Jamal Greene: belief

Transcript context

…It can take many decades. It costs far too much. Maybe it doesn’t ultimately get stopped, like the Second Avenue line has opened, even though it was first planned in the 1970s. It’s not Congress at fault. It does seem there are just too many interaction points, too many rights-relevant claims that can be made to slow things down. Isn’t that the problem we need to solve if we want actual democratic accountability, that the things you choose from your democracy can then actually happen? Well, if we’re talking subway infrastructure . . . It depends on what you’re talking about. Different cities are good at different things. New York is very bad at subway infrastructure, for sure. I don’t have a story to tell that connects that to veto points. The costs of construction are much higher in New York than other places. I don’t have a good story for exactly why that’s the case, but other places that think about rights in much more flexible ways have perfectly good public infrastructure — Canada, much of Western Europe, for example. I’m not sure how much of the story one can tell in that sense. I think generally, again, we should constantly be concerned about the ability of government to be effective. And if some particular rights regime, whether the one I’m describing or the one I’m criticizing, is standing in the way, that’s a problem. I’m not suggesting any kind of essentialism about this, but what I observe is that people use the putative absolutism of rights to prevent government from being effective on quite a regular basis. What do you think is the most worrisome unintended consequence of implementing your vision of rights for America?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.