it would turn public power into regional reconstruction. The TVA was meant to prove that government could act more rationally than the market because it could think in long horizons and social totals rather than immediate profits. For Roosevelt, this was not merely a relief measure. It was a governing philosophy in concrete form.

Dunkelman is careful, though, not to romanticize the TVA. He insists that the project carried a paternalist and even colonial logic from the start. The people of the Tennessee Valley were not simply seen as underserved citizens; they were often regarded by elites as backward people who needed to be uplifted, civilized, and taught how to live properly. Cheap electricity was therefore more than an economic tool. It was also imagined as an instrument for remaking social behavior. This matters because the chapter’s central claim is not that Hamiltonian progressivism was evil, but that it consistently joined public ambition to elite confidence and a striking willingness to overrule the people supposedly being helped.

The internal politics of the TVA itself reveal that progressivism never fully escaped its older duality. Arthur Morgan, one of the leaders Roosevelt chose, approached the mission with a more Jeffersonian sensibility, wanting something closer to moral and communal renewal rooted in local life. David Lilienthal, by contrast, represented the more recognizably Hamiltonian belief that expert administration should drive modernization from above. Dunkelman treats their tension as a miniature version of a larger ideological struggle. Even when progressives agreed that the old order had failed, they disagreed about whether renewal should come from empowered communities or expert-led institutions. The TVA became the stage on which that unresolved conflict played out.

Still, whatever its contradictions, the TVA worked on its own terms. It built dams, spread electrification, reduced flooding, improved soil conservation, planted trees, and helped create the conditions for economic development across a vast region. Dunkelman notes that the authority remained active into the twenty-first century, evidence of its durability and institutional success. Yet he refuses to separate that success from the costs that made it possible. People were displaced, local control was limited, and racial hierarchy was never seriously challenged. The TVA therefore stands in the chapter as both achievement and warning: it showed how much centralized public authority could accomplish, but also how progress could be delivered without meaningful recourse for those forced to bear its burdens.

From that prologue, the chapter widens its scope and asks how progressivism became so comfortable with concentrated authority in the first place. Dunkelman notes that the answer was not obvious in the 1920s. After World War I, many reformers had recoiled from government abuse. The Palmer Raids, the atmosphere of repression, and broader injustices made administrative power look dangerous. At that moment, a Jeffersonian distrust of concentrated authority was still very much alive. If one had stopped the story there, it would have been easy to imagine progressivism evolving toward stronger restraints on the state rather than toward more bureaucracy.

But the culture was moving in the other direction. The prestige of science, medicine, engineering, and professional expertise was rising rapidly, and progressives absorbed that change. Scientific breakthroughs in public health and sanitation made specialized knowledge appear not just useful but morally superior to amateurism. In industry, Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management taught Americans to associate efficiency with centralized planning and specialization. Across the professions, credentialed expertise began to displace generalist judgment. Dunkelman’s point is that progressivism’s faith in administration was not just a political doctrine; it was part of a broader civilizational turn in which trained professionals increasingly seemed more trustworthy than ordinary citizens.

That cultural shift transformed how reformers thought about government. Old-style bosses, local fixers, and amateur legislators no longer looked merely corrupt; they looked obsolete. Progressives wanted public affairs handled by people with technical knowledge and administrative discipline. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, along with Roosevelt’s later creation of the Power Authority of New York, illustrated this instinct before the New Deal fully matured. In both cases, centralized bodies were designed to lift decision-making out of messy local politics and place it in the hands of professional managers. Dunkelman stresses that this was a major break with the anti-bigness spirit associated with Brandeisian reform. The movement was no longer mainly trying to dismantle concentrations of power. It was increasingly trying to build better ones.

The New Deal, however, did not begin with a single clean theory. Dunkelman emphasizes that Roosevelt presided over a coalition containing at least three distinct tendencies: Jeffersonian conservatives wary of nationalization and deficits; Keynesians who wanted the federal government to spend aggressively; and associationalists in the original brain trust who wanted government to coordinate major economic actors from above. That last group shaped the First New Deal. Programs such as the National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Act were designed to stabilize the economy by organizing cooperation among large firms, labor, and agricultural interests. The state, in this model, acted less as owner or policeman than as conductor, trying to harmonize powerful interests for the common good.

This associational experiment failed badly. Dunkelman argues that it empowered the already powerful while freezing out smaller businesses, weaker unions, and consumers. Instead of disciplining concentrated private power, the NRA often ratified it. Western progressives with older Jeffersonian instincts recoiled at what they saw as a regime that protected incumbents and suffocated local initiative. The criticism was not just conservative. It came from within the progressive family itself. When the Supreme Court struck down key First New Deal measures, Brandeis reportedly reacted with satisfaction, believing Roosevelt had gone too far into centralization. The phrase that gives this section its title — the claim that the president had been living in “a fool’s paradise” — captures Dunkelman’s point that the failure was not merely technical. It was ideological.

Roosevelt’s answer was the Second New Deal, and here the Hamiltonian turn became far more durable. Rather than trying to coordinate the economy like a conductor, the federal government would build agencies that could regulate private actors directly and adversarially. Thurman Arnold helped articulate this shift: executive institutions would no longer merely stage-manage cooperation; they would intervene, enforce, and litigate. Courts would remain as referees, but the administrative state would become an active combatant. This model produced the enduring landmarks of modern liberal governance: the National Labor Relations Board, Social Security administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and other expert bureaucracies designed to shape markets and social life over the long term.

The decisive constitutional change came in 1937, when the Supreme Court ceased blocking New Deal innovation. Once the justices accepted minimum-wage legislation and then upheld other major statutes, the Lochner-era barrier to expansive administration effectively collapsed. Dunkelman treats this as the moment when Hamiltonian progressivism finally secured legal room to govern. From that point on, the administrative state could spread not only through Washington but through the states, aided by model laws, federal financing, and public authorities. The importance of this shift is hard to exaggerate. It did not merely save Roosevelt’s agenda. It normalized the idea that large, expert-run bureaucracies should wield major public power.

Even so, the story is not one of uninterrupted ascent. Dunkelman shows that resistance to bigness and bureaucracy never disappeared. Some progressives remained hostile to concentration of power, whether in government or in giant firms, and wartime administration stirred new public resentment. Price controls, rationing, and the visible reach of federal agencies made centralized authority feel intrusive. By the mid-1940s, Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom became a symbol of the fear that administration could slide into coercion. Liberal thinkers themselves began worrying about bureaucracy’s moral and political costs. So although Hamiltonian progressivism had won important institutional victories, it had not solved the legitimacy problem that came with expert rule.

The postwar answer was a partial retreat from direct administrative command toward Keynesian spending and the promise of full employment. Instead of endlessly enlarging coercive agencies, liberals increasingly used the federal purse to steer national development: housing, farm supports, urban renewal, the GI Bill, mortgages, student loans, and infrastructure. Yet this was not a return to Jeffersonian decentralization. The large bureaucratic apparatus built in the New Deal survived, and the Supreme Court now broadly accepted it. What changed was the dominant style of intervention. Government would still be big, but it would often act by financing and channeling activity rather than by openly reorganizing entire sectors through direct administrative control.

That new settlement fed the rise of what Dunkelman calls the Establishment. In foreign policy, economics, planning, science, and domestic administration, Americans increasingly deferred to a class of highly educated experts who were assumed to know how to manage complexity. This deference was not simply imposed from above; it was culturally earned by the memory of depression recovery and wartime mobilization. The “best and brightest,” the planners, the agency heads, the blue-ribbon commission members, and the public-authority builders all emerged from the same conviction: that modern life was too complicated to be governed by amateurs. Hamiltonian progressivism reached its zenith not just because institutions grew, but because society accepted the premise that experts should rule.

The chapter closes by showing the appeal and the danger of that world in a single image. A TVA official notices an unused piece of land created by dam construction in western Kentucky and, with very little delay or procedural friction, turns it into what becomes the Land Between the Lakes recreation area. It is a clear public good, enjoyed by huge numbers of people. But the speed and ease with which it was created depended on the near absence of objections, hearings, reviews, and meaningful public veto points. Dunkelman’s concluding point is sharp: this was the price of progress. Mid-century America could build because its institutions were willing to subordinate dissent, local resistance, and individual claims to expert judgment about the greater good. That bargain produced real achievements, but it also planted the seeds of the backlash that the rest of the book sets out to explain.

Chapter 3 argues that one of the decisive changes in modern American progressivism was not simply a change in policy preferences, but a change in emotional orientation toward power itself. Marc J. Dunkelman uses the history of the 1960s to show how a movement that had long trusted centralized institutions, expert administration, and large-scale bureaucratic problem-solving gradually turned toward suspicion of authority, decentralization, and liberation from the Establishment. The chapter’s title points to that new mood: reformers increasingly believed the machine itself had become oppressive, and that genuine progress required putting bodies against it rather than trusting it to work well.

The chapter opens with the demographic and political shifts visible at the start of the Kennedy years. As Black Americans moved north in large numbers during the Great Migration, the central social question confronting northern cities changed form. Problems that had been euphemistically described as juvenile delinquency or youth crime were in fact bound up with segregation, exclusion from opportunity, and the concentration of Black families in impoverished neighborhoods. Kennedy’s White House initially approached this challenge in the spirit of the New Deal and wartime state-building: if the federal government had conquered depression and fascism, surely it could also devise a technical remedy for urban racial inequality.

But the administration quickly ran into the limits of that mindset. The issues facing northern Black communities were not like building dams, financing highways, or coordinating wartime production. David Hackett, sent to study the problem, discovered how much resentment already existed between local officials, middle-class whites, and the poor Black neighborhoods supposedly being helped. What he brought back to Washington was not merely information about urban poverty; he brought back a new diagnosis. The problem, he and others concluded, was not just deprivation. It was also the power exercised by schools, police, welfare agencies, housing authorities, and other institutions that claimed to act for the public good while keeping the poor subordinate.

That diagnosis pushed some reformers toward what Dunkelman presents as a more Jeffersonian answer. Instead of trusting administrators to uplift the poor from above, these figures wanted to strengthen the poor so they could fight institutions themselves. Writers such as Paul Goodman and experiments supported by the Ford Foundation helped make this idea more attractive. Programs like Mobilization for Youth suggested that reform might come not from better bureaucratic design but from organized pressure exerted by local residents on the agencies ruling their lives. In other words, reform would come through conflict, agitation, and institutional challenge rather than expert management.

This dispute inside the Kennedy administration was really the return of an older ideological divide. On one side stood the Hamiltonian belief that public problems are best addressed by concentrated authority, professional knowledge, and centralized planning. On the other stood a Jeffersonian impulse to distrust concentrations of power and to favor forms of participation that dispersed authority downward. Kennedy had not fully chosen between these approaches before his death. With Johnson’s accession, one might have expected the Hamiltonian side to win decisively, because Johnson was temperamentally and politically a builder of large institutions.

Yet Johnson’s war on poverty produced a far stranger result. When the Economic Opportunity Act was drafted, Johnson tried to accommodate both camps. The bill included classic top-down measures such as jobs and training, but it also incorporated the idea of community action. Because existing local institutions, unions, school systems, and political actors resisted new federal intrusions that might threaten their turf, the more establishment-friendly side of the agenda ran into fierce opposition. The irony, as Dunkelman tells it, is that a deeply Hamiltonian president ended up advancing one of the most Jeffersonian elements ever placed at the center of national anti-poverty policy.

That element was the Community Action Program, built around the principle of maximum feasible participation. The phrase captured the spirit of the whole experiment. Federal anti-poverty policy would no longer be only something done for poor communities by experts in Washington or city hall. It would also be done with, and in part by, those communities themselves. Through local community action agencies, residents were supposed to organize, advocate, and pressure the institutions that had failed them. The state, in effect, would subsidize challenges to established power.

Dunkelman shows why this arrangement was almost bound to explode. The federal government now found itself financing organizers who promised to confront mayors, welfare offices, school boards, and local political machines. Activists sought grants precisely in order to become more effective critics of the public officials who were often allies of the White House. The result was a wave of conflict, confusion, and scandal. Some groups used money to sharpen protest tactics; others were accused of favoritism or political capture. Local leaders were enraged that Washington was funding people whose mission was to harass them. The program quickly became a magnet for administrative disorder and political backlash.

Johnson eventually retreated, and Congress redirected power over the program back toward local government. Community action did leave some useful institutional traces and trained a generation of Black leadership, but as a national political symbol it came to represent dysfunction. For Dunkelman, that failure matters less because of the immediate policy results than because of what it revealed: by the mid-1960s, progressivism no longer had a stable consensus about whether power should be built up or broken apart. The Great Society was therefore not only a triumph of liberal governance. It was also the moment when the internal contradiction of modern progressivism became impossible to ignore.

From there, the chapter steps back to explain the deeper cultural transformation that made this contradiction so explosive. Postwar liberalism, Dunkelman argues, had been shaped by fear of chaos. The memory of depression, fascism, war, and instability pushed reformers toward order, steadiness, and balance. That fear gave moral prestige to expert supervision, bureaucratic reason, and centralized authority. In economics, foreign policy, and municipal governance alike, progressives of the 1940s and 1950s preferred systems that could moderate conflict and keep society from veering into catastrophe.

This was the era of full employment policy, Keynesian management, countervailing power, containment abroad, and pluralism at home. These doctrines differed in substance, but they shared a structure. Each depended on strong institutions managed by sensible elites who could hold competing forces in equilibrium. The ideal political figure of the age was the calm establishment man: disciplined, authoritative, pragmatic, and certain that social complexity could be handled from above. Even when progressives worried about demagoguery or totalitarianism, their instinct was still to defend viability, order, and governability.

Such an outlook did not erase all Jeffersonian anxieties, but it clearly subordinated them. The main question was how to make institutions function responsibly, not how to escape their grip. Dunkelman stresses that the 1950s establishment did not merely acquire power; it accumulated cultural legitimacy. Planners, generals, administrators, and regulators were entrusted with keeping disorder at bay. This was the atmosphere in which the postwar state expanded and the large bureaucratic achievements of mid-century America became thinkable.

The seeds of disillusion, however, were already present. Corruption scandals, political patronage, and growing doubts about elite candor began eating away at public trust. At first, critics still often demanded better planning rather than less power. But younger Americans who had not lived through the upheavals of the 1930s and 1940s did not share their elders’ reverence for stability. For them, the existing order looked less like salvation and more like stagnation, hypocrisy, and complacency. The academy gave this sensibility a language through writers such as C. Wright Mills and through strands of critical theory that cast the American power structure not as guardian but as menace.

The New Left transformed that skepticism into an openly political style. In the Port Huron Statement and in the activism surrounding Students for a Democratic Society, the target was no longer only the political right. It was corporate liberalism itself: the web of institutions, bureaucracies, and elites that claimed to manage society rationally. Mario Savio’s famous image of bodies on the gears crystallized the mentality. The point was not to improve the machine so it could run more smoothly. The point was to stop it, expose it, and force people to see its violence and moral emptiness. That was a fundamental break with the older reform tradition that wanted the machine to work.

Dunkelman identifies 1965 as the hinge year in which the old balance briefly reached its peak and then began collapsing. Johnson’s Great Society marked the high-water mark of Hamiltonian confidence, with Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, school funding, and other federal expansions. At the same time, the civil rights struggle elevated a more Jeffersonian understanding of progress, one rooted in rights, citizenship, and the dispersal of power toward individuals denied equal standing. For a moment, these instincts coexisted. But they were grounded in different conceptions of power, and the balance proved unstable.

The unraveling became visible in controversies such as community control of schools and, above all, the reaction to the Moynihan Report. Moynihan intended to argue that legal equality was not enough and that deeper structural intervention was necessary. Yet in a climate increasingly hostile to paternal authority, his diagnosis sounded to many like an establishment brief against Black autonomy. What might once have been heard as a plea for stronger public action was now heard as an attempt to impose outside norms on a subordinated community. The same cultural shift shaped antiwar rhetoric, civil-rights militancy, and the broader conviction that the system would never reform itself voluntarily.

Vietnam drove the transformation much further. The credibility gap, the lies told by military and civilian officials, the revelations of atrocities, and later the Pentagon Papers all made distrust of authority seem not fashionable but rational. Once the government appeared capable of deception on such a scale, skepticism spread outward. Rachel Carson exposed environmental harms obscured by respectable institutions; Ralph Nader exposed regulatory capture and corporate negligence; journalists, activists, and intellectuals increasingly treated official assurances as presumptively false. Eldridge Cleaver’s image of a single octopus captured this convergence: local, national, military, corporate, and racial domination all came to seem like parts of one interconnected structure.

By the late 1960s, this anti-establishment sensibility had spilled beyond politics into the wider culture. The counterculture’s celebration of authenticity, spontaneity, natural living, sexual liberation, and escape from conventional life expressed more than lifestyle rebellion. It reflected a moral suspicion of system, hierarchy, and organized authority as such. The 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago then staged the conflict in pure form: Hamiltonians inside the hall defending institutional order, Jeffersonians outside seeking to expose its coercive nature. Even though Nixon benefited electorally, Dunkelman argues that the deeper ideological battle ended in a Jeffersonian victory. Progressivism’s emotional center of gravity shifted.

The chapter closes by tracing how that victory hardened during the 1970s. Watergate confirmed that power corrupts. Woodward and Bernstein became heroes not because they celebrated institutions, but because they showed how to hold them suspect. In academia, intellectual life tilted toward critique, deconstruction, and the interrogation of authority. In popular culture, films, journalism, and social criticism repeated the same lesson: behind every institution lurked domination. By the time Robert Caro’s portrait of Robert Moses appeared, the old Hamiltonian builder could be read above all as a monster of accumulated power. Dunkelman’s core claim is that progressivism had undergone a moral inversion. Where it once associated concentrated authority with deliverance from chaos, it now associated authority with oppression. That change, more than any single law or election, explains why later reformers would become far better at blocking power than at using it.

The fourth chapter argues that the anti-authoritarian turn of late twentieth-century progressivism did not remain a matter of mood or rhetoric. It became a governing program. Where earlier progressives had often trusted centralized institutions, expert administrators, and strong executive authority to solve large public problems, the generation shaped by the 1960s increasingly came to see concentrated power itself as the problem. Chapter 4 traces how that intellectual and moral shift translated into law, procedure, and administrative practice. Its core claim is that progressivism moved from a Hamiltonian confidence in capable institutions to a Jeffersonian desire to constrain them, disperse authority, and arm outsiders with rights against the state. The chapter’s title, “Manacling the Octopus,” captures that aim: the octopus is the centralized administrative order, and the manacles are the legal and procedural restraints reformers built to keep it from abusing people.

The prologue opens with a scene meant to crystallize the chapter’s paradox. Young lawyer Vincent Ragosta Jr. goes to a Providence police station in the 1970s to help bail out a client and sees the chief of police slap a disheveled officer across the face for looking sloppy. The episode shocks him because it reveals that police officers, who often appear to civilians as agents of intimidating authority, can themselves be subordinate victims inside their own institutions. The officer on the street may possess coercive power, but the officer inside the station house can be at the mercy of superiors. The point is not to sentimentalize police, but to show how a generation increasingly attentive to abuses of power could begin to notice a new category of victim: not only citizens abused by police, but rank-and-file officers abused by chiefs.

From there the chapter widens its lens. By the 1960s and 1970s, public confidence in the moral authority of police had already eroded. Supreme Court rulings such as Mapp v. Ohio, Escobedo v. Illinois, and Miranda v. Arizona had imposed procedural limits on police conduct, reflecting the growing belief that law enforcement too often abused its discretion. After the televised violence of the 1968 Democratic convention, that suspicion hardened. Yet the chapter insists that this reform wave produced an internal asymmetry. Suspects and defendants gained procedural protections, while many officers believed they remained exposed to arbitrary punishment from their own superiors. In the new moral landscape, a chief who terrorized subordinates could be understood as another avatar of the same abusive Establishment that reformers were attacking elsewhere.

The Baltimore police commissioner Donald Pomerleau becomes the chapter’s most vivid example of such concentrated authority. He is portrayed as a local strongman: feared, domineering, and willing to use tactics such as lie detector tests, pressure, intimidation, and humiliating investigations to keep control over the department. For officers and their unions, the contrast became glaring. Criminal suspects were being told their rights, while officers themselves allegedly had none when they were called into internal proceedings. Progressive reformers, newly sensitized to unequal power relationships, could therefore view due-process protections for officers not as a conservative indulgence but as an extension of the era’s broader civil-libertarian logic. What later generations would treat as scandalous shields for misconduct began, in important cases, as anti-authoritarian reforms.

This is how the chapter explains the origins of Law Enforcement Officers’ Bills of Rights. These laws, varying by state, restricted how police leadership could investigate or discipline officers, required notice and procedural protections, and often introduced confidentiality or neutral arbitration into disciplinary processes. At the time, many progressives and union advocates saw these protections as humane and just. The assumption was that if officers were insulated from arbitrary or politically motivated abuse by chiefs, they would be freer to resist corrupt orders, refuse racialized misconduct, and behave more professionally. In other words, limiting authority at the top was expected to improve moral conduct below. The chapter’s irony is that a reform once understood as progressive later became one of the most frustrating impediments to disciplining abusive officers.

Ragosta’s later career allows the chapter to show the long-term reversal. Having once sympathized with officers vulnerable to imperious chiefs, he eventually concludes that Rhode Island’s LEOBOR regime overshot. The procedural protections made it excessively difficult to remove officers who plainly should not remain on the force. The chapter underscores this with modern examples, including disciplinary cases in Rhode Island and the broader problem of officers like Derek Chauvin, whose records were full of warning signs before catastrophe struck. The author’s larger point is that the anti-power reforms of one era can generate a different kind of impunity in another. Efforts designed to prevent top-down abuse may end up shielding bad actors from accountability, especially once the political and institutional alignment changes.

After the prologue, the chapter steps back into legal history and argues that this policing story belongs to a much wider “rights revolution.” Earlier progressives had often regarded courts as enemies because judges in the Lochner era blocked labor and economic regulation. The New Deal settlement reversed that hostility: once the judiciary stopped striking down broad regulatory power, reformers began to ask whether courts might become allies instead. The hinge point is the famous Footnote Four in Carolene Products, where Justice Harlan Fiske Stone suggested that while courts should usually defer on economic regulation, they should intervene more aggressively to protect democratic processes, minorities, and specific rights. The chapter interprets this as a quiet but decisive redirection: the judiciary ceased to be mainly an obstacle to Hamiltonian state-building and became a potential engine of Jeffersonian checking and protection.

The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 deepened that turn. The chapter treats the APA as a foundational but often underappreciated instrument for disciplining the administrative state. Agencies had to publish proposed rules, accept public comment, and avoid arbitrary or capricious action, all under the shadow of judicial review. During the high New Deal and postwar decades, those safeguards coexisted with broad deference to expert administration. But once the culture changed in the 1960s, the APA became newly potent. What had been a set of modest legal guardrails could now serve as tools for outsiders to challenge bureaucratic discretion. The intellectual climate had shifted from trusting expert administration to fearing that expertise without accountability could mutate into domination. The legal machinery was already there, waiting to be used.

Charles Reich’s essay “The New Property” becomes the chapter’s key doctrinal bridge between culture and policy. Reich argued that in a modern administrative society, government benefits and permissions had become so essential to ordinary life that taking them away arbitrarily resembled the deprivation of property. A driver’s license, welfare benefit, or other routine public entitlement should not depend on opaque bureaucratic whim. The chapter presents Reich as translating the era’s anti-establishment sensibility into a concrete legal strategy. If individuals could claim rights against the bureaucracies that administered everyday life, then reformers could chip away at concentrated administrative discretion from below. This was not just a technical legal refinement. It was a moral recoding of the citizen-state relationship: the bureaucracy ceased to be presumed guardian and was increasingly treated as potential predator.

The chapter’s welfare section gives the most sustained illustration of how this new rights logic transformed policy. New Deal public assistance had originally been maternalistic. Aid to Dependent Children, later AFDC, was built around the idea that widowed or abandoned mothers needed support so they could remain at home raising children. But the aid came with intrusive supervision. Social workers, inheritors of the settlement-house ethos, did not merely distribute checks; they policed morality, domestic life, and sexual respectability. “Man-in-the-house” rules, surprise inspections, and midnight raids exposed how deeply the old welfare state combined care with social control. The chapter is unsparing here: whatever humane intentions may have existed, this was Hamiltonian progressivism at its most patronizing and coercive.

The Jeffersonian response was to convert welfare from a discretionary favor into something closer to a right. Reformers pressed courts and agencies to limit the discretion of social workers, culminating in decisions such as Goldberg v. Kelly, which required hearings before benefits could be terminated. States rewrote manuals and standardized procedures so that eligibility would be determined more by formal criteria than by intimate moral supervision. For recipients, this was liberation from arbitrary humiliation. It meant fewer prying questions, fewer moral judgments, and less exposure to a caseworker’s personal biases. Yet the chapter emphasizes the trade-off: once individualized discretion was stripped away, so was much of the human flexibility in the system. The social worker who could punish capriciously was also the one who could bend the rules compassionately when a mother needed help.

That transformation made welfare both more generous and colder. More eligible families applied and qualified. Rolls expanded dramatically. But the personal caseworker gave way to clerical functionaries instructed to think like bank tellers rather than social workers. Recipients no longer feared midnight raids; instead they feared bureaucratic mistakes, missing paperwork, and indifferent offices whose main duty was compliance with rules. In trying to remove one kind of domination, progressives helped create another experience of powerlessness: impersonal administration. The chapter’s phrase “salt in the wound of poverty” captures this new cruelty. Poverty was no longer moralized in the same intimate way, but it was managed through systems that could be rigid, unresponsive, and exhausting.

Politically, the author argues, this was disastrous for progressivism. Welfare had been redesigned in substantial part by reformers responding to abuses inside the system, yet the public impression that emerged was not moral liberation but bureaucratic chaos and indulgence. Richard Nixon, the chapter suggests, exploited the opening brilliantly. He could position himself as both sympathetic to the poor and scornful of a welfare apparatus that appeared incompetent, manipulable, and unfair to taxpayers. The old image of aid for widows gave way to the racialized and politically toxic image of the “welfare queen.” The deeper claim is that conservatives did not invent the crisis from scratch. Progressives, by remaking welfare in a way that advertised disorder and administrative failure, prepared the ground on which the right would later fight.

Environmental policy provides the chapter’s next major case. Here too the author contrasts older centralized progressivism with the newer suspicion of power. Earlier conservationist traditions, associated with Theodore Roosevelt, had trusted strong state institutions to preserve land and resources. The 1960s environmental movement, influenced by Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader, saw the threat differently. Bureaucracies, engineers, highway planners, and development-minded agencies were no longer reliable custodians of the public good. They were often understood as collaborators with industry, indifferent to ecological destruction, and structurally biased toward growth and convenience. That diagnosis naturally favored Jeffersonian remedies: empower citizens, watchdog groups, and courts to force large institutions to account for the damage they caused.

The chapter does not deny that the environmental movement also embraced strong command-and-control regulation, such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. But it insists that the more fateful development was the National Environmental Policy Act. NEPA looked modest at first. Its purpose seemed mainly to require agencies to think through environmental consequences by producing impact statements. Yet reformers and lawyers quickly recognized that this procedural requirement could be weaponized through the Administrative Procedure Act and judicial review. If an agency’s environmental analysis was incomplete, careless, or misleading, outsiders could sue. The result was a profound shift in power. Decisions that once would have been made within a bureaucracy and executed from above could now be halted, challenged, delayed, or renegotiated through litigation.

The trans-Alaska pipeline lawsuit symbolizes that change. Almost immediately after NEPA’s enactment, public-interest litigators used the new framework to secure injunctions and force agencies to defend their analyses in court. Similar suits multiplied. State and local governments imitated the model. What had been sold as a requirement to “look before you leap” became a procedural architecture through which determined opponents could slow or block both public and, later in some places, private projects. The author’s argument is not that environmental review was pointless or malicious. It is that a reform intended to discipline reckless centralized power also made coordinated building much harder. The old state builder gave way to a regime of continual challenge, bargaining, and judicialized delay.

The chapter then broadens its political frame and notes an uncomfortable convergence. In the 1970s, anti-establishment progressives and anti-government conservatives often spoke in strikingly similar tones about centralized power. Nixon railing against the bureaucracy and George McGovern denouncing an untrusted establishment were not ideological twins, but they were reacting to the same collapse of confidence in authoritative institutions. Watergate, Vietnam, urban decay, economic crisis, and bureaucratic failure all made Hamiltonian solutions seem suspect. The new Democratic generation elected after Watergate often shared the basic impulse to curb, monitor, divide, and restrain power rather than to mobilize it. The decade’s reform laws, from war powers to ethics rules to oversight regimes, expressed that distrust across multiple domains.

The final section, focused on public authorities, draws the chapter’s conceptual threads together. Entities such as bridge authorities, transit agencies, and other semi-insulated public bodies had once represented a Hamiltonian ideal: expert, businesslike, quasi-independent institutions capable of building and managing large systems beyond the reach of petty machine politics. By the 1970s, however, they looked to many reformers like pure embodiments of the octopus—remote, elite-run, intertwined with Wall Street, and unaccountable to ordinary citizens. Figures such as Robert Moses became retrospective warnings of what concentrated administrative power could become. So reformers surrounded these institutions with oversight boards, reporting requirements, lawsuits, and judicial scrutiny. The effect was not simply democratic correction. It was a diffusion of authority so extensive that agencies increasingly struggled to act decisively at all.

The chapter ends by naming the cumulative result: the administrative state became “a puppet controlled by warring hands.” No single reform caused that condition. It emerged from the braid of anti-authoritarian culture, rights-based jurisprudence, judicial willingness to intervene, procedural statutes, and organized activism. Each development could be defended on moral grounds. Each addressed real abuses. Yet together they curtailed discretion so severely that government often lost the capacity to do difficult things well. That is the chapter’s stark diagnosis. Progressivism, in trying to prevent institutions from doing harm, also made them less able to do good.

This diagnosis carries the chapter’s political sting. The deepest damage, the author argues, is not merely administrative inefficiency but the erosion of progressivism’s own credibility. When parks departments cannot repair rinks, housing advocates cannot build homes, climate advocates cannot deliver clean energy, and police reformers cannot remove abusive officers, the public stops associating reform with results. Critics like Ronald Reagan were not attacking the agile state of the New Deal; they were attacking the later state, encumbered by veto points, process, and paralysis. In that world, demagogues flourish. If government appears incompetent and progressives seem responsible for the incompetence, voters become susceptible to anti-state figures who promise to smash the “deep state.” Chapter 4 therefore functions as a hinge in the book: it shows how a morally intelligible effort to constrain abuse evolved into a structural politics of incapacity.

Chapter 5: More Harm Than Good

Chapter 5 argues that modern American progressivism gradually turned against one of its own greatest achievements: the centralized administrative state. Marc J. Dunkelman’s core claim is not simply that conservatives dismantled New Deal governance, but that progressives themselves, increasingly suspicious of concentrated power, helped erode the authority of the very institutions earlier reformers had built to act decisively in the public interest. The chapter tracks that transformation from confidence in expert bureaucracy to a sprawling regime of distrust, proceduralism, litigation, and veto points.

Dunkelman opens with the airline industry to show what Hamiltonian progressivism once looked like at its strongest. In the 1930s, the Civil Aeronautics Board was created because unregulated competition seemed likely to destroy a young and fragile industry. The airlines were unstable, safety could not be taken for granted, and the federal government believed that only centralized supervision could keep the sector from collapsing into chaos. In that earlier progressive framework, public power was justified because the market alone could not reliably produce durable, equitable, or safe outcomes.

For a time, the arrangement worked much as intended. Regulation stabilized the airlines, protected incumbent carriers from ruinous competition, and made it possible for government to demand service to smaller and less profitable cities. The system also spread benefits through the wider economy: unions, manufacturers, lenders, and communities outside the major metropolitan corridors all gained from a structure that subordinated pure market logic to broader public purposes. Dunkelman presents this as a textbook example of the old progressive belief that expert administration could discipline capitalism while also extending development.

The trouble, however, was that the stabilizing logic of regulation gradually hardened into protection for insiders. By the 1960s and 1970s, the CAB was increasingly seen not as a guardian of the public interest but as a shield for established carriers. It blocked new routes, limited competition, tolerated high prices, and moved with debilitating slowness. The emergence of lower-fare intrastate carriers such as Southwest and Pacific Southwest made the contrast glaring. Their success suggested that the CAB was not preserving safety or quality so much as preserving incumbents from competition.

At that point, a major intellectual reversal took shape. Progressives began to describe the problem through the language of “capture”: the regulators had become too aligned with the industry they supervised. What had once been defended as a rational public authority now looked like a cartel organized through the state. Dunkelman stresses that this reinterpretation mattered because it did not come first from the right. Figures such as Stephen Breyer, Ted Kennedy, and Ralph Nader were central to reimagining deregulation as a progressive remedy against entrenched power.

That is why Dunkelman treats airline deregulation as more than a policy episode. It was an ideological signal. An unusual coalition of consumer advocates, liberal Democrats, academic economists, and conservative Republicans converged on the same conclusion: the bureaucracy had ceased to serve the public. Jimmy Carter and Alfred Kahn then converted that critique into action, using administrative authority and the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 to break the old system apart. The result was mixed in distributive terms—workers lost protections, some cross-subsidies disappeared, and service quality did not uniformly improve—but fares fell and options expanded. The public, at least in the short to medium term, benefited.

From there, Dunkelman broadens the argument. The airline case was not an isolated correction. It exemplified a deeper change in progressive culture: a growing aversion to concentrated authority itself. What earlier reformers had seen as instruments of collective purpose, later reformers increasingly saw as machinery vulnerable to corruption, insulation, and elite manipulation. The question was no longer how to empower agencies to govern well, but how to prevent them from governing badly. That shift, in the chapter’s logic, is the hinge on which the rest of the story turns.

Dunkelman then revisits the New Deal constitutional settlement to explain what progressives were reacting against. The Administrative Procedure Act and the jurisprudence surrounding it had originally functioned as a compromise: agencies would be allowed broad governing authority, but they would have to exercise it through procedures that were consistent, transparent, and bounded by statute. This arrangement gave the administrative state legitimacy. It was meant to prevent arbitrariness without depriving government of the capacity to act. In principle, it reconciled energetic administration with basic rule-of-law safeguards.

But over time, confidence in the regulators’ judgment deteriorated. Dunkelman uses the Big John freight-car fight to illustrate the problem. Southern Railway developed a much more efficient railcar that could sharply reduce shipping costs, yet the Interstate Commerce Commission stalled the change because competing barge operators objected that they would be harmed. What looked at first like neutral regulation was, in practice, a mechanism for forcing efficiency to wait while entrenched interests defended themselves. Similar distortions appeared in oil policy, where administrative controls were used less to optimize national outcomes than to protect particular constituencies.

This mattered because it altered how reformers interpreted the state. The administrative apparatus no longer seemed like an impartial referee balancing the public good against private excess. It began to look like a venue in which organized interests fought for advantages and in which bureaucrats often mediated among them without any reliable commitment to efficiency, growth, or even coherent public purpose. At that point, the old progressive defense of bureaucracy lost credibility. Conservatives condemned regulation as inherently harmful; progressives condemned it as captured. Their broader political projects remained different, but on the question of bureaucratic distrust they increasingly pulled in the same direction.

Once progressives lost faith in agencies, the courts became their preferred alternative. Chapter 5 shows how the expansion of standing and the rise of public-interest law transformed the judiciary into a new center of reform. If captured agencies could no longer be trusted to defend neighborhoods, consumers, or the environment, then citizens and advocacy groups needed judicial tools to force accountability from outside the executive branch. Courts that earlier progressives had often viewed as obstacles were now reimagined as allies.

That shift had enormous consequences. Judges became more willing to take a “hard look” at agency action, and reformers pushed doctrines that required more hearings, more records, more responses to comments, and more opportunities for challenge. At the same time, organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Public Citizen emerged to use litigation as an ordinary instrument of governance. In Dunkelman’s telling, this did not merely add a layer of review. It changed the operating logic of administration itself. Rulemaking became slower, more defensive, and much more vulnerable to procedural attack.

Jimmy Carter occupies the chapter’s center because he personifies the unresolved tension between the old and new progressive instincts. He sincerely wanted to curb capture and inefficiency, but he also remained partly attached to centralized problem-solving. The result was not a coherent synthesis. In some areas, such as trucking and airlines, his administration loosened regulation in the name of the public interest. In others, especially energy, Carter still leaned toward top-down planning. At the same time, he multiplied inspectors general, watchdog mechanisms, and review procedures, adding new layers of oversight intended to make government cleaner and more trustworthy.

For Dunkelman, that contradictory agenda reveals a deeper intellectual failure. Carter wanted agencies to do more and to be trusted less. He wanted to decentralize power and centralize supervision at the same time. He wanted independent monitors, White House review, and empowered agencies all at once. The effect was cumulative restraint rather than renewal. Instead of rebuilding a more legitimate capacity to act, progressives kept adding checks designed to prevent abuse. The instinct was understandable in the wake of Watergate and decades of bureaucratic disappointment, but institutionally it was self-undermining.

The chapter then shows what happened once this logic matured. By the Reagan years, anti-government rhetoric was politically dominant, but the administrative state was already being constricted from within. Congress had reduced presidents’ room to reorganize government. Courts entertained far more challenges to agency decisions. The White House intervened heavily in rulemaking. Bureaucrats found themselves exposed simultaneously to statutory mandates, judicial scrutiny, political oversight, and organized-interest pressure. Dunkelman quotes the legal scholar Richard Stewart’s phrase “central planning through litigation” to capture the result: government still planned, but it did so through a maze of procedural contestation rather than through accountable executive discretion.

The consequences were not abstract. Dunkelman’s example of the Office of Civil Rights inside the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare is especially telling. A court order obtained during the Nixon years forced the office to keep devoting most of its energy to one desegregation struggle in North Carolina, even after Joe Califano, a liberal Carter appointee, wanted to redirect resources elsewhere. The point is not that civil-rights enforcement was wrong. It is that managerial authority had become so fragmented that even politically aligned leaders could not reliably set priorities inside their own departments. A judge, in effect, could become the agency’s real supervisor.

The Environmental Protection Agency furnishes the chapter’s broader institutional picture. Congress imposed deadlines, the White House revised proposed rules, industry and advocacy groups litigated aggressively, and the courts repeatedly intervened. From the outside, this could look like bureaucratic indifference or incompetence. From the inside, it looked like siege warfare. Officials learned that almost any consequential step could trigger delay, reversal, or sanction. In that environment, bold rulemaking gave way to caution, paperwork, and reactive administration. Public servants who had entered government hoping to build, regulate, or protect at scale found themselves reduced to navigating process.

Dunkelman’s sharpest analytical move comes in the chapter’s final section, where he turns to the progressive ideal of “voice.” Faced with both the abuses of old-school bureaucratic domination and the failures of captured agencies, many reformers concluded that the answer was broader participation: more consultation, more opportunities to object, more procedural inclusion. Dunkelman does not reject voice outright. He accepts that people affected by public policy deserve to be heard. His point is harsher: voice is not a substitute for decision. Consultation does not dissolve conflict, and participation does not eliminate trade-offs.

That is why the chapter treats negotiated rulemaking as an emblem of failure. The hope behind such mechanisms was that if all the affected parties were gathered into a structured process, they could reason their way toward mutually acceptable outcomes. In practice, the parties often had genuinely incompatible interests. No amount of listening could remove that fact. Consensus procedures produced tiny adjustments, endless meetings, or stalemate. And because participants retained other ways to obstruct outcomes later, even apparent agreement could not guarantee action. The process enlarged participation without creating finality.

The chapter ends with a bleak but precise diagnosis. Progressives were right to fear arbitrary authority of the Robert Moses variety, and right to recognize that bureaucracies can be captured by the interests they regulate. But their answer too often turned every grievance into a veto and every policy choice into a procedural gauntlet. The result was neither democratic empowerment nor effective public action. It was a vetocracy: a system in which many actors can block, few can decide, and government loses the practical ability to impose necessary costs for the sake of broader gains. Dunkelman’s conclusion is that progressivism damaged itself by refusing to face a basic truth of governing: public institutions must listen, but they must also be able to choose.

Chapter 6: “No Place to Call Home”

This chapter uses housing to show, in especially concrete form, the book’s central argument: progressivism first empowered centralized authorities to build at scale, then reacted so strongly against those authorities’ abuses that it created a system almost incapable of building anything. Marc J. Dunkelman treats housing not as a side issue but as a diagnostic case. If a society cannot build enough homes in places where people need them, then it is not merely facing a market problem; it is revealing something deeper about how power is distributed, checked, and ultimately neutralized. The chapter’s title points to the broad human outcome of this institutional failure: when systems make construction painfully difficult, ordinary people lose access to affordable places to live.

The chapter opens with Nelson Rockefeller’s effort in 1968 to create New York’s Urban Development Corporation, or UDC, after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and amid mounting recognition that state policy had helped wreck Black neighborhoods. Rockefeller wanted the UDC to serve as a muscular corrective to the damage done by Robert Moses and postwar urban renewal. His vision was that if the private market would not solve the housing shortage, the state would do it directly. But the way he pushed the plan through Albany already exposed the ambiguity at the heart of this model. The UDC was justified as a public-minded response to injustice, yet Rockefeller secured its passage through bargaining, threats, and patronage. The agency was born as a reform, but also as an instrument of concentrated executive force.

Once created, the UDC was given extraordinary powers. It could override local zoning, bypass local constraints, and finance projects through “moral obligation” bonds that implied state backing without fully formalizing it. Rockefeller put Ed Logue in charge, imagining him as a benevolent version of Moses: a planner powerful enough to cut through inertia, but enlightened enough to use that power for egalitarian ends. Logue moved with enormous speed, approving projects across New York and pressing ahead on developments that conventional private actors had avoided because the finances were shaky. In Dunkelman’s telling, this is the Hamiltonian impulse in full form: the belief that expert-led, centralized authority can identify the public good and impose it despite hesitation, localism, or procedural drag.

Yet Logue’s activism reproduced some of the pathologies it meant to overcome. He treated resistance with impatience, discounted worries about sequencing and financing, and tried to force more affluent suburban communities to accept affordable housing. That last move was morally serious, because it sought to break the racial and class boundaries that suburbanization had hardened. But politically it was explosive. The same communities that had supported Rockefeller recoiled when his state apparatus threatened to pierce local autonomy. Dunkelman does not present this simply as hypocrisy, though it certainly included that. He presents it as a structural collision between a planner’s idea of justice and residents’ determination to defend control over place. The more assertively the UDC acted, the more it summoned the backlash that would eventually delegitimize this entire style of governance.

The UDC’s collapse was not caused by politics alone. It was also a financial disaster. Projects were financed on optimistic assumptions about subsidies and future revenue, and when the Nixon administration began cutting housing support, the model started to unravel. Logue had counted on Rockefeller’s continued backing and on the broader assumption that the state would stand behind the agency if trouble emerged. But once Rockefeller left for Washington and the UDC’s debts became impossible to ignore, lenders began to fear default. The chapter uses this episode to show that centralized power can fail not only because it is insensitive or coercive, but because it encourages grand ambition untethered from sustainable constraints. Hamiltonian governance promises scale and speed, but when it overreaches, the resulting disillusion can be devastating.

That overreach fed directly into New York’s wider fiscal crisis. When Hugh Carey became governor, he discovered that the UDC’s distress was only one piece of a much larger problem: the state was entangled in a sprawling ecosystem of public authorities, all of them semi-autonomous, all of them carrying obligations that had been tolerated as long as elites assumed they would somehow be covered. The state had accumulated immense liabilities through agencies presented as technically “apolitical” and professionally managed. In reality, those bodies had enabled political leaders to spend and build without confronting the full public consequences. Carey’s budget team began cutting projects broadly, not because every project was unsound, but because the system had become too opaque and fragile to trust. What had once looked like energetic public capacity now looked like a shell game.

The showdown between Carey’s team and the banks dramatizes the chapter’s political economy. Richard Ravitch, brought in to replace Logue, tried to persuade lenders to roll over support for the UDC, but the banks refused to absorb the costs of a mess from which they had profited. Carey’s side then prepared a bankruptcy filing and forced the banks to blink. Dunkelman’s point is not just that a crisis was averted through brinkmanship. It is that the state’s governing class and the financial class had together normalized a mode of development that privatized gains while socializing risk, all under the rhetoric of public purpose. When the model broke, the obvious response was not to restore confidence in executive power but to put new checks on it.

That response took institutional form in the Schell Commission’s recommendations and, especially, in the creation of the Public Authorities Control Board, or PACB. What began as a seemingly sensible oversight mechanism became a durable new veto point. Legislative leaders were each given the power to block major authority projects individually, which meant that executive action could now be halted by a handful of actors—or even one. At the moment of its creation, this looked prudent. New York had just lived through the failure of unchecked authority-building. Additional review seemed like common sense. But the chapter insists on a broader lesson: institutional checks created in response to real abuses do not remain confined to those abuses. Once installed, they reshape the state’s capacity more generally.

Dunkelman then shows how the PACB evolved from safeguard into weapon. Sheldon Silver used it to kill Michael Bloomberg’s proposed West Side stadium, despite the project’s importance to New York’s Olympic bid. Its mere existence also scared off other proposals before they were formally considered. Later, the same structure helped doom Amazon’s planned HQ2 in Queens, because a single state senator with PACB power could credibly threaten to veto the deal. The issue here is not whether each project was good or bad on the merits. Dunkelman’s point is institutional: a mechanism designed to prevent another Moses- or Logue-style overreach ultimately handed enormous blocking power to politicians with narrow constituencies and immediate incentives. The balance had swung so far from centralized imposition that the state now struggled to act even when major investment was on offer.

From there the chapter widens into a longer history of housing and planning. Early progressives embraced zoning and urban planning because they saw unregulated urban growth as chaotic, unhealthy, and morally dangerous. Planning promised order. It would separate industrial uses from residential life, rationalize infrastructure, and improve public health. This was not marginal to progressivism; it was one of its clearest expressions. In Dunkelman’s account, zoning was originally a Hamiltonian tool: it lifted decisions about land use out of the hands of individual property owners and lodged them with public authorities advised by experts. The gains were real, especially in sanitation and civic coordination. But the same system also established the intellectual and administrative foundations for later exclusion.

That exclusion worked both directly and indirectly. Zoning could not always be used openly for racial segregation, because courts eventually rejected explicit racial zoning, but single-family restrictions and similar devices often served the same social purpose in practice. More broadly, the planner’s mindset assumed that city leaders had the right to decide how neighborhoods should develop and who or what should be kept out. After World War II this logic expanded dramatically. The federal government subsidized suburban homebuilding, highways, and urban renewal, while city growth machines used eminent domain and discounted land to remake neighborhoods. Officials imagined they were modernizing American life, but they often destroyed communities in the process and deepened racial and class separation across metropolitan regions.

New Haven under Mayor Richard Lee becomes a model of the postwar growth machine. A coalition of business leaders, civic institutions, labor, and political elites coordinated redevelopment, using federal money and eminent domain to clear neighborhoods and hand land to developers. From inside that worldview, this looked like responsible public leadership. The city was acting coherently instead of drifting. But the people displaced by these schemes were treated as collateral. The growth machine assumed that elites could define the public good and that those harmed by redevelopment either did not matter very much or would benefit eventually. Urban renewal’s failures—and the way it tore through poor and minority communities—made that assumption harder and harder to sustain. Jane Jacobs’s critique gained force precisely because it named what centralized planning had ignored: living neighborhoods are social organisms, not blank surfaces for elite redesign.

As white flight accelerated and homeownership became central to middle-class wealth, the politics of housing changed. A house was no longer merely a place to live; it became a family’s main asset. That transformed local attitudes toward change. New development now appeared as a threat not only to neighborhood character but to household balance sheets. In suburbs and cities alike, residents grew hostile to projects that might increase density, alter demographics, or lower property values. Their arguments were often framed in neutral language—traffic, schools, environmental strain, neighborhood quality—but those concerns frequently carried racial and class content. Dunkelman’s key move here is to show how a democratic push for local control and fair process became intertwined with exclusion. Tools first associated with protection against elite abuse now became methods for shutting newcomers out.

The legal and procedural architecture of that new system emerges through zoning rigidity, judicial review, and environmental law. Reformers attacked the old variance system because it had allowed insiders to obtain exceptions through connections and bargaining. They wanted decisions made openly, with evidence on the record and courts available to review them. The 1973 Fasano case helped establish that rezonings required formal, reviewable procedures in which affected residents could be heard. In principle, that sounded like democratic progress. In practice, it multiplied opportunities for objection and litigation. Once many actors had standing, nearly any controversial project could be delayed, revised, sued, and delayed again. The aim had been to prevent arbitrary favors for developers. The effect was to make development chronically vulnerable.

Environmental review deepened that transformation. By requiring extensive studies of impacts on water, wildlife, traffic, noise, and more, laws such as NEPA and especially California’s CEQA created powerful new levers for opponents. Dunkelman does not deny that some developments deserve scrutiny. His claim is that these procedures offered no reliable way to weigh costs against benefits, including the social benefit of more housing. A project could be blocked not because it was truly intolerable, but because some flaw in a study or process gave opponents a litigation hook. New York’s ULURP and similar local procedures amplified the same dynamic by giving neighborhoods and elected officials more opportunities to obstruct rezonings. Even conservation tools such as land trusts could become, in effect, devices for freezing communities in place.

California, and especially Silicon Valley, becomes the chapter’s clearest example of what this anti-growth system produced. Proposition 13 let homeowners avoid rising property taxes even as their home values soared. Environmental review and local veto structures let them resist nearby development. Together those rules made it possible for incumbents to enjoy enormous appreciation while blocking the supply increases that might have moderated prices. The result was predictable: extraordinary job growth paired with nowhere near enough housing. Dunkelman stresses that this was not just a Bay Area quirk. It was an advanced version of a national pattern in which communities wanted the benefits of prosperity without accepting the density and construction required to house people.

By the time the chapter reaches the 2010s and 2020s, the consequences are unmistakable. Governors and presidents could announce ambitious housing targets, but actual production lagged badly because the system remained built for objection. Even progressive jurisdictions that recognized the shortage struggled to pass meaningful reforms. Much of the movement still focused on the demand side—rent control, mortgage aid, subsidies—rather than the supply problem, in part because building itself remained morally and politically suspect. Construction could still be associated with displacement, gentrification, environmental harm, or the return of top-down coercion. So progressives found themselves trapped by their own history: they knew the market was failing, but they feared the very state capacity that might correct it.

The chapter does not end with a simple call to revive the old growth machine. Dunkelman is explicit that Robert Moses-style power is unacceptable. Instead, he argues for a new balance: a planning system that genuinely hears affected communities yet still empowers some authority to make timely, final decisions insulated from endless rounds of litigation and veto. In other words, voice should be guaranteed, but voice should not automatically become veto. That is the chapter’s governing distinction. Without some Hamiltonian restoration of decision-making capacity, Jeffersonian protections metastasize into paralysis. Without Jeffersonian protections, public power becomes predatory. Housing exposes the need for both principles at once.

The chapter’s final political claim is blunt. A society that cannot build enough homes cannot convincingly claim that government works. If progressives allow housing to remain a permanent symbol of public incompetence, they strengthen the case of reactionaries and demagogues who insist the state is hopeless. Dunkelman therefore treats housing as more than a policy sector. It is a test of democratic legitimacy. Progressives, in his view, cannot preserve their moral authority merely by denouncing greed or honoring participation; they must build institutions capable of acting. Chapter 6 thus turns the housing shortage into a larger argument about governance itself: when fear of abuse destroys the state’s capacity to decide, the public does not experience liberty. It experiences scarcity, frustration, and the sense that no one is in charge.

Chapter 7: “The Bridge to Nowhere”

Chapter 7 uses the history of American highway building to explain one of Marc J. Dunkelman’s central claims: the United States did not stop building ambitious public works simply because it lost money, ambition, or technical capacity. It stopped building because a long series of reforms, many adopted for understandable moral reasons, gradually made it harder for any public authority to impose a painful local cost for a broader regional or national gain. The chapter’s governing paradox is that the same progressive tradition that once celebrated state capacity eventually armed itself against that capacity so effectively that government now struggles to complete even projects many progressives want.

The chapter opens in the postwar years, when suburban growth produced a practical and ideological crisis for American cities. As middle-class families moved outward, downtown business districts became increasingly dependent on fast commuter access. Urban leaders came to think of central cities as living bodies whose circulation had to be preserved, and the highway became the chosen instrument for preserving that circulation. In this mental world, driving a road through a city was not an act of civic mutilation but a form of rescue. San Antonio and Memphis serve as Dunkelman’s case studies because both cities embraced that logic and both believed an expressway was essential to avoid decline.

In each city, however, the seemingly rational route ran into a deeper political problem. Planners wanted a direct path from suburb to downtown, but routing a highway through affluent white neighborhoods was politically dangerous. Public parks appeared to offer an elegant solution. In San Antonio, Brackenridge Park stood between downtown and the airport corridor; in Memphis, Overton Park offered a similar shortcut between downtown and eastern neighborhoods. The choice revealed the logic of midcentury technocracy at its clearest: if government experts could save hundreds of homes, reduce compensation costs, and improve traffic flow by taking public green space instead, then that was the route they believed a sensible state should choose.

At first, most local opinion broadly accepted those trade-offs. Business elites, chambers of commerce, city councils, and many ordinary voters treated mobility as a precondition for prosperity. Protesters who objected to sacrificing parks were marginalized as sentimental obstructionists. Yet Dunkelman shows that these critics mattered precisely because they asked questions the political mainstream was not asking. Were the benefits really as obvious as officials claimed? Were environmental costs being trivialized? Were planners simply assuming that technical expertise entitled them to override any local objection? The early anti-freeway activists were weak in formal power, but they were beginning to puncture the moral authority of the Establishment.

That challenge gained force when local opponents stopped acting as isolated cranks and started becoming part of a wider anti-highway movement. Across the country, residents confronting expressway plans began to recognize one another as participants in a shared struggle against top-down planning. In San Antonio, their breakthrough came through Senator Ralph Yarborough, who inserted Section 4(f) into the 1966 transportation law. The provision said transportation funds should not be used to damage parkland unless there was no feasible and prudent alternative and unless officials had minimized harm as much as possible. Dunkelman stresses that Congress did not originally mean this as an absolute ban. It was supposed to discipline administrative judgment, not abolish it.

That distinction became decisive when highway opponents turned to the courts. In both San Antonio and Memphis, activists concluded that public hearings and local politics would not save their parks, because officialdom had already decided what counted as the public interest. Their only real leverage lay in judicial review. That move was ideologically striking. For decades, many progressives had defended judicial restraint so that expert administrators could govern more freely. Now, anti-highway reformers were asking judges to do almost the opposite: to check administrators, scrutinize their process, and invalidate decisions reached in the name of expertise.

The turning point was Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe. Justice Thurgood Marshall’s opinion transformed a relatively limited statutory protection into a far more muscular doctrine. Instead of treating parkland as one concern among several, the Court read the law to give it extraordinary weight. Officials could not simply prefer the cheapest or most convenient route; they had to demonstrate, with real rigor, that no prudent alternative existed. Dunkelman treats this as a constitutional-cultural rupture as much as a legal one. A liberal Court, in service of anti-authoritarian reform, had repudiated the older progressive assumption that expert officials should enjoy wide discretion so long as they acted in good faith.

The practical consequences were immediate. Overton Park became not merely a victory for Memphis activists but a template for how marginalized opponents could stall or kill major projects by attacking procedure. The ruling made process itself into substance. A project no longer needed to be obviously corrupt or irrational to be vulnerable; it merely had to rest on a record that a court could deem incomplete, insufficiently comparative, or inadequately attentive to harm. Tennessee’s response shows the trap this created. Avoiding the park meant considering a tunnel that was vastly more expensive, while rerouting around it meant imposing new burdens elsewhere. The project lingered in paralysis. San Antonio eventually rerouted. Memphis never got its freeway through Overton Park.

From there the chapter pulls back to a longer history. Dunkelman argues that today’s progressive memory often treats the interstate era as a kind of original sin, but that interpretation misses how deeply the highway system itself was rooted in earlier progressive ideals. In the early twentieth century, reformers backed roads because private railroads did not serve isolated rural places well enough. The problem, as they saw it, was not that government was too ambitious but that markets had left too much of the country disconnected. Building roads was thus conceived as an egalitarian corrective: a public solution to the gaps left by private infrastructure.

Thomas MacDonald, the longtime head of the Bureau of Public Roads, personifies that earlier Hamiltonian phase. He believed expert administration could impose order on scattered, uneven, and often politically captured local systems. Even when authority remained formally in the states, federal money was used to force states to consolidate control in professional highway departments and adopt supposedly scientific planning methods. This was not a democratic consultation model. It was a state-capacity model. Progress meant taking fragmented local power and organizing it through disciplined expertise so that the nation could solve collective-action problems ordinary politics could not solve on its own.

By the late 1930s and especially after World War II, that road-building mission expanded. It was no longer just about linking remote towns to markets and rail hubs. Highways became instruments for remaking metropolitan life itself. The federal government solved earlier obstacles by authorizing land acquisition and, eventually, by building a durable financing system through gas taxes. The 1956 Interstate Act, in Dunkelman’s account, was the peak of this confidence. It aligned road builders, carmakers, oil interests, and suburban developers, but it was not merely a corporate giveaway. It was also a colossal example of government concentrating authority to overcome a national tragedy of the commons. The promise was simple and intoxicating: speed, access, integration, growth.

That is why the interstate program was initially so popular. Americans feared being bypassed more than they feared being cut through. Towns, cities, and regions worried that without rapid access they would fall behind economically. Highways were imagined as connective tissue, not as borders. Dunkelman does not deny the system’s racial and social damage, but he insists that the original political energy behind it came from a belief that roads would bind the nation together. Only later, as the human costs became unavoidable and the moral authority of the Establishment weakened, did the same infrastructure begin to appear primarily as an instrument of division.

The chapter’s middle sections track that moral reversal. Early critics such as Lewis Mumford still thought in largely Hamiltonian terms: their complaint was that planning had been too crude, not too powerful. Kennedy-era reforms similarly sought better coordination, not decentralization. Yet by the mid-1960s corruption scandals, city-state conflicts, hostile public meetings, and visible neighborhood destruction were undermining confidence that experts could be trusted to balance competing goods. Citizens no longer assumed that planners spoke for the common interest. They increasingly viewed them as insulated actors, capable of imposing severe local damage without ever having to bargain with the people who would live with the results.

A key moment in this shift came in New York, where opponents of a Hudson Valley expressway sued over route selection. Judge Edward McLean would not substitute his judgment for that of the engineers, but he did something arguably more important: he affirmed that affected citizens had standing to challenge whether the government had followed proper procedure. That doctrinal opening changed the terrain. If courts would not directly choose roads, they might still invalidate official decisions whenever agencies had failed to examine alternatives, weigh harms carefully enough, or produce a record showing that they had done so. Procedure became the lever through which ordinary citizens could pry open formerly closed systems of expert rule.

Dunkelman then shows how a series of laws deepened this procedural revolution. The National Historic Preservation Act, later highway statutes, the Endangered Species Act, and above all the National Environmental Policy Act layered more and more values into infrastructure review: historic preservation, noise, habitat, air quality, water quality, recreation, and more. In theory, some of these laws centralized coordination. In practice, they multiplied the number of questions any project had to answer and the number of points at which outside actors could sue. The modern bureaucrat’s mission became less about building the bridge or rail line than about assembling a record robust enough to survive litigation.

This is the context for Obama’s remark that there is “no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” Dunkelman argues that the remark was widely misunderstood as an admission of incompetence. His point is harsher: the absence of shovel-ready projects is not a managerial accident but the intended consequence of decades of reform. A system created to prevent the abuses of Robert Moses now makes it extraordinarily difficult to do almost anything large, quickly, and affordably. The result is not only cancellation but inflation. Costs rise because studies multiply, routes proliferate, agencies cross-review one another, lawsuits delay timelines, and every delay itself creates new costs. California high-speed rail and the staggering price of American transit projects become symptoms of this larger institutional design.

The chapter ends by naming the deeper problem as a progressive dilemma rather than a conservative one. Reformers want infrastructure, housing, transit, and public capacity, but they also want to ensure that no community is steamrolled by centralized power. For Dunkelman, modern progressivism has oscillated between those goals instead of reconciling them. It first empowered figures like Robert Moses, then overcorrected by surrounding all state action with veto points. The answer, he argues, is neither a return to unchecked technocracy nor satisfaction with endless participatory paralysis. It is a new balance in which government remains transparent and attentive to harm, but some accountable authority still has the power to decide that a painful trade-off is worth making for the larger public good. That, in the chapter’s terms, is what it would mean for progressivism to come full circle.

Chapter 8: A Tragedy of the Commons in Reverse

Chapter 8 is built around a brutal irony: at the very moment the United States most urgently needs to build the infrastructure required for decarbonization, the political and legal system has become exceptionally good at stopping almost any large project from moving forward. Marc J. Dunkelman uses electricity transmission as his case study because it sits at the center of the climate problem. Clean power is useless at scale if it cannot travel from where it is generated to where it is consumed. The chapter’s argument is not that environmental objections are fake, or that local grievances are irrational. It is that a system designed to multiply veto points, empower procedural challenges, and distrust centralized authority has made it extraordinarily difficult to make necessary trade-offs in the public interest.

The chapter opens with Massachusetts’s attempt to buy large quantities of clean electricity in the second half of the 2010s. The state wanted to reduce carbon emissions without sharply increasing prices, and one promising solution was importing hydropower from Quebec. That plan immediately ran into a geographic fact with enormous political consequences: Massachusetts does not border Canada. Any substantial flow of Canadian electricity would therefore require a long high-voltage transmission line through another state. This turns climate policy into a problem not just of generation, but of territory, consent, compensation, and public authority. Dunkelman makes clear from the start that the line itself becomes the true political battlefield.

The first proposal, Northern Pass, would have run through New Hampshire. It failed after public backlash, especially from people who believed the state’s landscape was being sacrificed for Massachusetts’s benefit. The defeat already contained the pattern that defines the chapter: a project with broad public benefits could still be stopped by more concentrated local resistance, procedural chokepoints, and political resentment. Massachusetts then pivoted to Maine, where the proposed alternative, the New England Clean Energy Connect, or NECEC, initially looked even more attractive. Maine’s leaders were told the project would create jobs, generate tax revenue, lower electricity costs, and be fully financed by Massachusetts. On paper, it looked like a political gift.

Yet the gift quickly became toxic. Opponents framed Maine not as a beneficiary but as a victim being used by its richer southern neighbor. Environmentalists argued that the corridor would scar forests, cross the Appalachian Trail, and damage places such as the Kennebec River Gorge. At the same time, incumbent fossil-fuel interests understood that a large new supply of hydropower would erode the market share of older, dirtier plants. Dunkelman shows how unlikely allies formed around a common goal: conservationists, local anti-development activists, and carbon-intensive generators all found reason to oppose the same line. The politics were powerful precisely because each faction could speak in a different moral language while reinforcing the same obstructive outcome.

Avangrid, the company behind NECEC, responded the way developers now often must: not by relying on a single regulatory approval, but by showering the process with concessions in hopes of neutralizing opposition. It promised rate relief, funds for low-income households, money for heat pumps and EV infrastructure, conservation spending, and local benefits for towns along the route. Major environmental organizations and Governor Janet Mills eventually backed the project. The state’s Public Utilities Commission granted the key certificate. By ordinary policy logic, that should have settled the matter. A project had been studied, modified, sweetened, and approved through the proper channels. But in the governance world Dunkelman describes, approval is never really final.

What followed was a master class in obstruction. Opponents built a professional campaign designed to find any available veto. They pressured regulators, fought in court, reversed local opinion in towns that had earlier supported the line, and looked for procedural weak spots. When one referendum strategy failed, they designed another that changed the legal terrain rather than directly undoing a past agency decision. By 2021, “Question 1” turned the project into a statewide populist conflict. Opponents had the stronger emotional message: Maine was being exploited, its beauty sold off, its future decided for someone else’s benefit. Voters approved the referendum by a wide margin, even though the project had already gone through years of review and significant construction had begun.

The aftermath is one of the chapter’s most devastating passages. Litigation continued. Courts partly revived the project by recognizing that Avangrid had acquired vested rights after spending hundreds of millions of dollars and building substantial portions of the line. But delay itself became a form of defeat. Inflation drove costs sharply upward. The financing model became less certain. Years passed while no additional clean electricity entered the grid. The project accumulated dozens of reviews, millions of documents, and endless layers of challenge. Dunkelman’s point is not merely that NECEC was delayed. It is that the system showed almost no capacity to metabolize conflict and reach a durable decision in reasonable time. Even after formal approvals, the project remained vulnerable to renewed political attack.

From that contemporary case, Dunkelman steps backward to explain how the United States once handled electricity more effectively. In the early twentieth century, electric service was chaotic, dangerous, and dominated by competing private firms laying wires wherever profit beckoned. Communities feared fires, unreasonable rates, poor service, and arbitrary intrusions onto public and private land. The Progressive Era response was Hamiltonian: create expert regulatory commissions with enough authority to discipline private companies while also giving those companies stable rules and a reasonable opportunity to earn returns. The public got oversight; investors got predictability; the grid got built. This was an exercise in using centralized authority to impose order on a technologically transformative but socially disruptive industry.

That older model worked not because it eliminated conflict, but because it gave someone the power to resolve conflict. Regulatory commissions could set rates, grant franchises, compel service, and authorize the use of land when needed. Dunkelman emphasizes that private firms often preferred regulation to more radical alternatives such as municipal ownership. Public oversight became the compromise that allowed private capital and public purpose to cooperate. In his telling, this was one of Hamiltonian progressivism’s real successes: experts, empowered by the state, could steer markets in ways that neither unregulated business nor fragmented politics could achieve alone.

The chapter uses Samuel Insull as the emblem of that system. Insull saw that a patchwork of small plants around Chicago could be replaced by a more efficient, centrally organized network. But building such a network required more than entrepreneurial vision; it required public authority capable of coordinating land, rights-of-way, and market structure. The result was cheaper and more reliable power on a massive scale. Dunkelman treats this as a case in which centralized power did not crush the public but served it. The grid expanded because government and business were bound together within an institutional framework that could actually make decisions and carry them out.

The next key development was federalization during the New Deal. As electricity began crossing state lines, purely state-based regulation became inadequate. The Federal Power Act of 1935 and the Natural Gas Act of 1938 divided authority between states and Washington, creating a more coherent national structure. But there was a critical asymmetry. Gas pipelines received federal siting authority because they obviously crossed states. Transmission lines did not, because electricity was not yet moving over such long distances at scale. That choice seemed reasonable at the time, but Dunkelman shows that it later became a structural trap. The country built a regulatory system for the old energy geography and then struggled when technology and environmental necessity demanded a new one.

For a time, the arrangement still worked. During the postwar decades, America operated within what Dunkelman calls a utility consensus: vertically integrated utilities generated and delivered power, regulators oversaw them, and cheap electricity was treated as a pillar of mass prosperity. But the consensus began to crack in the 1960s and 1970s. The Pacific Intertie demonstrated that power could travel vast distances, which opened the door to competition and weakened the logic of the old local monopoly model. At the same time, the oil shocks, the Santa Barbara spill, and the Cuyahoga fire deepened suspicion of the energy establishment. Progressives came to believe not only that incumbent firms were self-interested, but that supposedly expert regulators were too compromised to be trusted.

That suspicion produced a decisive ideological turn. Rather than strengthening a central authority capable of redirecting the system, reformers increasingly preferred decentralization, procedural guardrails, and skepticism toward concentrated power. Dunkelman connects this shift to the same broader transformation he describes elsewhere in the book: the rise of a Jeffersonian progressivism that wanted to protect communities and outsiders from institutions that might steamroll them. In energy, that meant more environmental review, more litigation risk, and more opportunities for local resistance. The timing, he argues, could hardly have been worse. The old fossil-fuel infrastructure already existed, but the transmission lines needed for a cleaner future had not yet been built.

The Minnesota transmission fight of the 1970s becomes an early warning. Engineers used an apparently neutral algorithm to choose a route that would minimize damage to residential neighborhoods and natural areas. In practice, that meant pushing the line through farmland, where rural people concluded they were being sacrificed so that suburbanites and environmental priorities would remain undisturbed. What followed was not just dispute but a cultural war over who counts, who bears costs, and whose landscape is protected. Dunkelman’s point is sharp: even technocratic planning does not eliminate politics. If anything, when decisions are filtered through too many procedural criteria, they may merely obscure the value judgments being made while intensifying resentment among those selected to pay the price.

Jimmy Carter’s response embodied the unresolved tension. On one hand, his administration expanded federal regulatory authority in certain areas. On the other, it also encouraged smaller and alternative generators through PURPA, helping to open the system from below. This hybrid reflected a broader progressive uncertainty about whether the answer to entrenched power was stronger public institutions or a more fragmented market. The ambiguity persisted into the 1990s, when environmental concerns became dominant and many progressives embraced electricity deregulation as a way to challenge the old utility order and make room for cleaner generation. The hope was that competition and decentralized incentives would green the system without requiring heavy-handed central command.

But deregulation created a vacuum of responsibility. Utilities no longer had strong reasons to build transmission lines that would invite competitors onto the grid and strand their own generation assets. Government, meanwhile, lacked both the operational apparatus and the political authority to impose the needed build-out. In the old vertically integrated world, regulators could pressure a utility to make long-term investments and let it recover costs from ratepayers. In the new world, no actor had equivalent leverage. Everyone might endorse the abstract goal of cleaner power, yet no one was positioned to execute the concrete transmission projects required to achieve it.

This is why Dunkelman places such emphasis on the contrast between gas pipelines and electric transmission. Pipelines benefited from a federal framework that could override local obstacles relatively quickly once market demand was shown. Transmission lines, by contrast, remained trapped in a state-and-local maze. Congress tried to address the problem in 2005 by creating federal backstop authority in designated corridors, but court decisions narrowed that power so sharply that it could not overcome outright state rejection. The result was a grotesque mismatch: the legal system was comparatively better at moving fossil fuels than at moving clean electricity. That is not an accident of technology. It is a consequence of institutional design.

The Clean Line saga under Barack Obama shows how this dysfunction survives partisan changes. Michael Skelly proposed transmitting Oklahoma wind power to the Tennessee Valley in what should have been an appealing climate-and-development story: jobs, cleaner energy, competitive prices, and regional integration. Instead, the project got stuck in regulatory catch-22s, state resistance, investor hesitation, and political opposition from incumbents threatened by competition. Obama officials offered some support, but not enough to bulldoze through the obstacles. When the Trump administration arrived, the remaining federal backing evaporated and the project died. Dunkelman’s interpretation is important: conservative hostility mattered, but it was not the whole explanation. A system that cannot deliver such a project even during years of Democratic rule is structurally broken.

He then broadens the indictment. Progressive groups themselves have often opposed solar plants, wind farms, or transmission lines for reasons tied to habitat protection, landscape preservation, or local environmental disruption. Dunkelman does not dismiss those concerns as cynical. On the contrary, he insists they are often real. But that is exactly the problem. A political order that treats every legitimate concern as a near-veto will reliably produce paralysis, because decarbonization requires choices that inevitably impose local costs. His Florida example is especially telling: a law meant to protect communities from intrusive high-voltage lines ended up pushing the utility toward a lower-voltage workaround that produced many of the same disruptions while delivering fewer system-wide benefits. The process did not prevent harm; it redirected action into a worse form.

The chapter’s title crystallizes the argument. In the classic tragedy of the commons, individually rational behavior destroys a shared resource because no one can effectively coordinate restraint. Here the dynamic runs in reverse. Every actor is boxed into defending a narrow, legitimate, often legally protected interest: utilities protect profits, regulators protect ratepayers, towns protect property values, environmentalists protect habitats, legislators protect constituents, and activists protect procedural rights. But taken together, those rational defenses make it nearly impossible to build the infrastructure necessary to prevent planetary disaster. The common good is not being pillaged by an absence of constraints; it is being thwarted by an overabundance of mutually reinforcing constraints.

Dunkelman’s conclusion is therefore not a call for authoritarian shortcuts or for the abolition of environmental review. It is a call to restore the state’s capacity to make decisions. The United States, he argues, needs institutions able to weigh competing goods, accept real trade-offs, and say yes to the best available option within a reasonable time. Without that kind of authority, technical progress in generation, storage, and clean energy innovation will be squandered by the inability to move power where it is needed. Chapter 8 ultimately serves as one of the book’s clearest expressions of its larger thesis: progress requires not only moral aspiration and democratic input, but governing structures with enough power, legitimacy, and discretion to act.

---

See also

• fukuyama_political_order_decay_resumo — Fukuyama’s “vetocracy” concept is the closest theoretical cousin to Dunkelman’s argument; both diagnose American dysfunction as an excess of checks without corresponding capacity to decide, but Fukuyama embeds it in a comparative framework while Dunkelman stays inside the progressive tradition.
• americanliberalism — Dunkelman’s Hamiltonian-Jeffersonian framework reframes the internal tension of American liberalism as a structural, not merely ideological, divide — the same movement that builds the state also arms citizens to paralyze it.
• gurri_revolt_of_the_public_resumo — Gurri’s thesis that networked publics destroyed institutional authority without building replacements mirrors Dunkelman’s chapter 3 cultural shift, but from the information-technology side rather than legal-procedural reform.
• tocqueville — Tocqueville’s analysis of how democratic equality breeds both local self-government and centralized administration anticipates the exact tension Dunkelman finds unresolved in progressivism two centuries later.
• neoliberalism — Chapter 5’s account of progressive-led airline deregulation complicates the standard narrative that neoliberalism was purely a right-wing project; Dunkelman shows liberals actively dismantling their own regulatory apparatus.