Democracy cannot easily build large-scale public works that displace voters

Evidence

For all these reasons, this book attempts to tell two stories at once: how New York, forty years ago a very different city from the city it is today, became what it has become; and how the idealistic Robert Moses became what he has become. It must try to be a book about what happened to the city and what happened to the man. For, to an extent few people have really understood, these two stories are one story. Would New York have been a better place to live if Robert Moses had never built anything? Would it have been a better city if the man who shaped it had never lived? Any critic who says so ignores the fact that both before and after Robert Moses—both under “reform” mayors such as John Purroy Mitchel and John V. Lindsay and under Tammany mayors such as Red Mike Hylan and Jimmy Walker—the city was utterly unable to meet the needs of its people in areas requiring physical construction. Robert Moses may have bent the democratic processes of the city to his own ends to build public works; left to themselves, these processes proved unequal to the building required. The problem of constructing large-scale public works in a crowded urban setting, where such works impinge on the lives of or displace thousands of voters, is one which democracy has not yet solved. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 107

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Caro’s framing thesis — that Moses’ ruthless bending of democratic process may have been necessary because democracy itself is structurally ill-equipped for large displacement-causing construction — is a genuinely paradigm-level tension the whole book will interrogate, resisting easy summary.
• SEED: An essay angle: whether democracies are structurally incapable of big physical infrastructure, and what that means for who we forgive for stretching the rules.
• XREF: connects to: Even functioning democracy requires publics that stay put in place. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 712; Democracies cannot sustain a gold standard because voters will reject it — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 534; Democratic politics is structurally incapable of matching economic and technological speed. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 676

Broader Connections

• Democracies cannot sustain a gold standard because voters will reject it #corroborates (0.95) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 534
• Democratic politics is structurally incapable of matching economic and technological speed. #complicates (0.75) — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 676
• Even functioning democracy requires publics that stay put in place. #corroborates (0.72) — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 712