NOTE: I recorded this many months ago (March 2025), so the timelines might be more than slightly off. Congestion pricing is 16 months old (and exceeding expectations).
Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works is a heavy-on-theory, evergreen addition to the growing library of books dedicated to practical government reform. The Professor sat down with me to talk about his thesis and core distinctions between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian visions of democracy, both of which have been warped and maligned through the speed and veracity of information.
Below are my key takeaways from the conversation, but the whole conversation is worth a listen/watch and the book certainly worth a read.
1. Progressivism has been fighting itself since the beginning
The core tension Dunkelman identifies isn’t between left and right—it’s internal to progressivism itself. From the very start, the movement has contained two completely opposing impulses: a Hamiltonian one that wants to concentrate power in expert hands to get big things done, and a Jeffersonian one that wants to break up concentrated power and return authority to ordinary people. The problem isn’t that either impulse is wrong. It’s that progressives tend to think of themselves as purely Hamiltonian—the party that wants government to do more—while simultaneously spending fifty years building guardrails, checks, and veto points that make government less capable of doing anything. You can’t sell government as the solution to people’s problems and then spend decades making government structurally unable to solve them.
2. The vetocracy problem isn’t that too many people can say no—it’s that nobody can say yes
The word vetocracy gets thrown around a lot, but Dunkelman flips the framing in a way that stuck with me. It’s less that the system has too many blockers and more that it has no authoritative yes. Congestion pricing is the perfect local example: Bloomberg floated it in the aughts, the state spent a billion dollars building out the infrastructure, and then a governor killed it on a whim—and got sued either way. Trump thinks he has jurisdiction. The MTA chair thinks he has jurisdiction. The mayor thinks he has a say. Nobody actually has the power to ratify the decision and move forward. That vacuum—the absence of a singular accountable figure who can weigh all the tradeoffs and say this is what we’re doing—is what makes big projects so expensive, so slow, and so politically radioactive. The fix isn’t just deregulation. It’s re-concentrating the authority to decide.
3. Progressives handed Trump the keys by breaking the product they were selling
This is the most uncomfortable argument in the book, and the most important one. Dunkelman is not letting conservatives off the hook—but he’s also not letting the left pretend it’s purely a victim of right-wing demagoguery. The progressive movement spent decades making government less functional in the name of accountability. And then they turned around and asked voters to trust government more, give it more money, expand its authority. That’s a lousy bargain when the refrigerator doesn’t keep the food cold. People don’t vote for abstraction—they vote based on whether the world around them feels like it’s working. When it doesn’t, they vote for whoever promises to burn it down. We laid out the red carpet. Recognizing that isn’t defeatist—it’s the only way to actually plot a path back.
4. Government has to show its work—and make it personal
The RhodeWorks story is the practical takeaway I keep coming back to. Every project financed by the truck tolling program got a roadside sign showing whether it was on time and on budget—green, yellow, or red. Her staff hated it because it created accountability. That was the point. FDR didn’t put up canvas banners—he put up chrome plaques buried in the ground, built to last. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funded a sign inside Borough Hall that got taken down almost immediately. That gap between how past leaders communicated investment and how we do it now tells you everything about why people don’t feel like government is working for them, even when it is. The MTA‘s congestion pricing messaging hits the Hamiltonian notes fine—travel times are down, air quality is up—but it’s missing the Jeffersonian ask: what does this do for me, specifically, today? Tell the story of the plumber in Rego Park who can now fit in three more jobs a day. Make the deal personal. Make it visible. Make it last.
