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1115: Why Are Democrats Afraid of Power?

Pod Save America

Sun Feb 01 2026

Summary

Podcast Summary: Pod Save America – “Why Are Democrats Afraid of Power?”

Episode 1115 | Aired: February 1, 2026
Host: Jon Lovett
Guest: Mark Dunkelman (author of "Why Nothing Works")

Episode Overview

This episode critically examines why Democrats and progressives seem hamstrung in wielding governmental power, contrasted with the brute-force efficiency of recent Republican leadership, particularly under Donald Trump. Jon Lovett interviews Mark Dunkelman, whose book "Why Nothing Works" explores the decline in the capacity for bold progressive governance from the New Deal era to the present. They discuss historical and present-day obstacles—ideological, procedural, and cultural—that have made it difficult for Democrats to demonstrate effective governance, and how this reality feeds political cynicism and strengthens reactionary forces.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Learning from “Trump's Brutal Efficiency”

Contrast in Governing Styles:
Trump’s approach exemplifies decisive, if often lawless, action (“he just knocked down the east wing of the White House. He just did it.” [04:39] – Mark Dunkelman). Democrats, in contrast, operate under complex constraints—legal, institutional, and cultural—that slow progress.
Progressivism’s Shift:
Dunkelman argues progressives moved from building powerful institutions for public good to a preoccupation with checking power—especially government power—after abuses in mid-20th century America.

2. The Burden of Process and Institutional Skepticism

Historical Examples:
- TVA and the New Deal: Programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) were set up rapidly, delivering infrastructure and jobs in months (“The Civilian Conservation Corps is a matter of months. The CWA came together and hired a huge portion of the nation… in less than a year.” [15:53] – Mark Dunkelman).
- Modern Contrasts – EV Charger Fiasco: The Biden administration’s $7.5 billion to install EV chargers resulted in only 58 chargers after three years (due to “so many process checks into the system” [12:58]).
Process Overreach:
A culture of accountability and transparency (born of legitimate abuses—urban renewal, environmental destruction, racist infrastructure) led to a proliferation of veto points, lawsuits, and bureaucratic sclerosis.

3. Political Constraints on Ambition

Compromised Legislation:
- Bipartisan deals (e.g., the infrastructure bill) needed Republican support, which led to complicated, less direct implementation (e.g., no federal “corps” to build EV chargers) ([13:08]).
- Even Democratic majorities contend with resistance from powerful interest groups (like labor unions) and allied factions.

4. The Cultural Turn Against “Big Men” Bureaucracy

From Reverence to Distrust:
- Figures like Robert Moses once represented the power of expert bureaucrats. In the wake of the 1960s/70s, their legacies were tainted by urban destruction, environmental neglect, segregation, and ego-driven projects.
- The American left became attached to "speaking truth to power," sometimes even at the expense of government efficacy ([04:39]).
- Dunkelman: "Downstream of that thinking became a whole series of legislative maneuvers designed to box in government. The Gulliver’s Travels image…government can't move..." [26:00]

5. Trade-Offs and the Modern Bureaucratic Dilemma

Voice versus Veto:
Modern systems empower every community and interest group to object, making process democratic but often unworkable. (“We've now gone…to the other extreme, where we've created all sorts of mechanisms for those communities that would otherwise have been bulldozed…to speak up. ... Now we can't build the things...we need.” [29:00] – Mark Dunkelman)
Case Studies:
- Environmental Review – The Turtle Story: Efforts to expand rail in Massachusetts were stymied by federal stakeholders focused on protecting “vernal pools” for endangered turtles, illustrating the web of modern process that makes compromise both expensive and slow ([38:59]).
- LA's ‘Mansion Tax’ Paradox: A well-intentioned city tax on property transfers inadvertently stifled new apartment construction, as fixing the issue would require multiple layers of reform and approval, revealing how easy it is now to grind urban reform to a halt ([44:26]).

6. The Demoralization of Public Servants

Lost Mission and Agency:
Governments no longer attract the same kinds of bold, ambitious experts because risk-averse bureaucratic culture punishes initiative.
- "Today…people who go into public service…spend their days frightened…they come out…like, I wasn’t really given the sort of leash to make the positive change that I wanted to do." [57:02] – Mark Dunkelman

7. Restoring the Capacity and Confidence of Progressive Governance

Empowering Doers, Not Just Preventing Mistakes:
The Democratic Party must rediscover both a clear public mission and a willingness to empower people to act, acknowledging that risk and mistakes are inevitable.
- “In order to have more faith in government, you need to see that government works...The reason that we have Trump is because people have seen government not work.” [47:07] – Mark Dunkelman
- “Sometimes we need elected officials to tell the lawyers to fuck off and try this, push the bounds a little bit…” [59:26] – Jon Lovett

8. Current Leaders and Ideas for Reform

Emerging Examples:
- Praising recent feats of Democratic governance (fixing highways quickly, prioritizing student outcomes in public schools [61:51–63:04]).
- Noting that the “abundance” and “neo-Brandesian”/progressive camps should find common cause on empowering government, not just breaking up monopolies.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“I think that in order for us to be popular again, we need to show that government can work…We are already, by default, the party of government.”
– Mark Dunkelman [05:55]
On the legacy of New Deal rapid action:
– “Months…hundreds of thousands…the CWA came together and hired a huge portion of the nation…in less than a year. It was just incredibly fast…and then…they were unwound quickly.”
– Mark Dunkelman [15:53]
“Between…Robert Moses…running rampant…and…nothing…where anyone can stop anything…there’s got to be some sort of process that allows everyone to have a voice but no one to have a veto.”
– Mark Dunkelman [29:00]
Lovett on modern progressive culture:
– “Politics is…defined by making sure you have the right enemies. …People are critical of those who suggest that bureaucracy…is what’s stopping clean energy, when it’s Republicans and corporate interference, too.”
– Jon Lovett [27:01]
On the demoralization of government work:
– “People today who go into public service…spend their days frightened…not really given the sort of leash to make the positive change that they wanted…That is an extension of the changes we made after the Robert Moses era and that we overdid.”
– Mark Dunkelman [57:02]
On necessity for new governing structures:
– “We go through these periods in American life where the broader structure of power just completely changes…People aren’t happy with this. … We will figure out a series of ways organically through reforms.”
– Mark Dunkelman [51:35]

Timestamps for Key Segments

[04:39] – What progressives can learn from “Trump’s brutal efficiency”
[08:39] – TVA vs. modern infrastructure: Speed and discretion then & now
[12:58] – EV charger program: process paralysis in real time
[15:53] – How fast New Deal jobs programs were implemented
[20:35] – From reverence to skepticism: the 20th century’s cultural turn against technocratic power
[29:00] – The dilemma: voice vs. veto in democratic process
[38:59] – The “turtle” saga: how overlapping stakeholder protections can block progress
[44:26] – LA’s mansion tax: policy intentions vs. systemic inertia
[47:07, 48:18, 51:35] – Why people lose faith in government, cyclical nature of bureaucratic effectiveness
[57:02] – Declining allure of public sector work
[59:26] – Sometimes leaders need to “tell the lawyers to fuck off”
[61:51-63:04] – Examples of current Democratic leaders taking initiative (Mamdani, Shapiro, Newsom, Whitmer)
[65:19] – Importance of credibility and mission for Democrats
[66:48] – Who is the Democratic establishment and how to regain confidence

Conclusion

This episode is a deep dive into one of the central dilemmas of modern liberalism: How can Democrats reclaim the ability to build big things when they are paralyzed by both internal skepticism of power and external veto points? Lovett and Dunkelman urge a return to bold public missions, accompanied by practical reforms for efficient government—a task requiring cultural, institutional, and political evolution.

Recommended for: Listeners interested in the practical challenges of American governance, the evolution of Democratic Party identity, and the future of progressive policymaking.

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Transcript

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John Lovett (1:19)

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Lovett. Obviously, right now, for national Democrats, success is. Is defined by what we can stop. It counts as some kind of good news when the President walks back his threat to use military force against Greenland or removes a petty tyrant and a fascist outfit from the streets of Minneapolis. And our job over the next year is to use what little power we have to stop the administration's worst successes while winning what will ultimately be a referendum on Trump's cruelty and failures. But regardless of the outcome in 2026, the Democrats are in a massive hole. The country may be turning against Trump, but that has not corresponded to any newfound love for his opposition. In recent polls, barely a third of voters have a positive view of the Democratic Party. And so one thing we're trying to do is have conversations about where we go from here, whatever happens in the midterms. And so that's why I wanted to have the conversation we had today. I spoke to Mark Dunkelman. He wrote a book called why Nothing Works. And it is a story about what happened to progressive governance and the changes in the way progressives think about power between the New Deal and today and what we need to do to prove to people that Democrats not only deserve power, but Democrats know how to use power once we have it. And a lot of times this gets framed as a left center, left debate. It kind of falls into the usual grooves of our kind of ideological fights over the last ten or more years. Sometimes it feels like people like to bring their old baggage to a debate because it's easier than packing a new suitcase. But I think it's worth listening to this as an opportunity for everybody in the pro democracy movement to understand what we have to do to demonstrate to people that democracy can actually deliver for people and that progressives can actually deliver on the promises that. That we make. Whatever you believe government should be trying to do for people, whatever vision you believe the Democratic Party should have, it was a great conversation that will kind of help put in context some of the fights we're having right now about the role of government and some of the reasons that Trump is able to make a lot of kind of political hay out of him being able to do things that other people couldn't do, and why Democrats need to carefully learn some lessons from that, while understanding that we should also listen to people and follow the law and respect basic values and the role of institutions. So it was a great conversation. It was a book I really enjoyed, and I think you'll like it.

Mark Dunkelman (8:43)

Yeah. There was a region of the country that was flyover country before we had the term. It was the Upper south, the area around the Tennessee Valley. It was an area that the local utility had chosen not to wire up because the farmers were so poor that they didn't believe that they'd get any return on the investment of building poles and wires to these poor farmers who were both black and white. And so Franklin Roosevelt hired a lawyer from Wisconsin essentially to build the Tennessee Valley Authority, which by itself had the power to build dams, build wires, reforest whole countrysides, and through just pure public power, hire both black and white workers who like, let's be honest, were put up in different encampments like it was a southern institution, it was segregated. But they miraculously, in almost no time built a huge power infrastructure that wired up these farms and you know, really brought enormous benefits to people who were living at, you know, 19th century standards when the rest of the country was well into the 20th century. Incredibly fast. Incredible power. With Lilienthal making these decisions, no real concern about local objections, no real input, no environmental impact statements, no sort of considerations like this. The better part of a century later. President Biden in the bipartisan infrastructure bill includes $7.5 billion to to put electric vehicle chargers in the places along the network where it does not make economic sense to place EV chargers. He realizes that the reason that people aren't buying electric vehicles is because they are worried that if they want to drive far, there are going to be places on the interstates where there is no place to recharge their car. So they worried the day before Thanksgiving when they're driving to grandma's house that they're going to be stuck, there's going to be no place. So he's going to subsidize the construction of those EVs. There's no federal workforce to build those EV chargers. So he's going to have to build a rule that will then put those dollars in the hands of state highway departments. Those state highway departments have never worked with EV charging companies. They're going to have to figure out what sort of equipment, they're going to have to find places to lease to put those EV chargers that aren't Places where the EV charging companies would otherwise want to put the EV chargers. They're then going to have to competitively bid to the EV charging companies. You know, so they compete with them. They're, they're going to have to convince the utility companies that they should sort of set aside all the work they're doing to, you know, power up these various data centers that are demanding more and more electricity and instead take some time to wire up these remotely placed EV charging facilities that very few people are going to want to. Right. Like, it's, I mean, that is a very long process. I think that the people who are working on this program, the NEVI program, were like, working really hard. Like, I think, like they made lots of really hard decisions. Like, like, like Andrew Rogers, like you can name the people who are involved. Pete Buttigieg, whole team. Like, like, I think they were really working hard and diligently. At the end of the administration, three years later, $7.5 billion, only 58 charges were out. It looked embarrassing. There were lots of negative stories. It was one of Trump's attacks on the Democratic Party. That wasn't laziness. It wasn't the bureaucracy gone wrong. It wasn't like, it wasn't anyone's fault per se, but it was the way that the government has been structured. Something that happened between when the TVA was able to do things expeditiously and the period where government looked incompetent. And, and it wasn't, you know, it wasn't a government got lazy. It was that we had inserted so many process checks into the system that we Democrats and progressives and reformers who were afraid of government working too fast and in, in many cases doing things that were bad made it so that government couldn't work effectively.

Mark Dunkelman (20:35)

I don't know. I think habit for the most part. Like, I don't find much of it to be totally compelling. You know, there's something cultural that happens. Like the moments that you're talking about in the New Deal. Progressives really do have a cultural, cultural affinity for centralized power. Right. Like you see a big public problem. There aren't enough wires to keep these poor people in the Tennessee Valley above, like really abject poverty. There isn't enough irrigation to stop a dust bowl. You know, there isn't enough relief in big urban centers. And so what you want to do is create these big centralized bureaucracies that are going to fix these problems. So, you know, there's a guy named Mike Strauss who runs the. I think it's Mike Strauss who runs the Bureau of Reclamation. Like it's a bureaucracy that's inside the Department of Interior. Like most Americans who aren't in agricultural places that depend on dams have never heard of that bureaucracy. He, he's succeeded by a guy named, I think Floyd Dominy in the, you know, in the 1950s and 60s. They are figures who are a piece like Robert Moses who runs the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority and David Lilienthal who runs the TVA and, and Austin Tobin who runs the Port Authority in New York City. And these sort of really powerful figures are just sort of run across America and they are generally revered now. They wear charcoal suits and fedoras and they cross their arms like this and they frown like the world, they hold the weight of the world. But generally Americans, having seen what George Marshall did to defeat, you know, the Nazis and right to just to make the world safe, like generally revered these figures and like they are, they are willing to accept their wisdom. And then something happens in the 60s and 70s and it turns out we discover that like these guys aren't, you know, the wise sages that we presume them to be in all circumstances, that they threw DDT on our crops and that caused birth defects, that they, they let, you know, pollution flow into the Cuyahoga river such a lit on fire that they did urban renewal and they did interstate programs that destroyed minority neighborhoods and that they sent us into Vietnam or Robert McNamara like so by the time you get to the 70s, like these guys are like generally seen as bad. Like the power broker, which is the takedown of Robert Moses in New York City and reveals that this guy who had remade the landscape of New York city between the 30s and the 60s had like strangled the city with interstates and like driven the Cross Bronx Expressway across a borough of New York City and like, you know, left it to be like just sort of a, the epitome of urban blight and despair. Like that was. That book came out right during Watergate. Right. It was sort of a symbol of how the great establishment that had been vested with so much we as the American people had vested them with so much respect for all these decades was wrong. And, and like you get to the 70s, like we get like these people are, are epitomized by like boss Hog, right? Like, I mean, like, like that's the view and we need to take them down so that you get, I mean all the cultural references, you know, like in network it's you know, like I'm mad as hell and I, we're not going to take it anymore, right? Like, like, like that's the sort of the notion or even that, that famous Apple ad from 1984 where, right where what do they take a javelin and someone comes in and there's a bunch of, a bunch of Robert Moses, Richard Daly looking figures sort of speaking out into the audience, sort of controlling people and someone comes in and throws like that becomes the ethos. How are we going to break down the establishment? And that became the central sort of pillar of progressive thought. And that downstream of that thinking became a whole series of legislative maneuvers designed to box in government. The Gulliver's Travels image. Like that I considered that. Or someone suggested that to me as for a cover image of my book, right. Which the sort of notion that there's government can't move, that you say you want to put up an electric transmission line that would connect clean power to the city, you can't do it. You want to build a high speed rail line, you can't do it. You want to build more housing, you can't do. Seems to me that the neo Brandesian left liberal, Elizabeth Warren, Lina Khan world, I think that they're fundamentally sympathetic. They want to do that. And I don't think that the abundance people don't think that we should take on monopolies. Monopolies. So it actually feels to me like this should be a topic on which we can all agree and just the sort of sense that we're Democrats so we're gonna find stuff to circular firing squad and, and ever. But anyway, you probably have a better explanation for me than why we're fighting about this stuff.

Mark Dunkelman (29:00)

I mean, this is the great challenge that I feel like I'm facing now and that I would hope all progressives would engage in a really productive discussion about. Because clearly we don't want to go back to the Robert Moses, Lloyd Dominy, Robert McNamara era where like singular figures could make decisions entirely on their own and without consideration of the effects on individual communities. Like, that was bad news bears. Right? Fair enough. We've now gone, I think, to the other extreme where we've created all sorts of mechanisms for those communities that would otherwise have been bulldozed by the Robert Moses or Dominies or whomever to speak up. We've created environmental laws and in, you know, historic preservation statutes and requirements for communities to have voices. And we've created rights of action in court. We created all sorts of mechanisms. And now like we know that people are using bullshit excuse like they don't want the housing to be put up near them. They're afraid that a black family is going to move in or a poor family is going to move into the apartments. So they say, I think that I once saw a bald eagle. Right? Or right. Or they are afraid that the train line is going to come and bifurcate their little neighborhood. So they create some sort of, I think this home is historic or I think this is actually a brownfield, that there was oil. They create all sorts of barriers such that now we can't build the things that we know that we need now between these two extremes of allowing one like powerful dude to make the choices unabated and on this other end allowing anyone with objection to stop anything. It's got to be some sort of of process that allows everyone to have a voice and no one to have a veto. I don't know exactly how that would work. Right. That's what I'm working on now. I'm trying to figure out, like, how do corporations do this? Now I was looking at the NEVI program at one point and someone told me this story sort of have, sort of interesting. I was thinking about just as a private, as a private sector example, when they were doing the NEVI program, Elon Musk had the supercharger program for Tesla and already people were buying Teslas not only because they like Teslas, but because if you bought A Tesla. There were already lots of superchargers all over the country. And the people who had, inside Tesla who had the supercharger program like they were running, those were like, we could license this to Ford and to the other companies and we could get some of that $7.5 billion. And that. That'd be like. That would significantly augment the overall size of the EV market. Maybe we should do it. The people inside Tesla who were selling Tesla cars were horrified that anyone would suggest it because, well, that was what they were selling their cars with. Right.

Mark Dunkelman (38:59)

Absolutely. There's a new line that's opened, a new railroad line that's opened between Boston and New Bedford, Massachusetts. New Bedford is a historically sort of a beaten down old industrial city on the south coast of Massachusetts that has not had rail service. One of the few cities that has not been connected to Boston. And it took them 35 years, but they finally opened the, the rail line. And there was a meeting that I've heard about in 2007 where Mass. DOT, the Department of Transportation, which would intended to build this line, called a meeting of all the stakeholders who were involved. And they called a couple of Indian tribes, and they called the Massachusetts environmental groups. They called the Army Corps of Engineers, who are responsible for water quality. And they called the Environmental Protection Agency. So it's a. Massachusetts has called a meeting. They're sitting at the head, but they've got these two federal agencies, and one of the routes that was under consideration was a route that was most direct, and it went through a swamp and a swamp that had vernal pools. I didn't know what a vernal pool. A vernal pool is a pool that only is wet during the spring. And they're important because you can. Turtles can lay eggs in the water during the spring, and they are then protected from predators in the water. And those turtles, in this case, the eastern box turtle, is endangered. And so those vernal pools are important ecologically. And the guy from the EPA is very worried about these vernal pools. And if you were to run this train through and this became, I. I learned, like, a real issue of contention. Just, the EPA really wants to protect these vernal pools and these. And these turtles. And, like, I remember hearing this story for the first three times and people sort of rolling their eyes about the turtle guy and like, like, like, really, like. Like, these poor people in New Bedford don't have access to these great jobs in Boston. And, like, it's going to be a much longer commute if you avoid this swamp. And like, this sort of, like, a real frustration that, like, the epa, are you really going to, like, force these. Like, like, that's great housing for people in Boston who are starved for housing. Like, like, like, how much are these turtles really worth? And then I began thinking about the guy from the EPA who's sitting there. Like, I think he's an older guy, probably took the job at the EPA maybe, like, not long after the power broker came out. Like, right in this age where, like, America has woken up to the degree to which the country has just totally destroyed much of the country's environment just to, you know, in every case, we've chosen economic expediency over the environment. Like, we've just destroyed whole, you know, forests and deforest just done terrible damage. And his. He'd taken this job and, like, probably, like, had joined the EPA because he was gonna speak up for these animals who couldn't speak up for themselves. He was gonna protect.

Mark Dunkelman (42:01)

He was the turtle guy, and he was proud of it, right? Like. And he was gonna stand up. Moreover, he sitting at that meeting, if he had said, all right, I'll let you run that train line through my turtle habitat, right? He'd gone back to the EPA and told his boss, like, I can only imagine that. Like, they would've been, what do you like? Our mission is to protect the. You can't just unilaterally. And then if news got out that the EPA had given up on their turtles, they would have been subject to a lawsuit from the Friends of the Wilderness, who were. There are a whole series of interventions that would have made it almost impossible for this turtle guy to actually come to some sort of collaborative solution with the Massachusetts transportation folks who want to do it now, there probably was some way to fix it where he could have said, listen, I'll let you take this, this little portion of the turtle habitat if you buy me a bunch of private land and we'll make that a new turtle, right? That's why things are so expensive here, right. Is that we, not we will buy it off, right? Like, why are things expensive in the US Is because each time you find a barrier, there is a way to have it all, but it's expensive, right? Like, oh, there's an old Indian burial ground. We need to avoid that or we need to properly move the site to have it reburied. I mean, there are all sorts of things that we are trying to be conscious of. We're not making trade offs and we don't have a great system for that. But, but between just allowing Robert Moses to run rampant through the South Bronx and destroy a borough of New York City and on the other hand, doing nothing so that we are, you know, millions and millions of units short of housing and unable to take advantage of the clean energy revolution so that we have more affordable clean electricity. And, you know, the acelotrine is, you know, running at a third the pace of the TGV and running between Paris and, you know, we're way behind China and Japan. I mean, like, we, we can get this stuff going, but it at root, this is a question of are we willing to make the trade offs and are we willing to create systems that allow us to do that?

John Lovett (44:26)

Yeah, it sounds like part of what you're circling is the idea that people need to have their voice, but not a veto. And that at different points along their way, there needs to be individuals empowered to make final decisions. Maybe not one person at the top, but individuals making decisions. You know, here in Los Angeles right now, there was this debate in the city council. So a couple years ago, Los Angeles passed measure Ula, I don't know how familiar you are with this, but it was a transfer tax for when properties over a certain amount were sold. Roughly, I'm gonna get the number slightly wrong, but it's like a roughly 4%. There's a tax that kicks in at $5 million. A tax that kicks in at $10 million. I think it's about roughly 4% and then 5%. But it turns out it also applied, it's called the mansion tax, but also applied to multifamily apartment buildings. And so a lot of researchers looked at the data and they said it is pretty clear that the, the application of the tax to new apartment buildings has probably cost the city far more in affordable housing units than the revenue has allowed the city to build. And so in the city council, there was a proposal. The proposal was to delay the tax on new family apartment. New apartment buildings for that have been constructed in the last 15 years. And it would cut revenue that the city wants and needs by 8%. That's a trade off, right? In order to allow the construction of multifamily apartment buildings, you would lose 8% of revenue on what the tax had been collecting. An extremely contentious debate, and it is now, as of right now, tabled because it would need to be passed by the city Council so that it could be put to a vote by the city in order to be ratified as a citywide ballot measure. And the amount of consternation in both directions that this is a gift to developers, the infighting about it has basically left Los Angeles kind of where it is right now with a measure designed to create more affordable housing, in all likelihood preventing the construction of vast amounts of affordable housing. And there are so many people who want to fix this, but they live in the system that they are in. And forget passing a small reform like this, the system, even if everybody involved wanted to have a version of what you're describing with a person who could be empowered at some level to address some of this, the system itself now has so many points of failure that the vetoes that exist would prevent that from happening. And I just don't know how we get out of this kind of doom loop.

Mark Dunkelman (48:28)

But the thing that I do say, which I hope provides some sort of comfort, you know, when the Progressive movement was born at the. Through the turn of the 20th century, it was at a moment when the federal government was small, when almost everything felt broken. Like, the. There were trusts and, like, railroads and steel barons, and, like. Like, private industry was huge, and government, like, was not built to handle it. Government was corrupt. Like. Like, you know, like, the federal government was like the US Postal Service and, like, a really corrupt pension system for people who, like, hadn't fought in the Civil War but were collecting pensions. Like, it was a. It was a mess. And people realized that. And the Progressive Movement was born essentially to say, like, we've got all this sort of scientific knowledge. We know that, like, we need better sanitation systems and transportation systems and electricity systems and regulatory systems, and, like, we need something better. And so, like, from this, like, mishmash of incompetent bureaucracy, like, recreated what became the New Deal. Like, there's no way in, like, 1906, you could have imagined the breadth and depth of the bureaucracy that was the New Deal or that existed in the 1950s, let alone, like, Robert Moses and the Triborough Bridge or the Tennessee Valley Authority, like, the idea that government bureaucracy could be this competent, efficient, like, powerful, or that, like, Robert Moses could be unimpeachable, right? Like. Like to think that in 19, you know, in the first decade of the 20th century, there would eventually be the man that Robert Caro would describe, you know, in the 1950s as, like, this. This. I mean, this powerful. 50 years later, unimaginable. To read the Power Broker in 1973, 74. And this a sort of idea of an establishment figure who's so unimpeachable. Who, Who. You know who. Jerry Rubin and Abby Hoffman and the Chicago 7. Like when they were protesting these sorts of characters on the outside of the 1968 DNC and like talking about the man and the establishment and, you know, up against the wall, motherfucker. And right. Like, like this, this sort of notion in the Port Huron Statement and Seawright Mill. Like this sort of notion that there was this, this establishment that sort of hovered over American life and that was impossibly large and beyond our, beyond anyone's control. That powerful institution would 50 years later be completely incompetent. There's no establishing right. We can't build any. We can't build housing. We can't build clean energy lines. We like, like think of the things that we can't do. Then there's no one to turn to. Like, we go through these periods in American life where the sort of. The broader structure of power just completely changes. So right now it feels like nothing can get done. There's no one to turn to. There's no way to make decisions. I think that 20, 30 years from now we will have completely rebuilt some sort of governing mechanism that makes it possible for us to do things. I don't know exactly how it's going to happen, but I feel pretty confident. Like, people aren't happy with this. They're not. Like they're not going to be happy with what we've got now. And like, we will figure out a series of ways organically through reforms. Like, ideas are popping. Like the fact that Ezra and Derek's book did well and Yoni Applebaum has a book and Jen Palka has a book and Nick Bagley's coming out. There's lots of literature coming out.

Mark Dunkelman (57:02)

I think mission is a huge part of it. I also think, to the point you made earlier, lots of people graduate from college and imagine that they're going to go into public service, take a job at one of these agencies and, like, do great things. I think that if you had gone to engineering school in the 1940s and gotten a job as a Moses man inside, you know, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority in New York and, like, spent years working for Bob Moses, who was imperious as a boss but, like, gave you a great deal of, you know, freedom to design parks and, like, you could end your retirement, like, you probably wouldn't have made as much if you'd gone to a private engineering firm, but you could show your grandchildren, like, I built that playground or I, you know, designed that bridge or what. Like, like that would have been very satisfying. I think that people today who go into public service and go work at a. What seems like a very important bureaucracy spend their days frightened. They're frightened that they're going to get their boss in trouble. They're frightened that they're going to get, you know, their boss is going to get yelled at by an appropriator because they did something wrong or that they're going to. They're going to make a decision that's going to get them subject to a NEPA lawsuit or that. Right. That the, that someone in the Office of Management and Budget is going to screw, that they don't have real authority to make the changes they want to do. And they come out after a bunch of years and like, I was just pushing paper around. Like, I wasn't really given the sort of leash to make the positive change that I wanted to do. I think, like, that is an extension of the changes we made after the Robert Moses era and that we overdid. I think we want to re. Empower people who go into public service to be able to make those sorts of changes. And you'll get different kinds of people who go into service that way. We're going to make mistakes. Like, government is going to make mistakes. It's going to be controversial. Like, people are not going to like it in all cases. But, like, I mean, I think that there's, like, there's so many things that we need to do and that only government can do. But I, I think a very hopeful. I think it's a very hopeful moment for all that, that we're all sort of aghast at what's happening in Washington right now. That sort of, the level of potential is really remarkable.