# Marc Dunkelman's Why Nothing Works explained: Hamilton, Jefferson and the progressive veto

> Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back (PublicAffairs, 2025), by Marc J. Dunkelman, argues that American progressives once used concentrated power to build, then turned against it after Robert Moses, filling government with reviews, lawsuits and participation rights that let almost anyone stall a project. His remedy is balance: give communities a voice without a veto. Critics say his prescriptions are vague and his story leaves out conservatives. For Europe the useful lesson is to settle participation early, at the planning stage, and then let approved projects move fast, as the EU now does for renewable energy.

- URL: https://www.radicalcentre.eu/en/articles/marc-dunkelman-why-nothing-works-explained
- Language: en
- Publisher: radical centre / centro radical
- Published: 2026-10-15
- Topic: Ideas & history
- Author: radical centre
- Licence: CC BY 4.0

## Key points

- Why Nothing Works was published by PublicAffairs on 18 February 2025; Marc J. Dunkelman worked for Democrats in Congress for more than a decade and is a fellow at Brown University's Watson School.
- His frame: a Hamiltonian impulse that concentrates power to solve problems, and a Jeffersonian impulse that disperses it to protect people from institutions.
- After the era of Robert Moses, he argues, reforms such as maximum feasible participation, class actions and environmental review gave nearly everyone a way to stop things.
- His remedy, as Washington Monthly summarises it: give communities a voice but not a veto, and trim the reforms without gutting them.
- Europe has its own version: the EU's renewable energy directive now asks states to map acceleration areas where permits must take no more than 12 months.

Marc J. Dunkelman's *Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back* came out from PublicAffairs on 18 February 2025, and it has become one of the key texts of the American debate on state capacity, alongside *Abundance*. Dunkelman spent more than a decade working for Democratic members of the House and Senate, wrote an earlier book called *The Vanishing Neighbor*, and is now a fellow at Brown University's Watson School. That background matters, because *Why Nothing Works* is a book by a progressive about progressives. Its claim is that the American left built a government that cannot build.

On day 8 we used Dunkelman to explain [what vetocracy means](/en/articles/what-is-vetocracy-fukuyama-dunkelman). Here we look at the book itself: its history, its remedy and its critics.

## The story the book tells

The book opens in New York's Penn Station, which Dunkelman passed through on his commute while reading Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses. Everyone agrees the station is grim, and there is very little organised opposition to a better one. It still has not been rebuilt. Looking for the culprit, he found no villain, only a large number of people and institutions each able to say no.

His explanation rests on two old instincts in American reform. The Hamiltonian impulse pushes power up, into institutions strong enough to solve collective problems: dams, highways, public health, the New Deal agencies. The Jeffersonian impulse pushes power down, to protect individuals and communities from those same institutions. Progressives, Dunkelman says, hold both at once. They want a powerful bureaucracy to limit pollution and fear a powerful bureaucracy everywhere else. The publisher's blurb puts his diagnosis in a phrase: reformers came to value speaking truth to power over exercising that power for good.

Robert Moses is the hinge. He built parks, bridges and the Cross Bronx Expressway, and he bulldozed neighbourhoods to do it. City Journal's review describes the result as a Jeffersonian reaction in the 1960s that set the pattern for the decades that followed. Dunkelman traces it through the War on Poverty's Community Action Program, with its demand for the "maximum feasible participation" of the poor, which he reads as the Jeffersonian approach winning out over a more Hamiltonian alternative. Then come the legal tools. As Alan Ehrenhalt summarises the book in Washington Monthly, the 1966 rewrite of the rules on class actions, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 and California's state equivalent created review requirements and openings for litigation that turned impact statements into documents thousands of pages long. Each reform was a reasonable answer to a real abuse. Together they made high-speed rail in California and new housing almost anywhere very hard to deliver. And, the blurb adds, the resulting gridlock has eaten away at trust in institutions and opened the way to populism.

## What he wants instead

Dunkelman is careful with his remedy. He does not want to abolish environmental review or community participation. Washington Monthly sums up his position as giving communities a voice without a veto, and shaving back the reforms without gutting them. In his interview with Yascha Mounk for Persuasion he talks about finding a balance and admits that no single law will fix things. City Journal calls the result a kind of neo-Hamiltonianism, and notes that Dunkelman accepts the uncomfortable corollary: tools that let government push through projects progressives like will also push through projects they dislike.

## The critics

Daniel DiSalvo, writing in the conservative City Journal, likes the diagnosis and finds the prescription thin: which decisions, made by whom? He also calls the focus on progressives insular, because conservatives barely appear, from Eisenhower's interstate highways to Reagan's concentration of executive power, and because the book says little about public-sector unions or urban machines. Ehrenhalt, in the centre-left Washington Monthly, thinks the title overpromises, since plenty of things in American government work, and that the Hamilton and Jefferson frame gets shaky when stretched over twentieth-century history. He still concludes that Dunkelman has the fundamentals right. Critics on the left, such as the hosts of the Pitchfork Economics podcast, argue that the book is unfair to progressives and leaves out the part played by laissez-faire ideology.

## What Europe can take from it

Dunkelman writes about America, and the instinct he describes is familiar in Europe: every project in Spain that has waited years for an environmental or planning decision is part of the same story. The European Union has already started to apply a version of his remedy in one field. The revised Renewable Energy Directive, in force since November 2023, asks member states to map renewables acceleration areas. According to the European Parliament's summary of the law, permits for projects inside those areas should take no longer than 12 months, two years outside them, and as little as one to three months for small installations such as rooftop solar and heat pumps.

That design is the useful lesson. The left is right that communities and nature need protection from projects imposed from above, and that people have a right to be heard about what is built around them. The market-liberal tradition is right that builders need legal certainty and timelines, and that a lawful project should not be held hostage by litigation for a decade. The idea that fits neither camp is to move participation upstream. The public argument happens once, openly, when a plan decides where and what can be built. Projects that fit the plan then go ahead quickly, with neighbours consulted on the details and no power to stop them. Dunkelman's Hamilton gets the power to build; his Jefferson gets a real say at the moment when the say matters most. Spain could apply the same method to housing, grids and rail.

## FAQ

### What is Why Nothing Works about?

It is Marc J. Dunkelman's history of how American government lost the capacity to build. He argues that progressives, reacting against the excesses of centralised power, created so many checks that projects everyone wants, such as a better Penn Station in New York, cannot get done.

### What do Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian mean in Dunkelman's book?

The Hamiltonian impulse pushes power up into institutions strong enough to solve collective problems. The Jeffersonian impulse pushes power down to protect individuals and communities from those institutions. Dunkelman says progressives need both and have leaned too far towards the second.

### What are the main criticisms of Why Nothing Works?

Daniel DiSalvo in City Journal found the prescriptions vague and the focus on progressives insular, with little on conservatives, public-sector unions or what happens when opponents gain the restored power. Alan Ehrenhalt in Washington Monthly thought the Hamilton and Jefferson frame wobbles when applied to twentieth-century history, while agreeing with the core argument.

### How is Why Nothing Works different from Abundance?

Both books argue that rules and processes stop democracies from building. Dunkelman's is a history of the progressive movement's own shift from building to blocking; Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, is a policy agenda for supply in housing, energy and science.

## Sources

- [Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/marc-j-dunkelman/why-nothing-works/9781541700215/), PublicAffairs / Hachette Book Group (2025)
- [Why Nothing Works (research brief)](https://home.watson.brown.edu/research/research-briefs/why-nothing-works), Watson School, Brown University (2025)
- [The long shadow of Robert Moses](https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/03/23/the-long-shadow-of-robert-moses/), Washington Monthly (2025)
- [Why Nothing Works (review by Daniel DiSalvo)](https://www.city-journal.org/article/why-nothing-works-marc-dunkelman-review-government-progressive), City Journal (2025)
- [Renewable Energy Directive](https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/renewable-energy/renewable-energy-directive-targets-and-rules/renewable-energy-directive_en), European Commission (2023)
- [Revision of the Renewable Energy Directive: summary of Parliament's first-reading position](https://oeil.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/en/document-summary?id=1757251), European Parliament Legislative Observatory (2023)