Name: Why building things in America has become so hard | The Gray Area
Uploaded: 2026-01-13T17:21:54.000Z
Duration: 46 min 20 s
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I'm Sean, host of this very show, the Gray Area.

For the show this week, I'm talking to Mark Dunkelman.

He recently wrote a book called why Nothing Works.

And if you are the type of person who wonders why nothing seems to work anymore, why the government, our government, can't seem to do anything well or reliably or at scale, this is the book for you, Mark.

Explains sort of how we got here, where things went sideways, and

how the hell we can get this thing back on the tracks.

Let's talk about your book, the title of which is why Nothing Works.

Are you making the case here that America, our beloved country, is broken?

Well, yeah, I think that broadly, I'm trying to connect with people who feel frustrated that a country that used to be able to do a lot of big things now seems incapable of doing even the mundane, and

that that feels like it's indicative of some larger wrongness with what's happening in America today.

So any democracy has to do a couple of things at the same time.

Citizens have to have a say in the decisions that impact their lives, and

government has to be empowered to do big, consequential things.

And you argue this tension is baked uneasily into progressive thought.

And really, it goes all the way back to the founding of the country.

So just say a bit about that and why Hamilton and Jefferson are.

So right from the beginning of the nation's story, America is betwixt and between two impulses.

And one of those impulses, which you see in the founding document, the Declaration of Independence, is one that is really frightened of centralized power.

it's born from an impulse to say there is some big bureaucracy that is far away that is coercing us to do things that we don't want to do and that the thing that would save us would be freedom from that.

So that's what the Declaration of Independence is.

And when the Founders created independence for us, they created a system under the Articles of Confederation.

And the Articles were a system that created real chaos.

That we had independent states in order to have a national government.

We didn't have any that didn't have an executive branch.

All the states basically had veto power over Anything.

It was like a government run entirely by filibuster, but

filibuster by any given state, a single senator could filibuster anything.

And within a decade, people realized that this sort of antithesis of old British colonial rule, which was too centralized, was this the opposite, which was rule under the Articles, was too chaotic.

Power was too dispersed and too spread for government to actually run effectively.

And so the founders tried to find a medium which was the Constitution, which.

Which was our second structure of government, which was sort of an in between, meaning that Hamilton.

And Hamilton sort of played a larger role in the construction of the Constitution and probably would have taken it further had it not been for some moderated influences.

But his idea is we need to bring back power to a centralized authority that will be able to make choices.

That in a pluralistic society with different voices wanting different things and people having different values and ideas, what you need is to empower some centralized decision maker to make good decisions in the public interest.

This tension between liberty and authority, which is really what we're talking about, that's always been a challenge for democracies everywhere.

Is there something unique about America's cultural aversion to power, especially state power.

In every group of humans, you have to figure out some sort of system for dealing with disagreement.

And I don't think that's a uniquely American problem.

I do think that America has a system that is uniquely designed to be able to vacillate between maybe a little bit too much authoritarianism, as we had probably in the middle of the 20th century, and

a little bit too much chaos, as we have today and we've had in other periods in American history.

And we've come to sort of, in the sense that things are.

I think we're at one particular extreme now, and we're probably headed back.

So the distrust is always there in the background.

The pendulum of distrust has swung a little too aggressively, and now we are where we are.

But all this distrust of power, it didn't emerge out of a vacuum, right?

I mean, there's, you know, the institutional racism and Vietnam and Watergate and the glut of pollution and all the corruption and captured regulators over the years.

I mean, we just don't have a lot of faith in our institutions.

And if we're honest, it's because they haven't been all that trustworthy in many cases, which is just a long way of asking if the current Predicament is less about distrust and more about the public justifiably losing confidence in government.

We go through these periods in history where we have real frustration that nothing is getting done.

At the turn of the 20th century, there's sort of a notion that power is dispersed among political machines and that if you want to get something done, it's easier to get something done at the parochial level by knowing your local ward politician who can maybe get your, you know, your ne' er do well brother in law a job in the sanitation department than it is to build a good sanitation system.

Politics is sort of a game of localism and parochialism, so you can't do.

So those are moments where we are looking for a move towards a more Hamiltonian approach.

Then there are the opposite moments, right?

There are moments where we see strong centralized institutions that look oppressive.

That's what was happening right around the revolution, where we saw taxation without representation.

So we wanted to push, in a Jeffersonian sense, power back down.

That's exactly what we saw in the 50s and 60s, where we saw powerful institutions of all sorts doing things that we didn't like.

We saw the industrial machine pumping out cars that were unsafe at any speed, as Ralph Nader pointed out.

We saw the agricultural establishment putting out groceries that had DDT in them, so women were burying children with terrible birth defects.

We saw Robert McNamara, who was sort of a quintessential vision of the establishment, sending kids off to Vietnam to be slaughtered in a quagmire.

We saw bosses like Richard Daly in Chicago segregating the city purposefully using urban renewal.

In all of these cases, power was so centralized that people said, no, no, no, no, no.

This Hamiltonian way of governing is corrupt and we need to push power back down.

What would you say is the window of time when we.

The country struck the ideal balance between these two poles.

When did we get this right and what did we do during that window that's worth remembering?

It is hard not to look at the TVA and not golf, say what that is.

The Tennessee Valley Authority was a bureaucracy set up in the very early years of the New Deal.

The Upper south at that point in history was flyover country.

Before we used that term, it was forgotten.

Most of the country had washers and dryers and washing machines.

But the Upper south had sort of been left behind, and

people were sick and people were impoverished and the soil had been eroded by years of logging and people were living hand to mouth.

And the private power companies that were organized into trusts under the name Commonwealth and Southern, had no interest in building the poles and wires to these poor farmers because they didn't think the farmers had enough money to justify the expense.

And when Franklin Roosevelt was elected president, he decided that he was going to use public assets to finally build power to these communities.

And he was going to empower a lawyer to make the Upper South a fiefdom through the Tennessee Valley Authority.

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Why building things in America has become so hard | The Gray Area

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