Housing construction saw a decade of depression after the financial crisis.
This article appears in the April 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
Avid Reader Press
Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress―and How to Bring It Back
By Marc J. Dunkelman
PublicAffairs
In the months before the re-election of Donald Trump precipitated our rapid descent into authoritarianism, two books were being written about the idea that progressivism went astray in the 1960s and 1970s. In Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson describe a drift into a “politics of scarcity,” and in Why Nothing Works, Marc Dunkelman calls it a “cultural aversion to power.” Both books ask a pertinent question: Why doesn’t the government do big, bold things, quickly, to address the pressing issues of our time? We have an abundance of viewpoints and veto points, they argue, but a shortage of affordable housing and transmission lines. Something’s got to give.
The unstated question, of course, is who must give. The problems the authors identify are real, but they largely ignore who benefits from prolonging them. Their vision is of a government that’s more responsive to the public’s needs, but their proposal is to remove already inadequate levers for accountability in political decision-making. We should be able to agree that the tools we have to ensure progress and affluence are insufficient, without concluding that the answer is to throw them away. Improving those tools—making them actually fit for purpose—will require keeping them out of the hands of those who would wield them to exploit us. But that discussion is missing from these books.
The authors are haunted by the expediency of unchecked leadership; how rapidly a place can be remade in the hands of a figure like Robert Moses, or governments like China and Texas. The “unresolved question” for Dunkelman is how to speed things up without “licensing a new generation of imperious, unaccountable power brokers.” Klein and Thompson seem less troubled by this possibility. Dunkelman’s optimism is tempered by lessons of history, while Klein and Thompson’s is unrestrained, but both books come to the same conclusion: There are too many people at the table, too many empowered to say “no.” They want to see regulatory requirements loosened, authority centralized, legal recourse limited. They want someone to just choose.
Yet the political landscape has shifted rapidly under the feet of these authors over the first several weeks of the second Trump term. Arguing for fewer checks on government action hits very different amid mass firings, unilateral cancellations of appropriated spending, and dissolutions of entire federal agencies. The diagnosis of what constrains the state acting authoritatively to meet public needs—more or less the messy multivocality of democracy—is an ill match for an era of accelerating authoritarianism.
The books argue that the key to restoring trust in government is empowering the government to act decisively. Progressivism’s preoccupation with “the injustices of the present” (Klein and Thompson), or “speaking truth to power” (Dunkelman), has precluded building a state strong enough to meet people’s needs. Yet it is difficult to imagine coming out on the other side of the Trump-Musk madness without a progressivism built around precisely those preoccupations.
No Villains Necessary?
Klein and Thompson want a politics of abundance. Not an abundance of anything and everything, they assure, not an “omnidirectional moreness,” but a course correction from the status quo, which offers “a startling abundance of the goods that can fill a house and a shortage of what’s needed to build a good life.” Who on the left would object to that aspiration?
But it is critical to be accurate about the sources of what Klein and Thompson call the “chosen scarcities” that stratify modern American society. What constrains political action for the public good? Call it industry influence, corporate capture, consolidated power. Call it the societal consequences of the profit motive. Whatever your shorthand, what’s missing from these books is a substantive engagement with the fact that powerful entities profit from the government failing to meet the public’s needs. (It’s worth noting that Dunkelman’s book makes fuller gestures toward this reality than Klein and Thompson’s.)
For example, no climate advocate would argue that we are decarbonizing fast enough, or that the status quo is serving us well. (Though it should be noted that clean-energy installations grew 47 percent in 2024 relative to the previous year, despite protests from abundance advocates that the clean-energy investments of the Biden Inflation Reduction Act were too convoluted.) But who profits from every single year that we fail to meet our climate goals? Who spends billions of dollars lobbying to make that happen? Who spreads disinformation, pushes false solutions, obstructs congressional investigations, files lawsuits, creates front groups, launches public relations campaigns to oppose new laws and tighter regulations, and elevates politicians who will aid them in this obstruction?
The fossil fuel industry benefits from our current gridlock. It benefits from legislative proposals that “abundance agenda” proponents have backed to weaken existing processes for assessing the environmental impact of the construction of energy infrastructure. And it benefits from “all of the above” energy rhetoric that signals political leaders’ refusal to stand up to corporate power and identify which private-sector goals are aligned with the public interest, and which simply aren’t. The stability of the global climate can’t handle the preservation of the fossil fuel industry.
Policy solutions that take climate change seriously will outrage the people who profit from coal and oil and gas, and those people have money and power. Donald Trump, at a surface level, is following an abundance agenda by removing the implementing regulations of the National Environmental Policy Act, a particular bugaboo for the authors. But he’s doing it in such a way that explicitly favors oil and gas infrastructure by labeling them “emergency” projects.
Regulations have led to dramatically lower air pollution and many other benefits over the past 50 years.
Housing is also a point of emphasis in these books. We have a serious deficit of home construction, which the authors attribute to nettlesome rules getting in the way of building. They identify an important problem, but neglect the historical hinge point that led to the deficit in 2007. We didn’t have only pro-construction zoning rules before 2007 and a flood of burdensome, anti-building rules afterward. The home construction sector crashed because of the collapse of the housing bubble, driven by the deregulation of housing finance and a securitization machine that broke the market.
This led to a decade of depression in home construction, a mass consolidation of the market, and a loss of technical know-how and material supply chains. The sclerotic nature of the housing market today benefits incumbents, who buy up and sit on available land and build out slowly to keep prices high. Weakening their power is complementary to the necessary step of fixing zoning. As Brian Callaci and Sandeep Vaheesan framed it broadly for Dissent, “for those who see housing as a right, the role of the state in structuring markets expands beyond the YIMBY vision of increasing supply at the margin through deregulation.”
Overlooking the question of who benefits from the status quo is especially glaring in a time of unprecedented greed in the halls of power, as a convicted white-collar criminal and the world’s richest man gut and weaponize the federal government, targeting agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Labor, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which expressly seek to curb private-sector grift and pollution. This will certainly make things move more quickly, but those things include Big Tech payment apps that have no deposit insurance, or gig work for wages artificially depressed by algorithms, or industrial manufacturers that can dispose of chemical runoff into rivers.
Klein and Thompson want “more of what matters”: affordable housing, clean energy, useful technology, lifesaving medicine. Yes, please. But we also need less of what doesn’t matter—predatory landlords, polluting energy, exploitative technology, unaffordable health care. Rules imposed over the last half-century that seek to prevent exploitation and safeguard the public have led to dramatically lower air and water pollution, significantly fewer auto and aviation fatalities, reduced mortality from infectious diseases, fewer deaths and injuries at work, fewer deaths from residential fires, fewer bank failures, and a less volatile economy. Some of us believe those are worthwhile trade-offs. But industry tends to lobby against the “burdensome costs” of so increasing general well-being, as rulemaking dockets can attest.
In failing to recognize who has vested interests in our unequal economy, the authors don’t seem to recognize that serving the public interest will require political leaders willing to make powerful enemies. The “liberalism that builds” camp, in short, would find more allies among the progressives they criticize if they acknowledged that some things should not, in fact, be built. We need better levers to prevent abuses and better processes for getting public goods built. But the authors refuse to dignify the question of how to prevent existing abuses from worsening if we take away existing guardrails.
A Credulous Agenda Is Easy to Co-Opt
When neoliberals attack perverse government outcomes while ignoring the influence of corporate America, they legitimize the center-right doctrinaires advocating for small government and deference to entrenched business interests, undermining their own purported goal of rebuilding trust in government.
Today, the buzzwords of Klein and Thompson’s pitch for rewiring the soul of the Democratic Party have rapidly been taken up by right-wing leaders committed to “unleashing” the excesses of private industry. Trump appointees like Doug Burgum and Chris Wright have cloaked their pro-polluter agenda in the rhetoric of “energy abundance.” Elon Musk has gleefully raided and dismantled federal agencies in the name of “government efficiency.” While Klein and Thompson were dreaming of a world in which “AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, and so its profits are shared,” AI companies were stealing the collective knowledge of humanity and hoarding its profits, all while sabotaging our climate goals.
Dreaming of a nimble, decisive, entrepreneurial state, the authors—inadvertently or not—fall prey to the deregulatory gospel that the government should function more like a business. When Burgum took the reins of the Department of the Interior, he promised staff that they wouldn’t have to do any “soul-suckingly boring work” anymore. The devil’s bargain here is that unleashing extractive industry on public lands without oversight or objection may at least entail less paperwork.
This should, one hopes, infuriate Klein and Thompson. The authors argue for more state capacity, not for a bureaucratic husk cowed by censorship, hollowed out by mass firings, and bent toward desultory and corrupt ends. But private interests have always sought to mobilize public resources to fulfill their goals. Reconstructing state capacity after it has been weaponized by the personifications of lawlessness and greed will require rebuilding a crucial muscle of government that these authors overlook: agencies that police the private sector.
Dunkelman asserts that neglecting state capacity got us here in the first place: “When government appears incompetent, voters turn to figures like Donald Trump.” This is part but not all of the story. Much of the incompetence of our political leaders is a choice. They choose not to rock the boat that keeps corporations afloat and keeps returns high for shareholders, while eroding political possibility. If government officials do appear productive and purposeful, they should expect to get the Lina Khan treatment: 126 separate articles in The Wall Street Journal complaining about her hardball tactics against monopolistic corporations. Making powerful enemies on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley may in fact be a useful bellwether for whether you are contributing to making government work.
The stakes of breaking the government are higher than a business going bankrupt—not shareholders losing money, but people losing food, medicine, and even their lives. Consequently, governments must operate with more caution, transparency, and accountability than corporations do. While the government has an important role to play in incentivizing private industry to work toward public ends—as Klein and Thompson put it, to “create space for companies to do what they otherwise cannot”—it will also always be industry’s regulator, enforcing laws meant to protect the public from the same corporations that the government subsidizes and contracts.
Given that dual nature of modern government, the split temperament of progressives that Dunkelman characterizes as both Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian, seeking both freedom from chaos and freedom from tyranny, is inevitable. Progressives want the state to do more of the right thing, and also less of the wrong thing. This balancing act and its attendant trade-offs will never be perfect, never resolved. This is the messiness of democracy, eternally heartening and disheartening. This is the task.
Dunkelman frames the dilemma this way: “[T]here is no way to serve the greater good without exacting some cost on at least someone … Giving everyone a seat at the table doesn’t by any stretch guarantee a mutually agreeable fix. But, as we’ve seen, giving anyone at the table a veto almost ensures that nothing will be accomplished.” Of course, there are always trade-offs; there are always costs borne more by some than others. But the animating spirit of progressivism has always been the insistence that the vulnerable should not shoulder a disproportionate share of the costs.
Modern environmental and labor standards resurface periodically in these books as the bogeymen of expedient building. The profit motive of the private sector is never viewed as so dispensable, or so historically particular. If Silent Spring was of a moment, then so too were the doctrines of Milton Friedman. If there are too many seats at the table, then the newcomers to democracy—the ones who had to build their own chair and elbow their way into the smoke-filled room—should not be first out the door.
