Marc J. Dunkelman

The guy's like, look what he's doing in Minnesota.

What do you mean you want to give more discretion to the federal government?

And of course, my answer is like,

in order to have more faith in government, you need to see that government works.

And so in the scheme of things, the reason that we have Trump is because people have seen

government not work, so they went to an orange madman to fix things, right?

Like the worst things got, they finally just wanted someone to break all the rules.

But the thing that I do say, which I hope provides some sort of comfort,

You know, when the progressive movement was born through the turn of the 20th century, it was at a moment when the federal government was small, when

almost everything felt broken.

There were trusts and railroads and steel barons and private industry was huge and government was not built to handle it.

Government was corrupt.

The federal government was like the US Postal Service and a really corrupt pension system for people who hadn't fought in the Civil War but were collecting pensions.

It was a mess.

And people realize that.

And the progressive movement was born essentially to say like, we've got all this sort of scientific knowledge.

We know that like we need better sanitation systems and transportation systems and electricity systems and regulatory systems and

like we need something better.

And so like from this like mishmash of incompetent bureaucracy, like we created what became the new deal.

Like there's no way in like 1906 you could have imagined the breadth and depth of the bureaucracy that was the new deal or that existed in the 1950s, let alone like Robert Moses and the Triborough Bridge or the Tennessee Valley Authority.