Rights Killed Progress
[2025 ended as a year many would just as soon forget, unless the U.S. stock market was your single benchmark. As the backlog of critical needs was building, I followed a series of authors in search of course corrections. One chain of thought that received some traction came to be known as the Abundance Movement. Starting with a book titled Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, I followed how other authors responded to the book, and what history and current events had to say relevant to the debate. The result is a series of eight essays that will be posted to Fifty Year Perspective weekly through January and February. Here the fourth of eight parts.]
The abundance movement was described in two previous blog posts. In 2022 Jamal Greene, a constitutional law expert and professor of law at Columbia Law School, published a book titled How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession With Rights Is Tearing America Apart.
In the zoning case in Montgomery County, Maryland, opponents to the changes in housing density expressed their rights as they saw them: the right to live at lower density, the right to preserve the value of their property, the right to enjoy unobstructed views without being blocked by high-rise buildings, the right to not be exposed to noisy highways or noisy neighbors, the right to preserve a habitat for endangered species.
Rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution protect against discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Personal rights cover freedom of expression, equal employment, safe environment, and good education. Greene writes, “We have been faced, for half a century and counting, with a rights explosion. Rights in this world are diverse and unruly; sometimes majoritarian and populist, other times protective of minorities or those on the margins of civil society.”
Greene argues that courts tend to adjudicate based upon what they determine to be similar cases previously resolved. Missing is the context of individual persons and situations. “There’s Citizens United, of course, in which the Supreme Court threw out a law preventing corporations from using their treasury funds for electioneering. For the Court, the fact that the funds were being used for expressive acts made the law subject to just the same scrutiny as one that, say, targeted voters for engaging in political advocacy.”
With so many rights in play, where does this leave the Abundance program’s efforts to build affordable housing, add and maintain infrastructure, improve healthcare and public education? Marc Dunkelman, a fellow at Brown University, addresses the contorted process in a book published early in 2025, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress―and How to Bring It Back.
With responsibility for preserving numerous rights diffused among so many regulatory authorities, Dunkelman says, “nearly anyone can upend even the most well-intentioned efforts to do good. The protections, reforms, rights, and processes have combined, in too many cases, to make government incompetent.” He cites the decline of faith in government since Watergate, the lack of filibuster-proof majorities for the party in the White House, and “the role entrenched interests play frustrating efforts at reform.”
The alternative Dunkelman suggests is establishing “a planning mechanism that both allows for everyone to be heard and empowers some centralized authority to make expeditious final determination, after weighing various national, regional, community, and individual interests. Pursuing that sort of solution would likely involve two prerequisites: first, a guarantee that a community’s input would be taken seriously—that concerns about environment or quality-of-life issues would not be ignored, even if they did not prevail; and second, that, in exchange for guaranteeing voice, an authority’s decision would be insulated from the Kafkaesque series of veto points that have left too many public policy choices to the wilds of the judiciary.” He summarizes his proposal as “giving communities a voice but not a veto.”