Public Debilitation

Public Debilitation

Rebuilding government decision-making power requires not just removing veto points, but also addressing the outsized corporate power that gives the wealthy the best access to policymakers.

Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back
by Marc J. Dunkelman
PublicAffairs, 2025, 416 pp.

The Habitation Society: Creating Sustainable Prosperity
by Fred Block
Columbia University Press, 2025, 192 pp.

It is a hard moment to propose that Americans need to put more faith in their government institutions. The second Trump administration has destroyed federal programs people had counted on for decades and refused to abide by the rulings of other branches of government, all while working to enrich their allies and punish their enemies. Asking people to defend and empower the democratic institutions that put in place a would-be dictator is a tall order. Nevertheless, the authors of two new books seeking to chart a path for the left propose to do exactly that.

Marc J. Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works and Fred Block’s The Habitation Society, both released in February, are each fundamentally concerned with what went so wrong in American politics that a demagogue was able to rise to power—and how we can reverse course. While ultimately offering very different proposals, they share the belief that a fundamental distrust of government is at the heart of our current crisis. Block writes of a “downward spiral of disillusionment with representative democracy that creates openings for demagogues.” Likewise, Dunkelman declares, “Absent a progressivism that works, what reformers get is a progressivism left vulnerable to demagoguery.” Rebuilding trust in government is core to both of their projects, but the degree to which their analyses diverge shows just how hard this project will be, and why Trump found such fertile ground in the first place. Together, however, they can help us start to find a way forward.

Dunkelman’s book begins with two things everybody loves to hate: Penn Station and Robert Moses. Penn Station is a confusing maze of underground tunnels not befitting the grandeur of the city to which it is a gateway (especially when compared to Grand Central). Moses is New York City’s most famous urban planner, made so by Robert Caro’s magisterial The Power Broker, which shows how Moses transformed the city’s landscape with utter disregard for the neighborhoods and people his plans affected.

For decades, politicians tried to transform Penn Station into something more than a confusing eyesore. Dunkelman began his project to understand how something everyone agreed needed to be done got so stuck. In the process, he found a legion of people secretly wishing for the return of a Moses-like figure. Why Nothing Works traces what happened between Moses’s time and our own to prevent such a figure from emerging.

Dunkelman structures his analysis around the theory that American politics has been defined by a war b...