Ian Coss (6:34)

Yeah, I love how this idea, it kind of troubles the conventional linear nature of like the left and right. And what you're suggesting is that it's not just a matter of how far left, but like how far left along which of these tracks it's operating on a different axis, which is interesting.

Mark Dunkelman (6:53)

That's exactly right. It is. You know, one of the fears I had when I wrote the book and delineated between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian impulses was that people would say, oh well, clearly the mods among the progressives are Hamiltonian and the libs are Jeffersonian. But that's certainly not true. Right. Like you could solve our healthcare mess by pushing power up into a single payer system. Right. That would be a Hamiltonian system. And it's embraced by the far left. And you can find situations the other way as well. So my view is that both of these impulses are in the hearts and minds of both the, both moderate and the most liberal progressives and that we're operating on an axis that people don't really consider.

Ian Coss (7:49)

You said it's not an either or. It's not like, you know, Lyndon Johnson is either a Hamiltonian or a Jeffersonian. So I'm wondering if you could give an example of a figure, a project from the past, when we can see those two impulses working together.

Mark Dunkelman (8:07)

Yeah, well, the reason that I struggle is that both impulses are almost always at work in some way or another. Like there's never been a project that was entirely Hamiltonian and never been a project that was entirely Jeffersonian. So they're always working and there are trade offs no matter how you balance the two. So the quintessential example of Hamiltonian progressivism, sort of at its apex is the Tennessee Valley Authority, where this little lawyer named David Lilienthal from Wisconsin was basically vested with dictatorial powers in the upper south of the United States. And the problem at the time was that the local utilities in and around the Upper south did not believe that it was going to be profitable for them to wire up all the poor farms that sat in the countryside. And so in that case, Franklin Roosevelt invested David Lilienthal as the head of the Tennessee Valley Authority to do this on his own using federal workers. And he dammed rivers, created electrical generation, condemned land, built poles, connected those wires to various farms. And what's so remarkable about it is that Lilienthal in that situation, who is still remembered to the degree he is remembered as a hero for having, you know, brought the lights to this huge swath of the countryside that was really, you know, living in the 19th century, but in the middle of the 20th, he's remembered as a hero. He was exercising essentially the same power that Robert Moses would exert in New York City when he was viewed today or is viewed today because of the power broker, which came out in 1974 as a villain. But it's the same basic paradigm. None of the people who were opposed to this project had any real standing to oppose it. And so just depending on the gloss you put on a story. And I think the Big Dig was spectacular for this very reason. You looked at how various people, depending on their vantage point, took away different lessons from the Big Dig. Was it a boondoggle? Was it an incredible feat of engineering? Was it both of these things at the same time? And what does it mean for the way that we view government generally? And I think that probably the way that we each answer that question stems not from the Big Dig itself, but from our general view of whether we think government is competent and the stories that we have and the experiences that we have. And we bring that what Walter Lippman would have called the stories in our heads to each individual challenge.

Ian Coss (11:00)

You mentioned Robert Moses, who is this just this inescapable figure in anything to do with urban planning, transportation infrastructure, government works, period. I'm curious, how important do you think he is and the narrative around him in kind of souring progressives on that Hamiltonian side?

Mark Dunkelman (11:24)

I'm gonna give you a long answer to this question. You know, during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, there were these two warring sides. One was inside the convention hall led by Richard Daley, the mayor of Chicago, who essentially sicced the Chicago Police Department on the protesters outside, led by the Chicago 7, Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. And these folks who were very suspicious of centralized authority, viewed through that prism of those two sides, those seat inside the convention hall and those marching outside, those. Those inside are the Hamiltonians. And those on the outside aren't just protesting the war. They have a much more universal gripe about centralized authority. Like, they don't like the war. They don't like Robert McNamara. They don't like Lyndon Johnson. They don't like folks like Robert Moses, who is the most powerful figure in New York City. He's like a Hamiltonian out of central casting. And this book, the Power Broker, that comes out in 1974, exposes him for all the things that he's done that seem to be cutting New York off at the knees. He's built these highways in terrible places. He's built housing in ways that aren't conducive to urban life. He's threatened communities. He's done terrible environmental damage on and.

Ian Coss (12:49)

On and on, blocked public transportation projects.

Mark Dunkelman (12:53)

There's a whole litany of things that he's done. And the Power Broker, which wins the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, is designed to take down his reputation, which has been so sterling in previous years. My view is that what Robert Caro, who writes the Power Broker, is doing is he's taking the argument that was made on the outside of the 1968 DNC. He's taking the core message, which is that there is rot. He's taking in the middle of the American establishment that needs to be exposed and needs to be checked. And he's putting it in this beautifully told story about Robert Moses, essentially presenting it in an erudite, thoughtful way people don't remember. But the Power Broker is released within weeks of Richard Nixon's resignation. And during that period, there are a whole series of cultural moments as well. Like Chinatown, the movie Chinatown comes out, which you may remember is a story of, like, a villainous developer who is stealing water from the valley outside of Los Angeles and bringing it to the city. The movie network comes out. And like the Howard Beale's famous line, I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore. Right? That's a calling out of the establishment, right? Like that I'm mad as hell at the establishment. And like perhaps the apotheosis of this comes in the 80s that people may or may not remember this famous Apple super bowl ad.

Ian Coss (14:26)

The 1984 ad.

Mark Dunkelman (14:28)

The 1984 ad, right? And like Apple is sort of absconding the zeitgeist of the old Abby Hoffman, Jerry Rubin. It's like a young woman uses a javelin or a.

Ian Coss (14:41)

It's a big hammer, a sledgehammer, and smashes the screen.

Mark Dunkelman (14:46)

Smashes the screen so that we can all be free, right? In all of these things, the underlying story in our heads is a Jeffersonian one, right? It is that there is some powerful figure above us, and what we need to do is be released from its tentacles if we are going to make the most of our lives. No longer would liberalism, the Democratic Party, no longer would they really embrace the Hamiltonian notion of solving problems.

Ian Coss (15:16)

Do you know the old line about the Velvet Underground? That not that many people listen to them, but everybody who did started a band. You ever heard that?

Mark Dunkelman (15:24)

I have not.

Ian Coss (15:25)

I feel like there's something there. Similar with the Power Broker. The book is like 1200 pages long. I don't think that the average person has read it. There are probably a lot of people who own it and have not read it. But it is so influential, it seems to me, in policy circles, in academic circles, and in, like you said, kind of distilling this moment and this instinct into just, you know, the most detailed, gripping account possible.

Mark Dunkelman (15:55)

Yeah. You know, today it almost goes without saying that we presume that there is a shadowy force that is operating beyond our own perception. And so if the story in your head is, is that there is a shadowy entity that is out for you and out for its own profit, your natural impulse, everyone's natural impulse would be, let's put checks and balances around that shadowy impulse so that this entity cannot do what it intends to do.

Ian Coss (16:30)

So tell me about the checks and balances. What are the concrete policy changes that come out of this era and how do they change how government works?

Mark Dunkelman (16:40)

So they're various and sundry, but they are pervasive. They are essentially hurdles at every step. We created, for example, environmental hurdles. So we created the National Environmental Policy act in 1970, which is the law that essentially mandates the environmental impact statements for big projects. That was a big part of the story of the big digit. We've created the Endangered Species act, the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act. All of these are designed in some cases to empower a bureaucracy like the EPA to impose regulations. But in many cases, it creates causes of action that allow individuals to challenge decisions made by centralized authority. One of the stories in my book is the story of an effort to build a transmission line through Maine so that Massachusetts could green its grid using hydropower produced in Quebec. And you needed some sort of transmission line to bring that power down. And among the things that happened in the course of the opposition to cutting that line through the northwoods of Maine, they created a referendum whereby the people were allowed to vote on whether they thought that the power company should be allowed to, you know, take this sliver of land through the North Woods.

Ian Coss (18:01)

Quite a contrast with the Tennessee Valley Authority example.

Mark Dunkelman (18:05)

Completely, Completely a contrast. So in most cases, the checks are not created in the mind frame of we're going to impose a Jeffersonian check on this Hamiltonian establishment. Right? It is. We want to save this species from being rendered extinct by a project. We want to save the vista looking out across the coast that's uninterrupted with a bunch of wind turbines. We want to ensure that there's no pollutant emitting factory put up in a residential neighborhood like these are like. Generally, the checks are Designed for good reason. But once they become so voluminous that like, it's almost impossible to clear all the hurdles, it becomes almost impossible to get anything done.

Ian Coss (18:58)

When I was working on the Big Dig, one of the questions I would ask almost everyone I interviewed who was involved with the project on Inside and Outside was whether they felt there was a fundamental tension between a project trying to be democratic and inclusive and on the other hand, effective and efficient. And I found that a lot of people, especially when I would ask activists about this question, folks who had fought the highways, who had fought those fights, they did not want to see it as a zero sum game, that there's not simply a choice. We have to make a trade off, we have to make between effective government and democratic government. Do you think there is a fundamental tension and that we do have to balance those things?

Mark Dunkelman (19:50)

The short answer is yes. The longer answer is that we certainly on the left have a fantasy that if you talk to everybody and everyone else talks to everyone else, that we will be able to find some solution that everyone can agree to that if you simply bring. It's sort of remarkable if you probably did this when you were doing the Big Dig. If you go to all the big think tanks and download all of their white papers on infrastructure and how to do infrastructure better, the first recommendation is almost invariably approach the community earlier in the process. The notion is that if you just tell people that we're going to drive a high speed rail line through your downtown early enough, they can find some sort of accommodation, or that they can be bought off with a new ice skating rink that the high speed rail developer is going to build for them, or somehow they will at least have felt consulted and therefore accede. But the truth is that in most cases there is no obvious place to put the high speed rail line. Every place has an interest in not being changed. No one wants their property to be taken. No one wants to live near the factory, no one wants to live near the homeless shelter. No one wants to have the highway be too close or too far from their little hamlet. And so I don't know whether in all cases we need to think of it as a trade off between effective government and democratic government. But there are trade offs to be made. And we need some system where not everyone benefits, some people suffer and the whole society benefits. We need some system for being able to balance those two priorities.

Ian Coss (21:47)

It's interesting to me that this reevaluation of how we build, this sort of environmental regulation, citizen input is happening now, you know, so your book came out this month. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson published a book called Abundance the same month exploring similar themes. And I think it's much bigger than that. I think to some extent, the series we did on the Big Dig felt kind of swept up in this same energy, which is something that I don't think I really perceive going into the project. And it really, one of the surprises of putting that out in the world was realizing just how ready and excited people on the left were to celebrate this big supposed boondoggle of a project. And so I'm curious, why now? Why is this in the air now?

Mark Dunkelman (22:52)

I mean, I think from a purely political standpoint, this is salient today because we're losing, I think, that the notion that government doesn't work, and that's a notion that is shared on the right and the left, is a terrible presupposition for the Democratic Party that wants to argue to people that government is a solution to problems. If you're able to set aside the desire to ascribe Donald Trump's emergence on the scene as one born from pure prejudice and bigotry and xenophobia and sexism and all the lousy things that are associated with him, and sort of wonder why is it that all these people who see that, who have been told that, who have been barraged with messages about how terrible he is, still voted for him? I think the underlying notion is that here's a strong man who will push through all these systems that don't work, that haven't worked for working class families, but frankly don't work for a lot of middle class families. And if that's the case, then the crucial element that progressives haven't yet grappled with is how do we present a government that actually can deliver? And once you realize that we progressives have been the ones who are really responsible for many of the hurdles that prevent government from acting effectively, you don't have to spend your time thinking about Donald Trump. You realize that if we created these problems, we can work our way out of them. Which isn't to suggest that we need to return to the era of Robert Moses and David Lilienthal doing things without anyone having any recourse to challenge them. But it is to say that if we are the ones that are stopping the transmission line from going through Maine so that Massachusetts can green its grid, then if we change our tune, we can probably walk some of that back. There is something very empowering in realizing that we are responsible for our own frustration.

Ian Coss (25:09)

And to be clear, the, the Problems you're identifying are not just with physical infrastructure. Right. I mean, this also affects healthcare policy. Or could you like expand on how this idea of procedure affects other areas of government service?

Mark Dunkelman (25:28)

So let's work through welfare.

Ian Coss (25:31)

Sure.

Mark Dunkelman (25:31)

Because it's, I think, a great example. When the program that we now know as TANF began in the New Deal as Aid to Dependent Children, the goal was to create a federal welfare system that empowered single mothers not to have to go to work. And the way that we were going to do that is that we were going to give money through social workers to people who were cases in the system. So the federal government would provide states with money. That money would be doled out by social workers, generally middle class women who would go and meet poorer women who were raising children and give them money if they were following the rules. But there was a lot of discretion given to these social workers. And so if a social worker was kind, she might throw in a few extra dollars if her car broke down or whatnot. If on the other hand, she thought that the woman wasn't properly following some moral code, that she had a boyfriend when she shouldn't, that she was drinking too much, that she was an addict or whatnot, she withhold support. And you get to the 1970s and people are looking at this and they're like, this is awfully weird. There's something off putting about the notion that you're essentially siccing a new mother through the government onto these women. It feels oppressive, coercive. Like there were what they called midnight raids where the social workers would knock on the door of someone's home who was on the dole and see if there was a man in the house. And the reform, the Jeffersonian reform impulse was to make the welfare system AFDC automatic or ministerial. If a person could check these boxes, if they had an income that they could prove was below this level, if they had this many dependent children, et cetera, et cetera, if they had tried to enroll their kid in school, if they met these criteria, they would get a benefit of some sort. The social workers were essentially replaced by caseworkers. This was the Jeffersonian solution. People who have no incentive to really help people. They're just trying to make sure that the paperwork is right. And like the image that we have from Ghostbusters of an EPA bureaucrat who just wants to follow the rules, it's not thinking about the greater good. The image that we have of the welfare system is a Jeffersonian welfare system where the rights are endowed in the individuals who are Getting puny checks and no real support from a system that doesn't really work. And so, you know, there are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, and you have to find a balance that is workable.

Ian Coss (28:37)

So I want to draw in the story of the state lottery, which I realize on the surface might seem like an odd connection, but I think there's a bit of irony here, I guess, that I'm interested in, in that on the one hand, we're talking about the Big Dig, this clearly beneficial project that was not run very smoothly and was very expensive and troubled in all these ways. And then on the other hand, you have the lottery, a government project of somewhat questionable value and benefit that is operated very smoothly and efficiently and effectively. And so at a high level, the question I have is, why do some parts of the government work better than others?

Mark Dunkelman (29:22)

Yeah, I mean, the criticism that Alan Erenhol made of the book in Washington Monthly was that the title, why Nothing Works. Like, clearly some things do work. Like, it's very hard to say that the Social Security Administration doesn't work now. You know, will it be fully funded forever? Like, those are. Those are topics that are debated on.

Ian Coss (29:42)

Occasion, that Social Security and the lottery. And I don't know if there are other things you'd put in that bucket. What do they have in common?

Mark Dunkelman (29:50)

Is there no immediate detriment to anybody that they can feel and see?

Ian Coss (30:00)

Yeah, I wonder if I'm just thinking out loud here. But there's something about the balance between the harms and the benefits. In an infrastructure project like the Big Dig, the harms are extremely concentrated. If you are the person who lives next to that on ramp that is going to be built, you know that you are being harmed, whereas the benefits are very diffuse. It's everybody, the thousands of people who commute through the city, the thousands of people who ride the train, whatever it is. In the case of something like the lottery, the harms are much more diffused. There are people who develop gambling addictions scattered throughout the state that are not an especially organized or powerful constituency. And on the other hand, you have benefits that are very real. Obviously, for the handful of people who become millionaires, but maybe more importantly for, I don't know, the Senate president who has a little extra money to play with, or for the mayor of a small town who gets a check from the state every year from the state lottery, there are these. The benefits are very concentrated and tangible in a way that creates a political constituency. Whereas in the infrastructure, the harms are very concentrated and tangible in A way that energizes opposition or energizes a constituency. Do you think? Does that make sense?

Mark Dunkelman (31:34)

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

Ian Coss (31:35)

How much of it is just about attention then Social Security, it just operates and nobody pays attention to the day to day operations of it. The lottery, people don't pay attention to it. As soon as that construction barrier goes up, you pay attention to it. Or even before, when the design plan goes out and you see the 14 story housing building in your neighborhood, people pay attention to it. Is that sort of what divides the parts of government that are able to function kind of more smoothly in the parts that hit all these roadblocks?

Mark Dunkelman (32:15)

I mean, I think the other way to look at this is to say Social Security was fairly controversial when it was established. Less so because it was the height of the New Deal and Roosevelt didn't have much opposition. But like, you go back and look at the creation of Medicare, Medicaid, like the American Medical association opposed these programs, right. And like, there was talk of socialism and there was a lot of fear of what this would do to the private marketplace for health care, et cetera, et cetera. And like, the Big Dig was very controversial when it happened, but then when it became part of the landscape, people embraced it. And so I think there is some notion that once the system is up and running, you aren't nearly so caught up in the opposition that you had. When things change.

Ian Coss (33:12)

Right. It almost makes me wonder as a thought experiment, like if every time the state lottery rolled out a new product, like if they were going to start offering keno games in bars in places that sell alcohol, if they had to have a citizen impact statement and it was subject to litigation. I wonder what that process would look like, if it would draw a lot of attention or not. I'm not sure.

Mark Dunkelman (33:41)

I mean, that's what's fascinating about this Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian tension, is that we're not of one mind about it. Throughout our history, we've had different views in different realms about whether we want to raise power up into central authority or push it down to individuals.

Ian Coss (34:01)

When you look out across the federal bureaucracy, state bureaucracy, are there bright spots for you? Are there areas of government that you think do work very smoothly, well, or very effectively?

Mark Dunkelman (34:17)

Yeah. I mean, you're seeing now this broad based attempt by the Trump administration to take down these research institutions. In many cases, that research has worked out entirely to our benefit. I mean, you know, we should have given Trump more credit. Maybe he would be in a different frame of mind. But warp speed brought us vaccines. Those were miracle drugs. And they were done by centralized agencies where they have a certain mechanism for deciding who gets funding and how much. And sometimes they're going to make terrible decisions. By the same token, our public health is much improved in general because of decisions made by centralized experts who understand the science and are making discretionary choices about where funding should go. So that's actually a pretty good case, like the nih. The nih, the darpa, which is the defense industry's research arm when the Food and Drug Administration was established at the beginning of the 20th century. Those bills were very controversial at the time because no one had ever thought to give the federal government that kind of regulatory power over the things that we eat. And to this day, like the degree to which we have safe food in our grocery stores, like that's a result of federal regulation. Right. We're not having community meetings about whether the FDA has approved the sale of eggs from this circumstance right there. We have invested power in centralized experts, and we depend and. And celebrate when they get things right or they get things right so frequently that we don't even really question whether we would want to take the authority away from them.

Ian Coss (36:15)

As you just mentioned, we're in a moment now where the federal government is being transformed and some parts of it are simply being turned off. And I wonder. I feel like there's a natural reaction to that from folks on the left to defend the institutions. Right. To defend the rules and the procedures as they were. And I'm wondering if that poses a challenge to the kind of argument that you're making about the need to reform the way government works. I'm just wondering how you think about the impulse to defend the institutions and to make them better.

Mark Dunkelman (37:03)

Well, I certainly am not supportive of just a sledgehammer approach to reforming the federal government. And it seems to me that we should be doing it in a thoughtful way. But you're right that when Elon Musk sends out an email asking people to justify what they did that week, progressives shouldn't be against that. It may be a burden for those people to have to justify what they did, but they should be able to justify what they did that week. You don't want to be defending the notion that there are bureaucrats who have jobs who are not actually producing for the public interest. They're being paid with taxpayer dollars for a reason. So the notion that we wouldn't constantly be trying to improve and reform bureaucracies so that they're more effective, that should be our point of view. Their point of view is that government is generally bad, so they are trying to undermine it so that people are are not getting the benefit of having a proactive, thoughtful, effective public sector. Like they don't believe in the public sector. They want to give more power to the private sector. That's not a progressive point of view. But that doesn't mean that progressives should be in favor of ineffective government. That should be in fact more offensive to us than it is to them. There should be more examples of us taking a scalpel to ineffective bureaucracies and firing people who aren't doing their job and evaluating whether this program is more effective at fighting poverty than this program. And so we're going to eliminate the second program and invest more in the first. That should be constantly on our minds. How can we squeeze more out of the lemon of what the taxpayers have given us so that they are seeing, feeling and touching, really an effective institution. We should be the stewards of good government, not Elon Musk.

Ian Coss (39:02)

To close, I'm curious, looking ahead, is there a policy area, a project where you feel like the left needs to take up that more emboldened, muscular, creative energy? Where do you see the potential for that?

Mark Dunkelman (39:25)

So there's this famous story where Robert Caro, who's written this book about Robert Moses, he says, you know, every time I go to a cocktail party, someone comes up to me, often someone of the real estate variety, and says to me, isn't it time we had another Robert Moses? And Caro responds, you know, I, not being someone who wants to get into an argument, simply say no and walk away. And I think that the thing that I took from that was that there are would be Robert Moses everywhere. Like New York is not short of middle aged men with gumption, right? But what's changed is the environment in which those people operate. So I think that there are progressives of all stripes who are eager, willing, maybe frothing at the mouth to do big things to improve public health, to improve infrastructure, to build more housing, people who want to take care, to take the best advantage of the clean energy revolution, like, who want to save the climate. On all these fronts, I think that there's enormous possibility and enormous excitement, but that reforms designed to stop bad projects from happening are now precluding good ones from getting off the ground.

Ian Coss (41:05)

Thanks so much.

Mark Dunkelman (41:06)

Thanks for having me.

Unknown (41:13)

You made me love you. I didn't want to do it I didn't want to do it it you made me want you and all the time you knew it. I guess you always knew it. You made me happy Sometimes you made me sad but there were times, dear, you made me feel so bad.

Ian Coss (41:53)

Mark Dunkelman is the author of why Nothing Works, who Killed Progress and How to Bring It Back. And that is it for our run of interview episodes this season. However, we will be back in your feed next week to share a story from our friends at NPR's Throughline that zeroes in on on a truly key figure in the everlasting push and pull between Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian thinking. It's a great story, so stay tuned for that and also just stay tuned to this feed. We will be back with another series sometime in the next year and the best way to know about it is to subscribe and follow wherever you're listening right now. You can also follow me on Socials. Probably the best place to hear about new projects I've got is on Blue sky at Ian Coss. I don't think there's another Ian Coss on there, so you'll find me. This episode was edited by Lacey Roberts. Mei Lei is the project manager and the executive producer is Devin Maverick Robbins. My co producer for the whole Scratch and Win series is Isabel Hibbard. Scratch and Win is a production of GBH News and distributed by prx.

Unknown (43:24)

Yes I do indeed I do, you know I do so give me, give me, give me, give me what I cry for. You know you got the brand of kisses that I die for. You know you made me, you know you made me, you know you made me love you and all the time you knew it. Thank you.

Ian Coss (44:15)

Hey, I want to make sure that you know this series you're listening to right now is part of an ongoing feed telling stories from the past to help us understand our present. Our first season is all about infrastructure. The second season is about gambling. And we've got more seasons planned. So if you want to stay on top of what the team and I are doing, go ahead and follow or subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen. We've got some really exciting stories coming up and I hope you'll stay with us. Thanks.

Mark Dunkelman (44:49)

From prx.