American political culture goes through phases. Between 1933 and 1963 that culture went through a Hamiltonian phase. Leaders believed in centralizing power to build big things. Franklin Roosevelt created the Tennessee Valley Authority and the rest of the New Deal. Dwight Eisenhower built the national highways system and founded NASA.
A lot of the stuff the centralizers did was great, like the New York infrastructure czar Robert Moses’ building Lincoln Center. Some of the stuff they did was horrific, like Robert Moses’ destroying Bronx neighborhoods to put in a highway.
Somewhere around the late ’60s the culture shifted in a decentralizing, Jeffersonian direction. A new generation of conservatives and progressives emerged who were suspicious of centralized authority and instinctively against the establishment, and who railed against “the system.” People with less power were automatically the good guys, and people with more power were automatically the bad guys.
On the right, Republicans from Ronald Reagan to the Tea Party crusaded against elites and the swamp in Washington. On the left, progressive activists like Ralph Nader and the environmentalists sued the government to halt development projects. Progressive community activists empowered neighborhoods to take on and stymie City Hall. Federal workers passed masses of regulations to micromanage everyday life on a work site. Republicans and Democrats joined forces to pass the National Environmental Policy Act, the California Environmental Quality Act and the Endangered Species Act, all of which could be used by activists to slow down and halt housing and transportation projects.
The decentralizing Jeffersonians overshot the mark. A group of activists who came of age during the New Deal era concentrated power to get things done. Then, a new generation of activists who came of age during the 1960s rebelled against concentrated power and made it nearly impossible to get anything done. This became the pattern.
In 2008 California set out to build high-speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco, promising that it would be finished in 2020. The project was blocked by a thousand little barriers, and now a scaled-down line between Merced and Bakersfield may open in 2033 at a cost, so far, of $35 billion.
