‘Why Nothing Works’ Review: Distrusting the Process

Beginning in the 1960s, progressives became ever more suspicious of big projects and their threats to individuals and local communities

By Judge Glock. He is director of research at the Manhattan Institute.

He reviewed the book Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back by Marc J. Dunkelman.

Excerpt: 

"These progressives typically preferred to block projects not by criticizing their aims but by objecting to their procedures. There was always need for more public hearings, public notice, commission oversight, court appeals and, most importantly, detailed study. According to Mr. Dunkelman, by the mid-1970s the federal government and half the states required developers and bureaucrats to study how proposed building projects might affect their surroundings—water tables, wildlife, traffic, air quality, historic properties.

If a procedure had been skipped or a study deemed inadequate, lawsuits could send multibillion-dollar plans back to the drawing board. One of the activist left’s crowning achievements was the 1971 Supreme Court case Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe, which stopped the construction of a highway that would have run through Memphis, Tenn. Justice Thurgood Marshall ruled that the U.S. Transportation Department hadn’t followed an obscure legal provision requiring it to study whether there was a “feasible and prudent alternative” to taking a public park. Activists touted the case as a pre-eminent example of the people versus big power, yet the Memphis City Council had voted 4-1 for the road. A similar stalled road in San Antonio, Texas, had won 2 to 1 in a public-bond referendum. Whatever the wisdom of these urban highways, progressive activists themselves were blocking the will of the people. 

The end result of progressives’ efforts was that Hamiltonian projects became bogged down by pettifogging procedures. Mr. Dunkelman labels this tendency toward bureaucratic enervation “Jeffersonian”: Negotiations over regulations, environmental lawsuits, automated welfare payments—all are Jeffersonian since they hamstring bureaucratic discretion. According to this argument, the proposal to create what became the Public Authorities Control Board to oversee independent bureaucracies in New York is also an example of “Jeffersonian caution.” One would be hard-pressed to find examples further afield from Jefferson’s small-state vision. 

Mr. Dunkelman’s book provides a strong case for the pitfalls of excessive procedure. But like many so-called supply-side progressives—leftists who want to unburden government to accomplish their aims—he imagines that the root of our modern ills is “a failure of process.” If prospective Hamiltons could rip up the flowcharts, in this view, government could fulfill its destiny.

A more convincing case can be made that modern government’s problems come from the concrete demands progressives place on it. After all, they haven’t merely required studies; they’ve demanded union wages, affirmative-action rules, laws requiring domestic production in manufacturing, endangered-species protections, wetlands preservation, emissions regulations, and on and on. 

Mr. Dunkelman is happy to attack abstract procedures, but not the unions and other interest groups that have been the drivers of progressivism. Several times Mr. Dunkelman refers to two big projects he wants a re-empowered government to complete: high-speed rail and transmission lines for renewable power. But both are demands from narrow progressive interest groups, rather than popular projects stymied by procedural hurdles.

As for the cultural battle between Jefferson and Hamilton, there is little doubt who won. In recent years state Democratic parties have renamed their venerated Jefferson-Jackson fundraising dinners. The party’s two most important founders are now painted as corrupt slaveholders. A Broadway musical has made Hamilton an unlikely hero. Big government has swept all before it, but still nothing works. Our troubles arise from more than a distrust of power."