The most haunting story in The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize–winning history of New York, traces a singularly powerful man’s determination to jackhammer an expressway across the South Bronx. Caro’s subject, Robert Moses, was at the peak of his imperious glory when he decided during the mid-1950s to dig what amounted to a cavernous trench through some of the Big Apple’s most vibrant working-class neighborhoods. Nearly everyone objected—even the mayor had taken sides with the parade of citizens, community groups, and elected officials begging the great man to modify the route. But those pleas fell on Moses’s deaf ears. And by the point of The Power Broker’s celebrated release two decades later, the Cross Bronx Expressway had effectively turned a once lively and multicultural section of the globe’s financial capital into an urban wasteland.1
Caro’s telling of the horrors—Moses blithely imposing his will on enfeebled citizens—was not only damning but indicative of why, by the time of the book’s publication in 1974, the public had turned against public authority. In nearly every realm, those wielding power in government appeared impervious to objection, high-handedly dismissing anyone with the moxie to raise a stink. Whether it was Richard Nixon’s corrupt efforts to keep his hold on the White House, or the Pentagon lying about Vietnam, or Moses razing whole parts of New York without any mind to his victims, what had come to be called “the Establishment” seemed, by the 1970s, to have run completely amok. The Power Broker was simply the most erudite treatment of how public authority had gone awry. By that point, no one really doubted that it had.
In 2013, I reread The Power Broker during my weekly train commute to New York. At the end of each journey, following the conductor’s announcement that we’d arrived in Manhattan, I would close the book, gather my belongings, and climb up into the daylight through the dingy, fetid basement corridors that serve as the city’s front door. At the time, more people traveled through New York’s Penn Station each weekday than traversed the region’s three airports combined.2 And yet, while the station had originally been described by the New York Times as “the largest and handsomest… in the world,” its turn-of-the-century grandeur had been razed in 1963 to make room for the eyesore known as Madison Square Garden.3 A once magnificent station was left to occupy the warren of dimly lit corridors below. And each time I traipsed through, I asked myself: Why hasn’t anyone fixed this? Why was New York allowing its most important gateway to fester as a rat’s nest?
Penn Station was not the only example of New York’s torpor. Decades earlier, Moses had built all sorts of things, and often in short order. Not only neighborhood-destroying highways, but parks, and bridges, and tunnels, and apartment buildings, and major cultural attractions—Lincoln Center, the United Nations Headquarters, the World’s Fair grounds in Queens, and, perhaps most celebrated, Jones Beach on Long Island. Venerated by many, he was, even then, considered a villain by others. But following the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge’s opening in the late 1960s—the same time, as it happened, that Moses was stripped of his last remaining influence—the city had essentially stopped building new infrastructure.4 And that left me curious. What had changed? Why hadn’t the globe’s second most heavily trafficked transit hub been reimagined or redeveloped? Why had it been so easy for Moses to pursue bad projects when it was now so hard to complete good ones?
The problem, I quickly concluded, wasn’t a lack of vision. In the wake of Penn Station’s demolition and Moses’s subsequent dethroning, a range of powerful figures had championed various plans for restoration. As early as the 1980s, New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan had begun speaking about Penn Station as his top priority—a massive public endeavor not only to restore some of Manhattan’s lost splendor, but to spur development of Midtown’s woebegone Far West Side. One iteration of the plan included a massive, 150-foot glass-and-steel canopy designed by the renowned architect David Childs—a flourish that promised to make Manhattan’s new gateway a destination in and of itself.5
Moynihan’s proposed redevelopment would, of course, be expensive—but set against all the projects Moses had pursued during his long reign, the dream of making Penn Station a front door worthy of the globe’s financial capital was hardly out of the ordinary. Madison Square Garden might need to be moved, again. But few objected substantively to the senator’s vision. Nevertheless, like so many other grand visions in New York—extending subway lines, erecting new housing, making it quick and easy to get from Manhattan to the city’s airports—progress foundered for years, and then decades. Each time I arrived in the world’s financial capital, I confronted a Penn Station whose replacement had been a sore subject for more than thirty years.
Hoping to gain some perspective on the dynamics holding back progress, I began reading up on the project’s history, building a spreadsheet that tracked all the erstwhile attempts to answer Moynihan’s call to action. I began reaching out to people who had been involved in various schemes, many of which had been abandoned years, if not decades, earlier. I spent hours listening to frustrations narrated by disillusioned representatives of City Hall, of the state’s economic development agency, of both the national railroad that owned the station (Amtrak) and the state-owned railroads that delivered commuter trains from New Jersey and Long Island, of Madison Square Garden executives, and of the megadevelopers hoping to erect skyscrapers in the surrounding neighborhood. I soon came to accept that everyone had a legitimate interest in the project—and most had good intentions. But they simply couldn’t divine a way forward because not everyone’s interests were aligned.
I was surprised by my own conclusion. I’d suspected at the outset that some single roadblock was really culpable for the whole fiasco—that, for example, the Dolan family, which controls Madison Square Garden, was the fly in the ointment. But the truth turned out to be different: Nearly every player involved in the negotiation had something significant to lose if the redevelopment took any certain turn. And while nearly everyone was willing to show some flexibility in pursuit of the greater good, no one was willing to abandon their own interests too severely. The result was an impenetrable Rashomon, with everyone laying blame at the feet of some purportedly intractable partner. If only federal bureaucrats had approved more funding. If only Amtrak had been more flexible in scheduling track construction. If only the preservationists had approved demolishing a hidden wall. If only a peevish governor had exerted his leverage over the Dolans. If only the Dolans had relented. If only, if only, if only.
What I came to find so remarkable was that this whole Rashomon phenomenon had rarely flummoxed Robert Moses. Decades earlier, he’d managed to build the Cross Bronx despite a whole cacophony of objections—and yet the project had steadily moved forward. That contrast hadn’t been lost on the figures involved in the negotiations over Penn Station. On more than a few occasions, midway through an interview at a Midtown coffee shop, one of my subjects would scan for eavesdroppers, lean forward, and whisper to me, not for attribution: “This is why we need another Robert Moses.” Then, leaning back and reconsidering what they’d just said, they’d make all the requisite disclaimers. Not the racist parts of Moses. Or his taste for ever more expressways. Or his penchant for condemning the homes of working-class families. They simply believed it was time to install someone with sufficient authority to drive projects to their completion—someone who could cut through all the “if onlys.”
The first half dozen times I’d been told Penn Station’s morass had suffered for not having a Moses-like figure, I’d nodded along. In Caro’s telling, Moses had been a kind of political savant, roguishly maneuvering to be appointed to a cluster of city and state bureaucracies—park commissions, state councils, transportation authorities—such that he could throw his weight around, impervious to the naysayers. Moreover, “the best bill writer in Albany” regularly managed to weave seemingly innocuous language into bills granting him ever more authority. The result was that Moses had managed to centralize power—to cull together leverage that would have otherwise been spread to a range of others.
A half century later, Penn Station was caught in the flip circumstance: Power had been so diffused that any minor objection would upend the whole thing. This wasn’t a shift in personality—it was a transformation in the architecture of power itself. But, at that point, I still didn’t understand what had prompted the change. Robert Caro’s masterpiece had pulled the veil off Moses—The Power Broker revealed how, in ways both terrible and mundane, the Establishment had wielded power to catastrophic effect. I now wanted to understand what had happened in the decades since. This book traces what I uncovered.
This is an intellectual story in some sense—a battle of ideas. But it’s also a window into one crucial reason government has lost the public’s confidence over the last several decades. America is caught in a housing crisis today—we simply can’t seem to build enough homes. We’re trying to thwart a climate crisis, but we can’t bring enough clean energy online to render fossil fuels obsolete. We’re decades behind Europe and China in building high-speed rail lines. And despite massive investments from the Biden administration—resources unseen in generations—progress is too often halting.6 In America today, government too often plays the buffoon. And while that’s a problem in and of itself, it’s a particular scourge for progressives who view government as a crucial tool for setting things right.
The chapters that follow argue that, for all the complaints, these frustrations aren’t born for lack of what some term “political will.” America still boasts its fair share of Robert Moses wannabes. Nor is it that conservatives have thwarted government by “starving the beast”—though that certainly hasn’t helped.7 Rather, this book argues that progressivism itself has changed. Once committed to galvanizing experts to tackle big problems, the movement has more recently turned in the other direction. Having come to see how men like Moses were wielding public authority, progressives haven’t just taken more frequently to “speaking truth to power.” Rather, we’ve remade our governing agenda in its entirety. We’ve broadly abandoned efforts to draw power into the hands of power brokers and worked instead to diffuse authority—to push it down and out.
Before going any further, I want to be clear that several things can be true here at the same time. First, conservatives can (and should) be assigned some bulk of the blame for convincing portions of the public that government is invariably bad—not only that public authority is wasteful, corrupt, and ineffective, but that it is an agent of moral decay.8 That’s long been their bread and butter, and they should own it. But progressives can’t hide from the reality that we too have burnished the same narrative: the movement’s determination to protect against latter-day Robert Moses types now serves not only to thwart abuse, but also to undermine government’s ability to do big things. As we’ll see, by helping to render government incompetent, we have pried open the door for MAGA-style populism. We share culpability for the public’s frustration.
Fortunately, things need not remain this way. To paraphrase a Democratic luminary, there’s nothing wrong with progressivism that can’t be fixed by what’s right with progressivism.9 But to right the ship, the movement will need a new perspective on how its values inform its agenda, and how its agenda shapes its politics. Rather than remain dependent on vilifying (frequently villainous) opponents and focusing the public on the depths of their villainy, progressivism needs to seek to heal itself—to expand the movement’s appeal so that it isn’t so vulnerable to criticisms from the outside. But that will mean addressing the root causes of public failure. And to do that, progressives will need first to understand the conflicting impulses that have led so many Americans to feel as though nothing works.
This book makes three arguments. The first is that progressives have conned themselves into believing that they’re focused on one thing when, in reality, the movement is broadly about something else. In fairness, that confusion has been born in large part from the fuzzy definition of the word “progressive.”10 Today, the label is sometimes taken to mean that someone leans far to the left. In other contexts, it suggests that someone subscribes to some smorgasbord of political positions—on abortion, climate change, gun safety, or simply on Donald Trump.11 A further complication: if you asked a self-described progressive what it means to be progressive, many would simply define it as the antithesis of conservatism. And in a global context, “progressive” parties are generally thought to be the “party of government,” set in opposition to the more conservative “party of business.”12
The journalist Matthew Yglesias supposed in early 2022 that if you interviewed many among the young college graduates who typically staff Democratic congressional offices, they would argue “that transforming the United States into a European-style welfare state would be desirable, and the big question about the Democratic Party is whether it’s too full of lame sellouts.”13 But I suspect that those same “progressives,” if asked to list the issues that mean the most to them, would turn out to be less interested in expanding government authority than in boxing it in—that few pine for big government so much as they fear government coercion. They worry about the prying tentacles of abusive police officers, corrupt election officials, and conservative jurists much more than they dream of expanding access to health care—or so you would come to presume if you scrolled their doom-filled social media feeds.
In 2019, a group of political scientists at Vanderbilt and UCLA conducted an experiment seeking to understand which issues were most salient to various types of voters. Interviewing roughly half a million Americans in search of the “revealed importance” of various topics, their surveys packaged issues together in creative ways—combining, for example, the liberal positions on gun control and the minimum wage with the conservative position on immigration. They then asked survey-takers whether they preferred that slate or the mirror image—namely the conservative position on gun control and the minimum wage, but the liberal position on immigration. The results allowed them to better discern what was pulling at voters’ guts, if not their minds.
What the researchers uncovered about the voters they termed “liberals” was noteworthy. Policies separating immigrant children from their parents, banning abortion, and preventing Muslims from entering the United States turned out to be more salient than policies increasing the minimum wage, providing Medicare for all, or capping carbon emissions. The issues that resonated most powerfully painted government as a menace—as an institution poised to rip families apart, rob women of their bodily autonomy, and discriminate on the basis of religion. Issues that framed government as a salve—proposals to raise family incomes, expand access to health care, and save the earth from a climate catastrophe—were less heartrending.14 In essence, a movement that’s purported to be bent on growing government appears, upon closer inspection, more driven to paring it back.
That’s not to argue that progressives aren’t, in many instances, eager to expand public authority. Obamacare broadened Washington’s mandate, and three of the Biden administration’s biggest early achievements—the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act—had the effect of expanding government’s reach. But if those triumphs were each a big deal, they elicited less attention among progressives than questions of endemic racism, access to abortion, and immigrant rights. In short, the research suggested that the progressive head and the progressive heart are in different places. And that, I will argue, is for a hidden reason: progressivism can’t be boiled down to one governing impulse—it’s actually a strange and awkward amalgam of two.
Before delineating the distinction, it’s worth reconsidering how, exactly, we presume individuals come to their politics. If each individual’s view of government were some immutable genetic trait—an engrained characteristic like someone’s height or eye color—that would be one thing. If our thinking were an entirely academic exercise—if individuals typically investigated an issue before coming to a logical conclusion—it would be another. But, in reality, that’s not how things work. Rather, our individual politics are brewed up from some combination of emotion and rationality, nature and nurture, logic and values, such that we come to issues of policy through narrative.15 We develop stories to help us make sense of reality—the famed journalist Walter Lippmann termed these the “pictures in our head”—and we then use those frames to make sense of politics.16 My argument here is that progressives operate with two separate pictures in their heads—two narratives that they hold simultaneously, often without even recognizing the distinction.
The first of the two is framed by the misery born of chaos—a narrative steeped in our images of tenement-dwelling immigrants, of the “Okies” making their way west in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, of New Orleanians stranded after Katrina, of children starving in refugee camps, of polar bears trapped on melting icebergs. In the face of these privations, progressives rue the absence of authority—they long for a heroic figure equipped to save the day. Set amid various tragedies of the common, progressivism’s first narrative dreams of pulling power up and into a node of authority equipped to make things better from above.17 A relief agency, a benevolent bureaucracy, a Herbert Hoover in Belgium, a Mother Teresa in Calcutta, an Admiral Thad Allen in Louisiana.18
The second narrative is born not from chaos but from tyranny. Centralized authority, in this frame, is less a salve than a menace. King George. The slave driver. The bureaucrat requiring a rape victim to bring her pregnancy to term. The cop with his knee on George Floyd’s neck. Robert Moses. In these circumstances, the progressive impulse isn’t to push authority up—it’s “to speak truth to power,” to cashier the tyrant and shield the victim.19 As one liberal once explained on Facebook during a period of intense debate over the war between Israel and Hamas that began in October 2023: “I will ALWAYS stand beside those with less power. Less wealth, less access and resources and choices.”20 The dream isn’t to imbue some savior with the authority to fix things—it’s to manacle a pernicious octopus. Power, within this narrative frame, isn’t a balm—it’s a scourge.
These two narratives aren’t exclusive to progressivism—they represent, by some measure, a tension straight out of the Enlightenment.21 Dueling impulses to pull power up and to push it down span the political spectrum. Nor were they born with progressivism’s emergence at the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, one hundred years earlier, during the late eighteenth century, they represented the core friction between two founding luminaries. Alexander Hamilton, leader of the Federalists, worried primarily about chaos. He wanted to place more authority in the hands of centralized officials and financiers capable of developing America into an industrial dynamo—a “Hercules” on the global stage.22 His worry was that America would remain too disorganized, too divided, too chaotic to make the most of its opportunity.23 Pulling power into a leadership class would deliver more for the public.
Thomas Jefferson’s narrative, by contrast, was born of an entirely different frame. Horrified by the English Crown’s treatment of the colonies, he was determined to thwart overbearing authority—to protect individuals (or, at least, white, male, landowning individuals) from the abuses of public authority.24 Jefferson saw shadows of the Crown’s cruelty in centralized national bureaucracy, and his attendant skepticism, paired with his belief that individual yeoman farmers were the heart of democratic practice, prevailed through the bulk of the nineteenth century.25 As Henry Adams would write: “European travellers who passed through America [in the early 1800s] noticed that everywhere, in the White House at Washington and in log-cabins beyond the Alleghanies, except for a few Federalists, every American, from Jefferson and Gallatin down to the poorest squatter, seemed to nourish an idea that he was doing what he could to overthrow the tyranny which the past had fastened on the human mind.”26
This book’s first argument is that both of these narratives—one Hamiltonian, the other Jeffersonian—frame elements of the progressive worldview. They were both part of the movement’s origin story in the late nineteenth century, and they have both framed progressive thinking ever since, despite being largely at odds. When progressives perceive a challenge through the Hamiltonian lens, the movement tends to embrace solutions that would pull power up and in. When, by contrast, a problem appears born of some nefarious centralized authority, the movement argues for pushing power down and out. But rarely does anyone notice that these two narratives, and their ensuing prescriptions, cut directly against one another.
That’s not always a problem—the two impulses can, and do, coexist. Few, for example, would so much as raise an eyebrow if a young progressive today professed that her two top voting issues were reproductive rights and climate change. What is remarkable is that they are each respectively born of the two antithetical narratives. The fight for reproductive freedom is an explicitly Jeffersonian endeavor—it’s designed to protect women from outsiders intent on controlling their bodies. The fight against climate change, by contrast, is explicitly Hamiltonian—activists want to imbue some institution with the power to stop people and businesses from spewing carbon and destroying the planet.
Support for centralized efforts to curtail pollution need not require you to believe that rape victims should be forced to bring their pregnancies to term. Those who advocate for choice need not ignore concerns that the earth may turn into a ball of fire. But if these two notions can comfortably coexist under progressivism’s broad banner, those who subscribe to the movement’s core tenets should not deny that they flow from wildly different and contradictory narratives about power. And that’s the essential point. In both cases, progressivism means well. But, at root, the frames are different. In many ways, they are discordant. And often, as we’ll see, they conflict.
This discord might be more obvious if we could lean on a clearer definition of “progressivism.” Unfortunately, instead of confronting this oft-overlooked ideological wrinkle, progressives today tend to be sidetracked by discussions of who is more or less progressive.27 No one can doubt that members of today’s Congressional Progressive Caucus, a group committed to making “Wall Street, big corporations, and the wealthiest pay their fair share,” would be revulsed by Teddy Roosevelt’s century-old Progressive Party agenda, if only because it was so explicitly pro-corporate.28 But the ideological division between progressivism’s Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian impulses doesn’t track that distinction for a simple reason: Every progressive, from every stripe, is invariably drawn in, to various degrees, by both narratives. The battle for progressivism’s heart is waged, in short, in the heart of every progressive.
The second argument of this book, then, is that the two progressive narratives are suspended in a kind of yin and yang, an everlasting symbiosis that has ebbed and flowed through the decades. To be clear, at no time has progressivism been exclusively in the throes of either impulse; Jeffersonianism and Hamiltonianism have always existed side by side. Nor do progressives typically view themselves as ideologically bifurcated along these lines, as evidenced by the fact that almost no one has registered how the campaign to combat climate change is directionally distinct from the movement to preserve reproductive freedom. But the tension has always been there, and for progressivism to thrive, I will argue, the two impulses need to be in the right balance. And that’s our fundamental problem today: the movement has listed too far in one direction.
The basic arc of this story is fairly simple. In the beginning, namely at the turn of the twentieth century, Hamiltonian progressivism reigned supreme. The Jeffersonian strain held its own in the early years—as we’ll see, Woodrow Wilson, running against Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft in 1912, articulated a deep skepticism of centralized authority. But from the late 1800s through the early 1970s, with certain exceptions, and with important caveats, progressives tended to favor pushing power up into institutions controlled by what we would come to call the Establishment. The movement’s prevailing view was that centralized institutions were the key to checking industrial excesses, and building public works, and expanding broad-based prosperity. Progressives were culturally inclined to power.
That proclivity was made evident in all sorts of ways: In the creation of regulatory bodies akin to 1887’s Interstate Commerce Commission, a now forgotten bureaucracy designed to keep watch over the railroad industry. In the creation of “public authorities” to manage public functions, including the port of New York. In the creation of school boards to expand the promise of public education. It was evident in the founding of big bureaucracies like the Social Security Administration and the National Labor Relations Board, and in the standing up of a whole series of public and private bureaucracies that would come to be called the military-industrial complex. Progressivism’s Hamiltonian bent fueled the creation of America’s expressways, its space program, and the Peace Corps, as well as many of the programs that comprised Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The movement generally conceived the core problem facing America as a lack of centralized control.
But in the 1950s, Jeffersonianism began to seek its level. During the postwar era, reformers became increasingly dogged by a gnawing notion that the Establishment wasn’t always working for the good—that it wasn’t uniformly wise, or effective, or even well-intentioned. Through the 1960s and 1970s evidence began to mount that the country’s powerful bureaucracies were prejudiced, corrupt, and sometimes even delusional. But when reformers tried to rein them in, they frequently discovered that the System was too insulated to be brought under control.29 As Greatest Generation sensibilities gave way to boomer skepticism, Hamiltonianism began losing its purchase. If progressivism had once been focused on building up centralized institutions, the new goal was to tear them down.
The seeds of Jeffersonianism’s renaissance were planted by abuses rendered overseas—the atrocities of Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism, among others. Totalitarianism unmasked centralized power’s potential evil. So it wasn’t much of a leap to apply the same lens to domestic institutions. The Establishment, reformers began to understand, was suffused with all sorts of villainy. It had spawned Jim Crow. It had pointed the country into the quagmire of Vietnam. It was responsible for “slum clearance,” the country’s disastrous reliance on foreign oil, the glut of pollution, and the rampant corruption made evident in Watergate. By 1974, when Caro published The Power Broker, there appeared little question that the most serious threats to America came not from below, but from above. And progressivism reacted by leaning into Jeffersonianism—by embracing a cultural aversion to power.30
At this point in most accounts of American history, Ronald Reagan’s conservative revolution typically takes center stage. But a studied look at progressivism during what might be called the movement’s wilderness era makes clear that the skepticism of centralized power never abated. Even after Bill Clinton’s election victory in 1992 ended the Democratic Party’s quarter century in purgatory, the pendulum never swung back. Progressivism’s central narrative—its belief in the conservative philosopher Lord Acton’s famous aphorism that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”—held firm.31 And even today, progressivism remains profoundly suspect of the Establishment—a reality whose effects continue to reverberate in crucial but unexpected ways.
Most important, progressivism’s cultural aversion to power has turned the Democratic Party—purportedly the “party of government”—into an institution drawn almost instinctively to cut government down. Progressives are so fearful of Establishment abuse that reformers tend to prefer tightening the grip on public authority to loosening the reins. The movement discounts whatever good government might do in service of ensuring it won’t do bad. And as we’ll see in the chapters that follow, that’s driven well-intentioned reformers to insert so many checks into the System that government has been rendered incompetent. Public officials can’t effectively fight climate change, or address the nation’s housing crisis, or enhance the country’s infrastructure because of strictures progressives themselves have installed to protect the public from abuse.
Conservatism, of course, hasn’t been helpful on any of these fronts. But for progressives, that reality can quickly become a distraction. We can’t control the MAGA agenda—but we can offer a more palatable alternative. If the progressive agenda is going to prevail—if government is going to be given the leash required to combat inequality, to solve poverty, and to fight prejudice—we will first need to convince voters that government is capable of delivering on its promises. At present, we’re too inclined to cut public authority off at the knees. And that’s why progressives so often feel like they can’t win for losing. Our cultural aversion to power renders government incompetent, and incompetent government undermines progressivism’s political appeal.
Ed Koch was angry—and perhaps a bit embarrassed. It was the spring of 1986, and the wheels were beginning to come off for New York’s irascible mayor, a Democrat now serving in the first year of his third term. Elected nearly a decade earlier on a promise to pull a crime-ridden Big Apple back from the brink of bankruptcy, Koch had cultivated a reputation for being both tough and savvy. But there was no getting around the reality that his Parks Department had wasted millions of taxpayer dollars trying unsuccessfully to rehabilitate Central Park’s Wollman Rink. At the height of the crack epidemic, the skating facility’s closure hardly represented the worst of New York’s problems. But the Parks Department’s ineptitude burnished a notion that New York was fundamentally ungovernable. A mayor famous for cheekily asking New Yorkers, “How am I doing?” appeared not to be doing very well at all.
The trouble had begun six years earlier when the happy little attraction near Midtown’s Plaza Hotel was abruptly closed for repairs. Having constructed the rink during the go-go years following the Second World War, the city then let Wollman decay. To cut costs, the Parks Department had begun to explore the possibility of replacing its clunky brine-based refrigeration system with a more efficient new technology known as Freon, which was purported to cost $20,000 less per year to operate. So, in 1980, City Hall ordered the rink shuttered, the pipes beneath torn up, and the whole system uprooted to make way for a $4.9 million replacement that would take fewer than three years to complete.32 The project quickly went sideways.
Having ripped up the old system, a contractor installed what amounted to twenty-two miles of new piping for the Freon. But when that initial phase was complete, the Department had yet to secure a contractor to pave over the new plumbing. For more than a year, the piping was exposed to the elements, flooded by an underground stream, and subject (according to subsequent investigations) to stray electric current. When, in 1982, pavers were finally hired to cover the new pipes, engineers underestimated how much concrete would be required to complete the job. Rather than call for more, they diluted their insufficient supply. Then, to protect the delicate piping below, the pavers chose not to deploy vibration machines typically used to collapse any air pockets.33 The result was predictable. When the job was done, the ice on the surface melted. The rink simply didn’t work.
As was typical in this sort of fiasco, everyone pointed fingers. The Parks Department excoriated the contractors. The contractors blamed one another. The public blamed City Hall. And the mayor was left to shake his head in disgust. In a kind of chef’s kiss moment, consultants the city hired for $200,000 to audit the catastrophe punted as well: speaking to Joyce Purnick, an iconic columnist for the New York Times, one Parks Department employee later complained that the report read “very much like ‘Murder on the Orient Express,’” where “the detective on the case finds out that… everybody was the murderer.” Koch was incensed, not only because the project had been bungled, but because an opportunity to demonstrate that New York was turning a corner had instead burnished the city’s reputation for incompetence.
At this point, the mayor had little choice but to order the Parks Department to begin anew. To rip up the piping. To abandon the new technology. To revert to the traditional refrigeration system. That, of course, would not only require the department to shutter Wollman for another two years, but to add another $3 million to the taxpayers’ tab. The whole thing appeared like an unmitigated public relations disaster until, almost by the grace of God, Koch received an unexpected reprieve: a local developer offered to step in and make things right. In an unusual arrangement, Koch cut a deal to pay the developer to take control of the rink project, complete it for a fee, and hand it back to the city. “If it costs less, we’ll pay less,” the mayor explained when some questioned the wisdom of trusting someone outside of government to do something that would typically have been handled by a public authority. “If it costs more, he’ll pay.”34
Lost in the focus on the city’s incompetence was a more nuanced reality. The Parks Department had been trying to rebuild the rink with a proverbial arm tied behind its back. More than sixty years earlier, the New York state legislature had passed a law designed to prevent mayors (and the machine bosses who controlled them) from throwing municipal construction gigs to politically connected contractors.
At the time, progressives in both parties rightly presumed that graft was rife throughout the state—that various construction companies were bribing city officials to secure city contracts at inflated prices. Wicks Law had aimed to solve the problem by requiring cities to hire, separately, the lowest-bidding general construction, plumbing, electrical, heating, and ventilation contractors on any municipal project slated to cost more than $50,000.35 Mayors were prohibited from hiring general contractors. As a result, more than a half century later, Ed Koch’s Parks Department was still legally prohibited from hiring a single firm to deliver a project on time and on budget.36
Asked why a private developer would be better equipped to move more speedily, a Parks Department official charged with managing capital improvements explained: “Parks is a city agency. We are bound by the city’s rules and regulations and checks and balances. If [the developer] wants a certain contractor, he just picks up the phone and says, ‘Look, if you ever want to do work for me again.…’ He’s got that type of clout.”37 Another former city official explained that private developers could consider skill, competency, cost, and trustworthiness. Moreover, they could move expeditiously ahead when selecting people to work on a project. But, he pointed out, “there is nobody in government who can do that. There are 15 or 20 people who have to agree.”38
Fortunately for Koch, his collaboration with the outside developer turned out to be a huge success. The project did cost less than the original estimate—$750,000 less—and the rink opened ahead of the holiday season.39 But from a public relations perspective, the developer’s success just seemed to highlight City Hall’s incompetence. The Parks Department, columnists and reporters liked to remind the public, had wasted six years and $13 million on a project the private sector managed to complete in six months and at roughly a sixth of the cost. Asked about the lesson learned from the whole episode, the developer responded: “I guess it says a lot about the City.”40 And with that wry remark, everyone understood how this episode fit into a broader narrative. City government was fundamentally incompetent. The municipal bureaucracy was a nightmare. Even liberal New Yorkers, many of whom reviled then president Ronald Reagan, would have been tempted to nod along to his famous quip that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”41
Not long thereafter, a reporter traipsed down to Central Park to interview members of the public. A local man enjoying a skate was asked his impressions of the rigmarole: “Anybody who can get anything done right and done on time in New York is a bona fide hero,” the skater replied. Then, after a pause, he alluded to the sort of honor the city reserves for America’s greatest luminaries. In recognition of a triumph of this magnitude, he declared, the developer “should get a ticker-tape parade.”42 Fixing a municipal skating rink was, in this New Yorker’s view, an accomplishment to be venerated akin to General Dwight Eisenhower winning the Second World War or Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. And it’s probably safe to say the developer would have agreed. Certainly he would have enjoyed the attention. His name, as it happened, was Donald J. Trump.
That then marks the third argument of this book. The first, to recount, is that progressivism is defined not by one, but rather by two divergent impulses. The second is that the two impulses have waxed and waned through time such that the movement’s underlying zeitgeist has shifted, a bit like the tide. And the third, made so plainly evident by the catastrophe at Wollman Rink, is that the balance that’s emerged since the late 1960s—the excessive tilt toward the Jeffersonian—is a seminal political liability for the progressive movement. Beyond conservatism, populism, MAGAism, and whatever other forces are pushing in contrary directions, progressivism is undermining itself. The cultural aversion to power hasn’t just tied government in knots—it has diminished the movement’s broader appeal. It is at the root of contemporary progressive exasperation.
Some will argue that’s preposterous—pointing to Trump and his supporters, they’ll dismiss out of hand any notion that progressivism should be held culpable for its own frustrations. They’ll argue that the movement’s real shortfall is its inability to overcome its antagonists—Rupert Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, and a whole slew of others. But my contention that progressivism is largely responsible for its own foibles should be more a source of hope than of anger. After all, the best antidote to conservatism’s enduring appeal may in fact be, quite simply, a progressivism that simply works.43 And on this count, the movement need not wait on voters to wake up to how bad MAGA-style populism really is—we can forge a more balanced progressivism on our own.
The saga at Wollman Rink encapsulates the underlying dynamic. Wicks Law had been passed with good intentions—to thwart municipal corruption. Mayor Koch had wanted to restore Wollman Rink for good reason—to serve the public. Combined, however, progressivism’s two impulses had served to undermine each other, and the resulting gridlock cleaved an opening for Trump. As we’ll see in the chapters that follow, that same cadence has become so endemic that progressives no longer register or notice. But the evidence is everywhere.
America can’t build housing. We can’t deploy high-speed rail. We’re struggling to harness the promise of clean energy. And because government has failed in all these realms—because confidence in public authority has waned through the years—progressives have found it increasingly difficult to make a case for themselves.44 After San Francisco spent several years and $1.7 million trying to get a toilet installed in the Noe Valley neighborhood, one New York Times reporter asked: “If an army of more than 30,000 city employees with a $14 billion annual budget cannot build a simple bathroom in a reasonable way, what hope is there that San Francisco can solve its housing shortage and fentanyl crisis?”45 Or, put more universally: Who would want to give more power to an institution that, as Ronald Reagan sometimes quipped, would mess up a two-car parade?
There is a certain irony to progressivism’s contemporary predicament. After all, as we’ll see in the first chapter, the movement was born amid many of the same dynamics. The core problem at the turn of the twentieth century wasn’t that powerful government bureaucrats were doing bad things—it was that feckless public authority couldn’t get things done. The famed journalist H. L. Mencken rued that during the late 1800s in Baltimore “there was a great epidemic of typhoid fever every Summer, and a wave of malaria every Autumn, and more than a scattering of smallpox, especially among the colored folk in the alleys, every Winter.”46 But machine-controlled government remained incapable of crafting solutions. Across the country, machine-controlled city halls struggled to build sanitation systems, or public parks, or good schools. Robber barons corrupted public bureaucracies. Government was a mess, fenced in by judicially enforced doctrines of laissez-faire.47 Progressivism emerged to steer the country in a different direction—and it prevailed.
Today, the sources of progressive frustration are different—but the underlying dynamic is largely the same. Things feel stuck. Nothing seems to work. And for all the efforts Democrats make to invest in the future—the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act—progress too often remains a vision of Charlie Brown’s football. Reformers tout an achievement, but then a housing plan is abandoned after local opposition, a high-speed rail line is shelved for exorbitant costs, or an offshore wind farm is blocked by local fishermen. Often enough, both sides in any given debate—those who want to change things, and those who fear that change will be destructive—are well-intentioned. But the movement’s inability to resolve its conflicting impulses has turned progressive policymaking into what drag racers call “warming the tires.” A driver steps on the brake and accelerator at the same time. The wheels spin. The track screeches. But the car remains in place.
The political effect of the ensuing paralysis has been profound. In the early 1960s, nearly four in five Americans professed trust in Washington to “do what’s right.” By 2022, that figure had fallen to one in five.48 And you need not discount conservative harping to acknowledge that progressives have also been arguing for decades that power can’t be trusted—that public authority is captured by moneyed interests, that it lines the pockets of the powerful few, that it is a tool of white supremacists, xenophobes, sexists, and worse. No one can deny that centralized power can be used for ill. But even given that reality, attacking government turns out to be, for progressives, a ham-handed way of convincing ordinary people that government should be empowered to do more to pursue the public interest.
This book comprises eight chapters, the first four of which detail how progressivism evolved from a beacon of centralized authority into a movement culturally averse to power. The latter four chapters detail how this shift has played out in various realms—in the movement’s effort to regulate greedy corporations, to keep housing affordable, to build public works, and to build a clean energy future capable of thwarting climate change. Every chapter begins with a story designed to illustrate how the progressive schism has framed a certain moment, or shaped the movement’s approach to a certain challenge. Following that prologue, each chapter tracks back to trace the chronological narrative. And while the topics vary dramatically, the basic arc remains the same throughout: public authority’s potential is eventually undermined by the impulse to “speak truth to power.”
Which points to the book’s final nudge. Having identified the core of progressivism’s frustration, the solution presents itself: the movement needs to come full circle—to rebalance its Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian impulses. The unresolved question—one to which I’ve yet to divine an entirely satisfying answer—is how to avoid too drastic a pivot. How, in the end, can progressives pull the System back from the vetocracy we’ve created over the last fifty years without licensing a new generation of imperious, unaccountable power brokers? How can we clear a path for progress without beckoning another Robert Moses? In 1976, Daniel Bell argued that “if the society can respond, through a new public philosophy that commands respect and through institutions that work, then there may be time for the other, slower process of cultural reconstruction to take hold.”49 That should be the goal. In the face of today’s imbalance, progressivism needs to reset.
The good news is twofold. First, the movement doesn’t lack for gumption. Wonks, activists, and experts across the country are awash in plans and proposals delineating how America can build sufficient housing, address climate change, give people better access to transit, improve public education and health care, fight inequality, advance social justice, and more. Good ideas abound. Second, and perhaps more important, reformers need not wait on conservatism to come to its senses before changing course—progressivism can heal itself. With a proper balance, the movement can make a convincing case for how and why public authority is, in fact, a boon to the public interest—that it produces a good return on public investment. If we can convincingly make that true, ordinary people will be less inclined to fall for the other side’s foibles and canards.50
To get there, however, progressives will need to step away from the impulse simply to attack whatever red meat Fox News throws on their screens. Rather than tear our hair out over their plans, we need to train more of our attention on our own ideas, our own impulses, our own narrative. That’s not to invite a war within progressivism, if only because, as I argued above, nearly every progressive of every stripe harbors both progressive impulses to one degree or another. If there’s any great reckoning to be had, it will be within each progressive heart—individuals will need to recognize that their underlying political impulses cut against each other and must be put into balance. To say it again, there’s nothing wrong with progressivism that can’t be fixed by what’s right with progressivism. But to restore the movement’s promise, we will need to grapple with our own demons, and place our good intentions in a balanced, productive tension.