The Biggest Obstacle to Progressive Success

Ed Koch was angry—and perhaps a bit embarrassed. It was the spring of 1986, and his Parks Department had wasted millions of taxpayer dollars trying to rehabilitate Central Park’s Wollman Rink. At the height of the crack epidemic, the ice-skating facility’s closure hardly represented the worst of New York’s problems. But the Parks Department’s ineptitude fed a notion that the city 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 the 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 it decay. To cut costs, the Parks Department started to explore the possibility of replacing its clunky brine-based refrigeration system with Freon, which was purported to cost $20,000 less a year to operate. So, in 1980, city hall ordered the rink shut down, the pipes beneath it torn out, and the whole system uprooted to make way for a $4.9 million replacement that was to take less than three years to complete.

The project quickly went sideways. After ripping up the old system, a contractor installed 22 miles of new pipe for the Freon. But when that initial phase was completed, the department had yet to secure a contractor to pave over the new piping. For more than a year, it was exposed to the elements; flooded by an underground stream; and, according to subsequent investigations, subjected to stray electric currents. When, in 1982, pavers were finally hired, engineers underestimated how much concrete would be required to cover the pipes. Rather than call for more, the pavers diluted the insufficient supply. Then, to protect the delicate piping, they chose not to deploy vibration machines typically used to collapse air pockets in concrete. The result was predictable. When the job was done, the ice on the surface melted. The rink simply didn’t work.

The mayor seemed to have 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 require the department not only to close Wollman for another two years but to add another $3 million to the taxpayers’ tab. The whole thing was looking 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.

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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 government to do something that would typically have been handled by a public authority. “If it costs more, he’ll pay.”

Lost in the focus on the city’s incompetence was a more nuanced reality. More than 60 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 the state was rife with graft—that construction companies were bribing municipal officials to secure 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. Mayors were prohibited from hiring general contractors. As a result, Ed Koch’s Parks Department was legally prohibited from hiring a single firm to deliver a project on time and on budget.

Fortunately for Koch, his collaboration with the outside developer was a huge success. The project cost less than the original estimate—$750,000 less—and the rink opened ahead of the holiday season. But from a public-relations perspective, the developer’s success just seemed to highlight city hall’s incompetence. The Parks Department, as 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.” The government was fundamentally incompetent. The municipal bureaucracy was a nightmare. Even liberal New Yorkers, many of whom reviled 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.’”

Not long thereafter, a reporter traipsed over 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. And it’s probably safe to say the developer would have agreed. His name, as it happens, was Donald Trump.

Roughly a century before the fiasco in Central Park, the Progressive movement was launched to address the same perception of government incompetence. City halls around the country, caught in the grip of rapacious political machines, simply couldn’t get things done—mayors and governors couldn’t build sewer and water lines, couldn’t maintain parks and school systems, couldn’t manage the nation’s messy transition from farm to factory. Progressivism emerged to stand up a system that would work. But the reformers drawn into the movement were torn between two ideas about how to turn things around. Some, adopting a perspective that would come to be associated with Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, believed that the key was returning power to the individuals and small businesses that had defined 19th-century life. Others, many of whom would align themselves with Theodore Roosevelt, took the opposite view, having grown convinced that imbuing bigger, more robust bureaucracies with new power—public-service commissions and public authorities, for example—was the only realistic way to overcome the power wielded by the political hacks and charlatans then dominating American life.

The tension between these two ideas—Brandeis’s Jeffersonian impulse to push power down and Roosevelt’s Hamiltonian impulse to push it up—became the most consequential divide within Progressivism. Faced with the pernicious influence of monopolistic corporations, for example, the two camps were at odds over whether to prioritize efforts to break up trusts, thereby enabling competition from below, or to subject corporate behemoths to more stringent regulation from above. The Jeffersonians scored a handful of major victories before the First World War, including breaking up monopolies such as Standard Oil. But in the decades that followed, Progressivism’s Hamiltonian impulse came to predominate, advancing the notion that big, powerful government was the key to doing big, important things. The New Deal was defined by an alphabet soup of robust bureaucracies empowered to wield enormous authority—the Social Security Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Tennessee Valley Authority among them. And while the Jeffersonian impulse did not fade entirely—Wicks Law was passed in the 1920s—the Progressive project largely sought to empower what many would come to call the “establishment.”

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Then, in the shadow of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, the teeter-totter tipped back across its fulcrum. The upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s—the civil-rights movement, Vietnam, the counterculture, an environmental reawakening, second-wave feminism, Watergate—soured reformers on the very establishment they’d helped erect. Rather than empower centralized institutions, they would now endeavor to rein them in, placing guardrails around various power brokers and giving voice to the ordinary people the establishment ignored. The movement became culturally averse to power. Over the past half century, that Jeffersonian impulse to check authority—to return influence to the meek among us—has become progressivism’s abiding priority. And rarely do those inside the movement register that, entirely apart from the influence of conservatism, these two warring impulses cut in separate directions.

The saga at Wollman Rink encapsulates the underlying dynamic. Wicks Law had been passed with good intentions—a Jeffersonian check on municipal corruption. Mayor Koch had wanted the Parks Department to restore the rink for good reason—here was a Hamiltonian bureaucracy endeavoring to serve the public. Combined, however, progressivism’s two impulses served to render government incompetent. And the resulting gridlock wasn’t just a black eye for public institutions. It cleaved an opening for a figure like Trump.

Over the past half century, progressivism’s cultural aversion to power has turned the Democratic Party—purportedly the “party of government”—into an institution that almost instinctively seeks to cut government down. Progressives are so fearful of establishment abuse that reformers tend to prefer to tighten rather than loosen their grip on authority. The movement discounts whatever good the government might do in service of ensuring that it won’t do bad. And that’s driven well-intentioned reformers to insert so many checks into the system that government has been rendered incompetent.

Conservatism, of course, hasn’t been helpful in making government more effective. But for progressives, that reality can quickly become a distraction. They can’t control the MAGA agenda—but they can offer a more palatable alternative. If the progressive agenda is going to have a chance—if government is going to be given the leash required to combat inequality, to solve poverty, and to fight prejudice—progressives will first need to convince voters that government is capable of delivering on its promises. At present, progressives are too inclined to cut public authority off at the knees. And that’s why they so often feel like they can’t win for losing. Their cultural aversion to power renders government incompetent, and incompetent government undermines progressivism’s political appeal.

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 difficult to make a case for themselves.

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 version 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 policy making into what drag racers call “warming the tires.” A driver steps on the brake and the accelerator at the same time. The wheels spin. The tires screech. 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. Progressives have been arguing for decades that power can’t be trusted—that government 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.

Ordinary people who experience the morass of inept bureaucracy will, like the New Yorkers frustrated with Mayor Koch’s inability to restore Wollman Rink, be tempted to turn to someone with the individual moxie to get the job done. That was Donald Trump’s appeal in the mid-1980s, and he employs the same basic rationale as an iconoclastic politician on the national stage. But it’s not just that unrepentant Jeffersonianism doesn’t work. Ordinary people aren’t monolithically averse to power. They don’t want public authority abused, but they know that progress is impossible without leadership. And insofar as the subtext of contemporary progressive ideology is that anyone wielding power is in the wrong, the movement alienates itself from voters who might otherwise support its agenda.

This is the crux of the political argument for rebalancing progressivism’s Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian impulses. The movement supports growing government so that it can take a stronger hand in protecting the vulnerable. But then progressives excoriate government as a captured tool of the patriarchy. Those of us who style ourselves progressive typically gloss over that tension for a simple reason: It’s awkward and confusing. Most progressives want to both empower government to combat climate change and curtail government’s authority over a woman’s right to choose. And squaring that circle is more intellectually difficult than standing strong against Trumpism, or calling out conservative bigotry, or attacking the figures eager to steer the country toward fascism. There’s no storming the barricades in support of a healthy balance between contradictory impulses. And so progressives typically retreat into reflexive anti-conservatism.

Criticizing your adversaries is not, in and of itself, a terrible political strategy. When the other side supports unpopular ideas—separating children from their parents at the border, limiting women’s bodily autonomy, stripping away environmental protections, cutting Social Security and Medicare—there’s little downside to drawing the public’s attention to its agenda. But for progressives, there’s danger in that appeal. A movement consumed by exasperation over how so many people could have voted for Trump, or supported his agenda, or excused his conduct after losing in 2020, will be less inclined to correct its own errors. If progressives put making government work not on the periphery of the movement’s agenda but at its center, voters might be less vulnerable to the sirens of the populist right.

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There is, of course, an authentic and powerful reason for progressives to worry about making government hum. A government that operates expeditiously—a public authority with fewer guardrails—will inevitably be used not only to serve progressive desires but to pursue conservative ends as well. Any change that would have made it easier for the Obama administration to identify well-intentioned “shovel ready” projects in 2009 and 2010, or for clean-energy companies to build transmission lines through Arkansas and Maine, or for developers to build affordable housing in New York and California, might well have opened the door for someone else to build a legion of coal-fired power plants or gentrify minority neighborhoods.

But that’s a risk progressives today need to take, a bargain they need to accept. A government too hamstrung to serve the public good will fuel future waves of conservative populism. Voters are drawn to figures like Donald Trump not because public authority is too pervasive, but because government can’t deliver. His refrain that the “deep state” has sold the ordinary citizen out—that insiders are constantly making “bad deals” on the nation’s behalf—lands, in no small part, because voters have witnessed the incompetence. Lionizing government and then ensuring that it fails is a terrible political strategy. The movement needs to change course not only because it’s bad policy, but because it’s bad politics as well.

That, in the end, is the best argument for full-circle progressivism. The Jeffersonian retrenchment, now more than 50 years old, has run its course. Today, the core obstacle to progressivism’s substantive success—to greater economic equality and prosperity, to more social justice and responsibility, to a more robust response to climate change, to more housing, to greater mobility—isn’t centralized power. It’s the absence of centralized power. Populism takes hold not when democracy works well, but rather when it doesn’t deliver. No amount of righteous sanctimony can substitute for the political benefits of making public authority serve the public interest. That should be the progressive movement’s north star.

This essay has been adapted from Marc J Dunkelman’s new book, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress--And How to Bring It Back.