The Moses Meme and the Master Veto

To build again, we must outcompete the Moses Meme. So MNY is launching the first great memetic counteroffensive—join us on August 25 in New York City.

Aug 14, 2024

*The New York Times Book Review* of *The Power Broker,* “If you want to see his monument, look around,” September 15, 1974. Here’s a special note on this image.

Join Maximum New York on August 25 for a meme contest in favor of building in New York City. We will be outcompeting the most powerful anti-building meme: The Moses Meme.

New York City is afflicted by the Moses Meme: the attitude that building is bad, the power to build is inherently suspect, a pro-building default will destroy everything good, and allowing large projects will have unacceptable consequences. Why? Because if we allow building, a Robert Moses analog or similar influence will immediately do what he is simplistically understood to have done in the mid-twentieth century.1

The meme comes from the history of Robert Moses himself, largely handed down to us by Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. As Jason Barr recently wrote:

“…whereas Moses, the man, was in power until the early 1960s, Caro’s portrait of Moses has been ‘in power’ since 1974. He hovers as a living ghost that haunts New York and holds vast influence, perhaps more so than the flesh-and-blood version ever did.”

If Moses the man was The Master Builder, his Caro-mediated legacy, the Moses Meme, is The Master Veto—ironically, it helps ensure nothing much (and certainly nothing much of large scope) will be built in New York City again. People infected with the meme conflate “building, and building big” with “building badly and deleteriously.” This isn’t helped by the worlds of art and culture—artists of his time and ours reinforce the view of Moses as a threatening titan one building mistake away from return. Just look at the opening image of this essay, which appeared in The New York Times Book Review piece on The Power Broker. It depicts Robert Moses as a Roman god overseeing Roman tragedy, in a modern remix of Laocoön and His Sons being ensnared by sea serpents:

The Moses Meme is also part of a larger Moses Memeplex that contains memes like Saint Jane, the Jones Beach underpass story, and more. The memeplex is a giant, mutually reinforcing pool of memes that principally serves to support the Moses Meme and its injunction against building.

The Moses Meme rots people’s brains

“Well, you know, that’s because of Robert Moses.”

“Well, we can’t do that, or it’ll be Robert Moses all over again.”

I most often hear sentiments like these deployed right after someone has made something up about New York City—or has expressed a preference, good or bad—and needs a convenient source of borrowed authority that people won’t question.

“Robert Moses did it” is the “studies say…” of the urban planning world, accepted by pro- and anti-builders alike.

This is the Moses Meme. It cauterizes everyone’s ability to look into anything with skepticism or a sufficient level of detail to make definitive conclusions. It is the mind killer, and it treats Robert Moses and mid-century America like a throwaway explanation, a flat character who everyone obviously understands.

This idea of Robert Moses is the crutch that generations of intellectual laziness have leaned on, confident that they will not be challenged. In New York City, there is no need to correctly attribute urban cause and effect when you can simply get away with invoking him.

This comes with two terrible consequences: (1) the inability to identify real causes of modern urban problems, especially our inability to build the things we need, and (2) the concomitant inability to identify real solutions. In the best case, it turns everyone into urban alchemists; they come up with brilliant sounding explanations for everything, but in the end they are constitutionally incapable of fixing anything. The worst case is only distinguished by its lack of elegant systems built on nonsense—it is merely a porridge of nonsense.

The Moses Meme is incorrect

The chief fear behind the meme can be expressed roughly like this: “If we allow for a lot of building, and large building, we will immediately fall back to the obviously evil ways of Robert Moses.”

But Robert Moses, as singular and powerful as he was, operated in a very specific set of civilizational circumstances: legal, political, cultural, material, and metropolitan. The most widely pointed out of these is that “…he was swimming with the tide of history…Moses perceived this historical surge and worked with its flow.”2 For example: after World War II, huge amounts of federal money flowed to states and localities to build, among other things, highways.

More generally, my usual response to people who think we’re one apartment building away from full-blown Robert Moses (whatever fuzzily evil thing that means to them) is: even if you think he or his replacement would immediately reappear, the government and legal system that enabled him is gone. Although our web of federal, state, and city law is a descendant of that which Moses worked with and shaped, it is fundamentally different, in ways both good and bad.

One of the most obvious ways: in 1989, eight years after the death of Robert Moses, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down NYC’s central governing body—our entire city government was reformed, marking a sharp break with the previous governing paradigm not seen since modern New York City was created in 1898.

In 1975, during NYC’s financial crisis that saw it teetering over the void of bankruptcy, the city government’s relationship to the state was completely reconfigured, especially in the realm of audit and control.

I could go on at virtually unlimited length. The United States, New York State, and New York City are not the same places they were in the middle of the twentieth century. The law and policy of each now conspire to smother building far more than they ever did historically, and anyone who is worried about destructive building must first contend with our default destructive sclerosis, which is perhaps more intolerable. But the Moses Meme says: being sclerotic is preferable to building, no matter what. We can’t risk it.

Expressing the Moses Meme is a prime mark of historical illiteracy, not to mention lack of facility in civics, government, and law. Interestingly, the meme has built-in defenses against this. People feel as though they are projecting knowledge of history by invoking the devil of Moses, unaware that their invocation is almost certainly inapt.

Robert Moses is our history, not our present or future

Per Jason: “We need to change the narrative. We need to get the word out that Old Man Moses died in the 20th century and we refuse to be afraid of the Spooky Ghost Moses. Let’s put him in the history books along with other 20th-century figures like Al Smith, Franklin Roosevelt, and Fiorello La Guardia. It’s time to create a future with new leaders who help build New York by incorporating the lessons from the best version of Moses while leaving behind those from his worst side.”

The plain fact is this: Robert Moses is not actively relevant to New York City anymore. He is only historically relevant. Invoking the Moses Meme is a lazy excuse to avoid engaging with the real contemporary personalities and facts of New York City and State.

Learning about him and his story can provide an immense amount of useful information, just like studying any other important man or woman of their time (and our past). But we don’t live in that past anymore, even if we live in its temporal descendant. One should no more invoke the modern specter of Robert Moses than Jay Gould—they each have good lessons to teach, but neither is coming back. Our context has departed too much from theirs, and our needs are too divergent. Not to hammer the point too much, but Moses saw New York City fall into the bad old days of the 70s. He and Jane Jacobs were arguing about how to manage the decline of the city, which was rapidly losing population and wealth. Today, we are locked in an argument about how to accommodate growth and increasing wealth.

What supports the Moses Meme?

If the Moses Meme is so wrong, and so civically vicious, why do so many people propagate it?

There’s no special explanation here.

(1) In the first place, it’s a nice, neat story that explains anything you want it to. Per Jason again: “We long for simple explanations for complex phenomena, and when the ‘truthiness’ of the simple explanations is strong, we cling to them.”

(2) In the second place, no one reads. Especially The Power Broker, by Robert Caro. If someone tells me they have read it, my default assumption is that they are lying out of either civic embarrassment or intellectual hubris. Since hardly anyone else has read the book, they can be reasonably sure that they won’t be challenged. And so the Power Broker-illiterate people trade the overly simplistic Moses Meme back and forth, happy to reap the social status and in-group approval that comes with “having read an important book.”

(3) In the third place, of those who have read the book, many do not critically engage with it. Beyond asking whether Caro’s portrait was correct, they do not ask questions like, “Are our current legal-historical circumstances importantly different from that time? Should I avoid extrapolating from that past to this present?” Usually they just walk away with the simplistic Moses Meme in a way that isn’t meaningfully different from someone who’s never read the book.

(4) In the fourth place, there are some people with a vested interest in blocking building and development in New York City—across the whole political spectrum. The Moses Meme is one of their greatest weapons, because it gives ready air cover to arguments that are generally not very robust. These are the same arguments that would have killed the Empire State Building and New York City itself.

(5) In the fifth and final place, many people aren’t aware they’re spreading the Moses Meme. They think of themselves as people who would be aware of such an obvious error. But we’re flooded with memes all the time, from all directions. Being humans, we only have a limited capacity to doublecheck things. When we can’t look into something directly, we must settle for good intellectual proxies. But most people don’t even look for those, especially around such a consensus view like the Moses Meme. A better stance would be to assume that you’re riddled with memes you haven’t yet detected, and to adopt an intellectual posture that’s friendly to hearing challenges.

Otherwise you get this:

What is there to do about the Moses Meme?

The Moses Meme is a big problem—it is one of the principal cultural forces that prevents New York City from building anything. It’s taken up by citizens, legislators, and civic groups alike.

If we want to build things again, we ultimately have to change the law to permit that. But changing the law means winning hearts and minds that are currently infected with the Moses Meme, so it must be outcompeted.

We need to begin the memetic counteroffensive, and overturn the Moses Meme that has ruled New York City since Robert Caro released The Power Broker in 1974.

It’s time to organize the memetic counteroffensive

On Sunday, August 25, from 11:00am—2:00pm, Maximum New York will launch the first memetic fusillade against the Moses Meme right here in NYC:

🗓️ 🗽 🇺🇸 🚀 The Event Page

We’ll be having a meme-making contest. Come and make memes in favor of building, against the Moses Meme, and for the excitement of New York City’s future. Although the primary focus of both this event and this essay are not discussing what Robert Moses’s proper legacy is (see the Kenneth Jackson podcast interview at the end of this piece), that will also come up. Maybe you’ll make some memes about it.

There will be prizes, good people, and glory. You’re invited. If you can’t attend, or you’re not in New York, I still want to work with you. We’ll have more events, and I want to see the memes you make.

If you’re not sure what you’d meme about, we’ll have a variety of experts floating around to help you sharpen up your ideas; they can come in the form of images, essays, or anything else you can think of.

This will also be an excellent opportunity to learn more about building in NYC. We’ll have several short talks about the history of building fast in NYC, as well as guest speaker and chief meme judge Jason Barr. If you don’t know him from his wonderful books, Building the Skyline: The Birth and Growth of Manhattan's Skyscrapers (2018) and Cities in the Sky: The Quest to Build the World's Tallest Skyscrapers (2024), then you might know him as the visionary who proposed extending Manhattan into the harbor in The New York Times in 2022.

Jason (right) at his most recent book launch event in New York City in May 2024

Here are some ideas for you to think about for the meme contest, but by no means limit yourself to just them (all quotes from here):

“The true lessons of Moses are that big projects that will benefit New York can and should be built, but they also need to minimize the negative spillovers and unintended consequences and be done in a way that engenders trust and confidence in the government. Getting community input is vital, but community input should not mean complete veto power.”
Our choice are the growing pains of a bold, new New York, or the terminal pain of a worsening disease (housing, climate, etc) that is currently only being nibbled away at.
New York has a great, storied history of building. It is the capital of the world. It must rise above any question about that position, and rightfully gleam as the jewell of America.
The correct idea is neither with the ghost of Jane Jacobs or Robert Moses—within the Robert Moses Memeplex. It is this: New York City must build many large things for a successful future. Some of those are cumulative, like large numbers of housing units throughout the city. Some are unitary, like extending Manhattan into the harbor. Some will require generation-defining law and politics, like a new subway system. All of these projects will have negative externalities for someone, just like the original subways did. The goal is not to have no negative externalities—that is purely impossible. The goal is to prudently minimize them without compromising the project, to justly compensate those who experience them, and then get a move on.

🗓️ 🗽 🇺🇸 🚀 The Event Page Again

Supplemental Sources and Extended Bibliography

If you would like to explore the topic of Robert Moses, his legacy, and his extended universe, but don’t have time to read The Power Broker, then I invite you to explore this bibliography I’ve curated.

Jason Barr essays:

The Power Author: Robert Caro, Robert Moses, and the “Fall” of New York (August 5, 2024)
Robert Moses and the Zoning of New York (Part II): 1944 (July 4, 2023)
Robert Moses and the Zoning of New York (Part I): Killing the Master Plan (February 28, 2023)
Saint Jane and the Moses Myth: Revisiting the Robert Moses-Jane Jacobs Debate (April 18, 2022)
Saint Jane Versus the NIMBY (August 23, 2018)
Jane Jacobs: Libertarian? (August 9, 2018)

Contemporary commentary

Jane Jacobs Would Support ‘City of Yes’ (Vital City; August 8, 2024)
Jane Jacobs Would Reject NYC’s Proposed “City of Yes” (Common Edge; July 22, 2024)
The play Straight Line Crazy
Straight Line Crazy review – Ralph Fiennes enthrals as the man who shaped New York (The Guardian; March 23, 2022)
‘Straight Line Crazy’ Review: The Road Rage of Robert Moses (The New York Times; October 26, 2022)
Robert Moses and the saga of the racist parkway bridges (The Washington Post; November 10, 2021)
Robert Moses and His Racist Parkway, Explained. (Bloomberg CityLab; July 9, 2017)

Dwarkesh Patel & Kenneth Jackson podcast interview and related sources—read these to see how some are reimagining Moses’s legacy

Dwarkesh Podcast: Kenneth T. Jackson - Robert Moses, Hero of New York? (November 8, 2022)
Robert Moses Returns: Power Broker Spurs Caro-Jackson Bout (Observer; January 29, 2007)
Robert Moses and the Rise of New York, by Kenneth Jackson (2007)—an excerpt of this book
We Live in a Motorized Civilization: Robert Moses Replies to Robert Caro (March 2021), with Comment on a New Yorker Profile and Biography (August 26, 1974)
Rethinking Robert Moses, by Phillip Lopate (Metropolitan Magazine; 2002)

The Power Broker book review in NYT

If you want to see his monument, look around, (The New York Times Book Review of The Power Broker; September 15, 1974)

By Robert Moses

Slums and City Planning (The Atlantic; January 1945)
Public Works: A Dangerous Trade, 1970 (He wrote an autobiography that I bet none of you know about. It was published four years before The Power Broker!)