Kinda stoned- so pardon the lack of paragraph formatting. I’ve been listening to the Power Broker audiobook during my commute (on chapter 9- no spoilers! lol) and the descriptions of how power (typically via extractive industries and international exploitation and slavery) was stolen, distributed and hoarded among the robber barons is incredible. And their contempt for and violence against the lower classes through private (later incorporated into municipal) police forces. None of this is really a hot take or anything - but it’s just been providing a lot of good historical context on the development of early power systems and how many have expanded or at least maintained that same power (eg railroads, JP Morgan, etc). As a part of history I feel like it really illustrates the ineffectiveness of reform, and how blatantly the illusion of democracy has been used as a protective shield for the bourgeoisie. Idk just wild that the US is so whipped into being revolutionary action averse lol (myself included). Like that’s literally all been done within the past 100 years, and all of those people have had “names and addresses”, but how has there not been anything done by the public at large. Reform seems to be the perfect palliative requiring the absolute bare minimum effort and risk, and as long as the mass media says things are working and the public is kept in shallow opposition, everyone is kept “fat and happy”. It’s visible that absolute abolition of these systems of powers is the bare minimum of what must be done. Reform just allows one to feel contented while nothing ever happens.
The Power Broker audiobook is great, the voice actor is amazing. Has the richest voice I've ever heard. Check out the preview!
I'd say the most important thing I learned from this book is how power actually works within the US. Before reading this book I had no idea what power actually was; it was just some mystical force that some people had where they could say things and then other people would do those things. Whenever I tried to do this to other people in my life they just... wouldn't do the things I suggested and I had no idea why.
The thesis of The Power Broker is that you have power over somebody if you control whether they get what they want. This definition is recursive; you can't control whether someone gets what they want unless you already have power over some other set of things. In this way power builds on itself over time; once you've established a foothold you can parlay that into gaining more power by using it to control whether other people get what they want. This is all very obvious but it had literally never occurred to me that if you want to persuade people to do things, it isn't enough to just make a strong argument for why they should do those things. You have to dangle something in front of them so they'll put in the effort to work with you.
The way in which this form of power interacts with laws is very interesting. Laws matter both very much and not at all. You can derive power from very specific specific verbiage in how the law is written that snuck past everyone who reviewed it, but you can also override broad swaths of the law by transposing the battle into other domains like public opinion. Robert Moses did all these things masterfully. Very sadly he used this talent to turn NYC into a car sewer despite it being repeatedly demonstrated that more car infrastructure didn't reduce traffic.
One thing that I think was underexplored in the book is why he focused so much on roads and bridges serving car traffic. It was repeatedly presented as though he was being irrational and ignoring all the evidence that more car infrastructure didn't reduce traffic, but there was only a short section that talked about "the highwaymen", a powerful coalition of banking, manufacturing, and construction entities who benefited immensely from the huge amounts of money being dumped into building car infrastructure. Perhaps Robert Moses did not actually care about a grand vision of NYC as a car sewer; he was simply parlaying power into more power as he had always done, and allying with highwaymen was the best way to get more power.