Mark Dunkelman

Mark?

So I think I have a slightly more optimistic perspective.

My view is that your book and the associated effort to rethink progressive policy

is a sort of a remarkable change in the sense that from the beginning of the progressive movement in the late 1800s through the 1950s, basically the progressive answer to most public policy questions was put the government in charge and it will make

enormous strides, centralized power, and we will bring power to the Tennessee Valley through the Tennessee Valley Authority.

We will remake the banking system through the Federal Reserve.

We had a whole series of ideas that were grounded in this notion that we were going to have strong centralized power do big things.

And then beginning in sort of the late 50s and into the 60s, a different idea, which had been there at the beginning but had really been sequestered by this sort of idea that big government could do big things, emerges.

And there are books like C. Wright Mills' Power Elite.

And then the SDS puts out the Port Huron Statement.

And the core notion that they are beginning to seed inside the progressive movement is actually...

centralized power is bad and we need to take on the core elite that have been making all these decisions.

And the progressive movement becomes about speaking truth to power in almost every form.

And you see that

in the reaction to the Civil Rights Movement, that speaking truth to the power of Jim Crow.

You see it in second-wave feminism.

You see it in the objection to urban renewal, to the highway program, Silent Spring, ultimately the power broker, which is my book is sort of in conversation with the power broker.

But in all of these, all of these are strikes against the old progressive way of...

governing.

It was to push power down, to empower little people who have been bulldozed in the proverbial sense and in the literal sense to be able to stand up against centralized power.