Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, everybody. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Lovett. Obviously, right now, for national Democrats, success is defined by what we can stop. It counts as some kind of good news when the president walks back his threat to use military force against Greenland or removes a petty tyrant in a fascist outfit from the streets of Minneapolis.
And our job over the next year is to use what little power we have to stop the administration's worst successes while winning what will ultimately be a referendum on Trump's cruelty and failures. But regardless of the outcome in 2026, the Democrats are in a massive hole. The country may be turning against Trump, but that has not corresponded to any newfound love for his opposition.
In recent polls, barely a third of voters have a positive view of the Democratic Party. And so one thing we're trying to do is have conversations about where we go from here, whatever happens in the midterms.
Chapter 2: How do Democrats define success in the current political landscape?
And so that's why I wanted to have the conversation we had today. I spoke to Mark Dunkelman. He wrote a book called Why Nothing Works. And it is a story about what happened to progressive governance and the changes in the way progressives think about power between the New Deal and today and what we need to do to prove to people
that Democrats not only deserve power, but Democrats know how to use power once we have it. And a lot of times this gets framed as a left center, left debate. It kind of falls into the usual grooves of our kind of ideological fights over the last 10 or more years. Sometimes it feels like people like to bring their old baggage to a debate because it's easier than packing.
a new suitcase, but I think it's worth listening to this as an opportunity for everybody in the pro-democracy movement to understand what we have to do to demonstrate to people that democracy can actually deliver for people and that progressives can actually deliver on the promises that we make.
Whatever you believe government should be trying to do for people, whatever vision you believe the Democratic Party should have,
Chapter 3: What lessons can progressives learn from Trump's governance style?
It was a great conversation that will kind of help put in context some of the fights we're having right now about the role of government and some of the reasons that Trump is able to make a lot of kind of political hay out of him being able to do things that other people couldn't do and why Democrats need to carefully
learn some lessons from that while understanding that we should also listen to people and follow the law and respect basic values and the the role of institutions so it was a great conversation uh it was a book i really enjoyed uh and i i think you'll like it Welcome to the show. Nice to meet you. Great to meet you. So I am a huge fan of your book, Why Nothing Works. Thanks.
And then there's a subtitle. So I want to start with something you wrote recently, and then we'll get into the book, which you wrote an op-ed for The Times called What the Left Could Learn from Trump's Brutal Efficiency. And I think that's a great way in to the debate around the book. So what can we learn from Trump's brutal efficiency?
So the thing that I want those of us on the left to think about is the degree to which our primary zeitgeist for the last 50 years has been to speak truth to power.
We see big institutions, we see powerful people, and our instinct is to say, there's something wrong there, they'll do something wrong, they're somehow smooshing little people, and we need to, out with the bad things they're doing, figure it out, call it out, stop it. And that is largely at odds with what progressivism began
As a mission, which was how do we create big, powerful institutions that will do big things for people who can't do for themselves? Those are two totally different missions. And Trump... has come into office and he's got control over this huge bureaucracy and he's done things with it. Like, you know, the sort of the quintessential thing just to, it's not the most important thing that he's done.
It's not something that I particularly like, but he just knocked down the east wing of the White House.
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Chapter 4: How has progressive governance evolved since the New Deal?
He just did it. And that is sort of a powerful example of a guy who sort of said, I'm not going to go through the process. I'm not going to bow to the whims of all the boxes I need to check, all the T's I need to cross, all the I's I need to dot. I'm just going to do things. that progressives in many cases don't think to do.
I think that in order for us to be popular again, we need to show that government can work. I think we are already, by default, the party of government. Our movement is the one that wants government to work. And so that if we're going to try to glean a mandate from the people, we need to make government work in the first place.
And that means that they need to have a sense that when they want things to be done, government is going to actually deliver.
So obviously, uh, Trump, uh, manages to move quickly, knock down East wings, destroy bureaucracies because he's breaking the law and a lot of cases are ignoring, uh, regulations, uh, wherever it suits him.
Uh,
How much are we limited because we wouldn't do that? How much could there be a democratic version of that that is bound by law, that does have respect for institutions, but also wants to move quickly? It feels like we're kind of the two options, which is the kind of a democratic style of leadership in which you're kind of, like in Gulliver's Travelers, kind of tied down.
And then you have Trump, who's... How do you decide where that line is, where a Democratic president would be able to move quickly and get things done quickly while being respectful of those institutions?
Yeah, well, I think it's a terrific point and a terrific distinction. The point I wanna make here is that when we are creating programs, when we are thinking about the reforms that we wanna do next time we're in office.
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Chapter 5: What challenges do Democrats face in regaining public trust?
If that ever happens, and that's something we just do hope will happen, yep, continue. Yes, well, I'm gonna presume that, until proven not, I'm gonna presume that it will happen. Great. We should be thinking not only about the things that we hope to do, but we should be thinking about how we plan to design those programs in a way so that we can actually deliver.
so that we are building the sorts of programs which we used to build, which gave a fair amount of discretion and power to bureaucrats who made decisions and were able to get things done expeditiously. So let me give you an example.
Please.
So at the beginning of the new deal, there was a region of the country that was fly over country before we had the term, it was the upper South, the area around the Tennessee valley.
It was an area, um, that the local utility had chosen not to wire up because the farmers were so poor that they didn't believe that they'd get any return on the investment of building poles and wires to these poor farmers who were both black and white.
And so Franklin Roosevelt hired a lawyer from Wisconsin, essentially, to build the Tennessee Valley Authority, which by itself had the power to build dams, build wires, reforest whole countrysides, and through just pure public power, hire both black and white workers who, let's be honest, were put up in different positions encampments, like it was a Southern institution, it was segregated.
But they miraculously in almost no time built a huge power infrastructure that wired up these farms and really brought enormous benefits to people who were living at 19th century standards when the rest of the country was well into the 20th century. Incredibly fast, incredible power with Lilienthal making these decisions.
No real concern about local objections, no real input, no environmental impact statements, no sort of considerations like this. The better part of a century later, President Biden, in the bipartisan infrastructure bill, includes $7.5 billion to put electric vehicle chargers in the places along the network where it does not make economic sense to place EV chargers.
He realizes that the reason that people aren't buying electric vehicles is because they are worried that if they want to drive far, they're going to be places on the interstates where there is no place to recharge their car. So they worried the day before Thanksgiving, when they're driving to grandma's house, that they're going to be stuck.
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Chapter 6: How can Democrats effectively use their power when in office?
There's going to be no place. So he's going to, uh, subsidize the construction of those EVs. There's no federal workforce to build those EV chargers. So he's going to have to, uh, build a rule. that will then put those dollars in the hands of state highway departments. Those state highway departments have never worked with EV charging companies.
They're going to have to figure out what sort of equipment. They're going to have to find places to lease to put those EV chargers that aren't places where the EV charging companies would otherwise want to put the EV chargers. They're then going to have to competitively bid to the EV charging companies. So they compete with them.
They're going to have to convince the utility companies that they should sort of set aside all the work they're doing to power up these various data centers that are demanding more and more electricity and instead take some time to wire up these remotely placed EV charging facilities that very few people are going to. Right. Like it's, I mean, that is a very long process.
I think that the people who are working on this program, the, the Nevi program, we're like working really hard. Like, I think like they made lots of really hard to sit like, like, like Andrew Rogers, like you can name the people who are involved. Pete Buttigieg, his whole team, like, like I think they were really, really working hard and diligently.
At the end of the administration, three years later, $7.5 billion, only 58 charges were out. It looked embarrassing. There were lots of negative stories.
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Chapter 7: What role do institutions play in effective governance?
It was one of Trump's attacks on the Democratic Party. That wasn't laziness. It wasn't the bureaucracy gone wrong. It wasn't anyone's fault per se, but it was the way that the government has been structured. Something that happened between when the TVA was able to do things expeditiously and and the period where government looked incompetent.
And it wasn't, you know, it wasn't government got lazy. It was that we had inserted so many process checks into the system that we Democrats and progressives and reformers who were afraid of government working too fast and in many cases doing things that were bad made it so that government couldn't work effectively. Right.
Well, I wanna just challenge that a little bit. This is a bipartisan infrastructure bill, right? And if we had wanted as Democrats to pass, say a proposal that would have created a national core of federal, clean energy workers to go across the country rapidly installing these things, you wouldn't have had the Republican support.
Isn't part of the problem here that in order to get something like this through, the kind of big, fast-moving, New Deal-style programs you would want are just not politically possible without more Democratic control? I hear you on once you put it into this system,
Once you don't just sort of federalize it and have it done at the federal level, yeah, you're gonna enter into the buzzsaw of private companies and contracts and local governments and all these rules. But isn't the alternative just needing a bigger majority?
I wonder, I mean, it's an excellent counterfactual. I'd want to ask the folks who are involved, what would the electrical workers think? What would our allies as the state levels think about being preempted?
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Chapter 8: What are the potential paths forward for progressive governance?
What would the- And we require fighting those groups. It requires a democratic president or democratic policymaking apparatus that understood it had to kind of push through and kind of drive things to a yes to get things done quickly.
Yeah, I mean, even by the time you get to the Johnson administration, you know, the war on poverty, there is a proposal for a jobs core program, which would have trained lots of young people to work in the building trades. And, like, the unions that are allies of the Johnson administration kill it in the process of negotiation. They don't want...
a bevy of new supply of labor to come in and compete with them. Yes. I mean, Franklin – I mean, those are – that's an interesting question. At this point, the notion at the moment of creating a huge new federal workforce to do this – Or anything. For anything is sort of beyond the pale of imagination.
But it's a worthwhile thought experiment that I haven't considered and definitely something that I should think about.
Well, the – The reason I ask is because in the book, and it's another example I think is worth sharing, can you just talk about how quickly in the New Deal, a program for people out of work to begin work, how quickly it was stood up, and I think almost as importantly, what happened when it was stood down? What was the time horizon for some of these New Deal programs to get off the ground?
Yeah, months. The Civilian Conservation Corps, it's a matter of months for... you know, hundreds of thousands, the CWA came in together and something like some huge portion of the nation was hired under that program with it in less than a year, like something like 5% of the country. I mean, it was... just incredibly fast. And then, yeah, you're absolutely right.
But Franklin Roosevelt also recognized these were temporary relief programs, wound them down quickly. And so certainly by the end of the Second World War, most of the alphabet soup of programs that we remember from seventh grade social studies had been undone.
Yeah.
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