Traffic is diverted around a detour at Shaw Avenue and Golden State in Fresno, California, as construction on the California High-Speed Rail overpass begins on December 29, 2025. | Craig Kohlruss/The Fresno Bee/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

There’s a familiar mood in American life right now, a frustration that feels both personal and ambient. The bridge doesn’t get fixed. The train line doesn’t get finished. The housing never gets built. The permits drag on. The timelines slip. The price tags balloon. And even when everyone agrees in principle that we really, really need to get things done, the system still can’t move.

Marc Dunkelman thinks that sense of paralysis isn’t a mystery, and it isn’t just a product of polarization or bad politicians. In his 2025 book Why Nothing Works, he argues that the deeper problem is structural.

Over the last half-century, we’ve built a governing regime designed to stop government from doing harm. And it largely succeeded. But it also made government far less able to do good, especially at scale. Progressives, Dunkelman argues, can’t explain away this crisis by pointing only at conservatives and lingering Reagan-era anti-government ideology. If the left wants to use government to solve big problems, it has to be willing to rebuild government’s ability to execute.

I invited Dunkelman onto The Gray Area to talk about that tradeoff between democracy’s need for participation and accountability, and its equal need for empowered institutions that can actually deliver. We talk about the founding tension between Jeffersonian suspicion of centralized power and Hamiltonian faith in state capacity, why the mid-20th century was the high point of American “building,” and how well-intended reforms created a procedural thicket where “everyone has a voice” slowly became “everyone has a veto.”

As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday, so listen and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Your book’s called Why Nothing Works. Are you arguing that America’s broken?

I’m trying to connect with people who feel frustrated that a country that used to do big things now seems incapable of doing even the mundane. That frustration feels like a clue that something deeper’s gone wrong in American governance.

You frame this as a tension any democracy has to manage: Citizens need a real say, but government also needs enough authority to make big decisions and execute them. You trace that tension back to the founding, and you map it onto Hamilton and Jefferson. What’s the basic story?

From the beginning, America’s caught between two impulses; one is fear of centralized power. Jefferson writes the Declaration of Independence out of the sense that a distant bureaucracy is coercing colonists and that freedom means getting out from under that.

After independence, the founders built a system under the Articles of Confederation. It’s essentially the anti-empire model: Power is dispersed, there’s no real executive, and any state can effectively veto national action. It’s like a government run entirely by filibuster, except any state can do it.

Within a decade, people realized that the system produces chaos. Power’s so dispersed that government can’t function. So they tried again in 1787 with the Constitution, which is an attempt to strike a balance. Hamilton’s side is basically if you want a pluralistic society to make decisions, you need a stronger center. You need institutions that can act.

Key takeaways

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