https://www.vox.com/podcasts/474468/why-...ity-crisis
Discusses why progressive government doesn't get anything done.
"...A big part of the story is Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, which won the Pulitzer in 1975. It’s about Robert Moses, the most powerful man in New York from the 1930s through the 1960s. Moses builds highways, housing, Lincoln Center, massive infrastructure. He really shaped the city.
The most famous chapter is about the Cross Bronx Expressway. Moses drives a trench through a working-class neighborhood in the South Bronx, displacing thousands of people. Communities beg him to move the route a few blocks. The mayor’s against it. Moses doesn’t care. He has the power and he uses it.
People look at this and say we need to stop Moses. We need environmental reviews, historic preservation rules, community input requirements, civil rights protections, rights of action so people can sue. The goal is to prevent top-down abuse. And it worked, in the sense that it made it harder for someone like Moses to bulldoze a neighborhood. But it also helped create a system where it’s hard for anyone to do good things, too. By design, we made change incredibly difficult.
“By design, we made change incredibly difficult.”
So it’s a rational response that eventually becomes self-defeating. You stop Moses, but you also stop Penn Station from getting fixed.
Exactly. The question I ask is: Why could nobody stop Moses in the 1950s, and then 50 years later we can’t fix Penn Station, one of the busiest transit hubs in the hemisphere. It’s the same underlying dynamic. We created a governance structure with too many veto points.
Some people will hear this and say that you’re blaming progressive reforms for dysfunction, while downplaying the conservative project to deliberately make government fail.
Conservatives absolutely play a role. But that story has become so dominant in progressive thinking that it gives us a pass. It lets us avoid self-criticism.
It also becomes a kind of political fatalism. If the story is always “Reagan broke everything,” then the only strategy is to win elections and hope. But if your pitch is that government should solve big problems, you’ve got to make government work in the places where it already has a mandate. Otherwise people won’t trust you with bigger ambitions.
What are the main policies and legal structures that jam things up now? NEPA comes up a lot. Is that ground zero?
NEPA is high on the list. It’s the National Environmental Policy Act, passed in 1970. It was originally meant to require project planners to consider environmental impacts and alternatives. In practice, it became a procedural litigation engine.
The key shift is that the legal question often isn’t whether a project’s impacts are worth it. It’s whether the study addressed every conceivable impact and alternative thoroughly enough. So agencies produce thousands and thousands of pages to anticipate lawsuits. It becomes a game: not “is this project good,” but “is the paperwork lawsuit-proof.”
And NEPA’s just one piece. There’s a whole regime of rules, mandates, and jurisprudence layered over decades. The cumulative effect is paralysis...."
