The Power Lives in a Subsection of Section 9 — Notes on Dwarkesh's Essay About Moses and Johnson

Contents

1. How does a man nobody elected end up bigger than the mayor and the governor?
2. Why did nobody remove him in thirty years?
3. Johnson held one formal power — the right to speak first. How did that become the second most powerful job in America?
4. The two men ran in opposite directions. What is Caro actually saying?
5. So what can I do with this?
6. Worth a look
7. One thing to take with you

A man of talent without position, however worthy, cannot govern the unworthy. Set a foot-long stick on a high mountain and it looks down a thousand-fathom gorge: the stick is not long, the place is high.

—— Han Feizi, “Merit and Reputation” (Warring States; translation mine)

On October 29, 2026, the Dwarkesh Podcast released a video essay in which host Dwarkesh Patel laid out what he had taken from Robert Caro’s two biographies — of Robert Moses and of Lyndon Johnson — ahead of his interview with Caro the next day. Moses, New York’s master builder, was never elected to anything, yet of the 899 miles of highway completed in New York State by 1964 he built 672 of them; in 1946 New York City could borrow $150 million before hitting its legal debt limit, while Moses’s Triborough Bridge Authority could borrow $360 million. One thing to be clear about: all of the material here comes from those two books, as the host’s reading of them.

How does a man nobody elected end up bigger than the mayor and the governor?

He drafted the law that governed him, then wrote his powers into bond contracts so the U.S. Constitution would hold them for him.

In Albany he was called the best bill drafter around, and he used that skill to grant himself powers the legislators voting on his bills didn’t know they were handing over. The instrument was the public authority — a government-created corporation that sells bonds, builds a bridge, charges tolls until the bonds are paid off, tears down the toll booths, hands the bridge to the city and goes out of existence. That is what Albany assumed when it passed the Triborough Bridge Authority Act of 1933. Section 1 said it plainly: once the bonds are paid, the authority dissolves. Bonds could run at most forty years, and the tolls would cover the cost far sooner.

Then, in a subsection of Section 9, one sentence: the authority could “from time to time” pay off old bonds by issuing new ones, and the new ones could be for “any other corporate purpose.” So just before the original bonds expired, the authority could float a fresh forty-year note for something else entirely. The original act allowed two bridges and their approaches; his amendments added connecting roads and “facilities not inconsistent with the use of the project” — if a road connected to a road that connected to the bridge, or a park sat beside that road, the authority plainly had the right to change it.

The sharpest move came last. The Constitution says no state shall make any law impairing the obligation of contracts, and a bond issued by a public authority is such a contract. Moses slipped in a clause letting the authority write into those bond contracts “any other matters of like character which in any way affect the security or protection of the bonds” — matters including Triborough’s right to charge whatever tolls it liked, for as long as it liked, and keep the surplus. Once the bonds were sold, the legislature, the governor and the mayor could no longer revoke any of it, short of a constitutional convention. And the life of the bonds could always be extended by refinancing.

Why did nobody remove him in thirty years?

Because removing him cost more than tolerating him.

The statute covered half of it: his own drafting said commissioners could be removed mid-term only on “stated charges after a formal hearing,” and his fights with mayors and governors were about what he built and whom he displaced, never about his conduct. Caro’s judgment is that Moses was not corrupt — as uninterested in payoffs for himself as any public servant who ever lived, “money honest” in the politicians’ phrase. The charges never existed to bring.

The other half is that nobody wanted him gone. At his peak he held twelve government posts at once, some appointed by the mayor, some by the governor, so no single person could cut off all the heads. He also delivered: in his first four months as city parks commissioner he kept crews working around the clock and finished 1,700 park renovations. That pace fit inside one election cycle — give Moses the power to build something and you could expect to be at the ribbon cutting before you faced the voters. For contrast, construction on New York’s Second Avenue subway began in 1972, the first section opened in 2017, and those initial two miles cost taxpayers $4.5 billion. Money sat on his side too: public works funding came largely from Washington, and the cities that got the most were the ones whose blueprints were finished when a new federal program was announced. Moses had the largest and best planning team in the country, and by the show’s account New York alone took roughly a seventh of the nation’s Depression-era work relief money in 1936. A mayor who wanted something else would have to draw up his own plans, and he had no independent technical staff.

With those chips in hand, he was the one threatening to quit. He resigned on LaGuardia so often, and over such small things, that the mayor’s lawyer had a stack of forms printed reading “I, Robert Moses, do hereby resign as so and so,” to save him the writing. The joke sat on top of a real fear: accepting a resignation meant forfeiting the projects in progress and the money already apportioned to them — and Moses had spent years befriending the city’s newspaper owners, many weekends at the summer home of the Sulzbergers, who own the New York Times. The next morning’s front pages would all tell the same story: a man above politics driven out by a craven politician who wanted the city’s interests compromised.

We’re used to NIMBY, where a concentrated interest kills a broadly popular project. Moses ran it in reverse, organizing the beneficiaries of building into a faction just as concentrated: banks bought his bonds at a steep discount without competitive bidding, unions got jobs, politically connected lawyers got legal fees, party bosses got paid to broker insurance on bridges with no plausible risk of falling down. Stand in front of one of his projects and those people would start making calls.

Johnson held one formal power — the right to speak first. How did that become the second most powerful job in America?

He rewrote the rules so only he could do colleagues favors, pulled the agenda into his own hands, and made sure every deal ran through him.

The job started with nothing. The Senate was deliberately built by the founders not to be led; when Johnson asked the Library of Congress for a list of the majority leader’s formal powers, the list had exactly one item — the right to be recognized first on the floor. Before him the leader was a lightning rod: blamed for everything the Senate failed to do, with no power to fix any of it. The position was toxic enough that his two predecessors both lost their own Senate seats. He became leader at forty-four in a chamber whose average age was around sixty largely because nobody else wanted the thankless, useless job.

He went after leverage first. A senator who needed a bill passed needed Johnson to schedule it and talk the committee chairman into reporting it out; a bill needing help in the House needed Johnson’s direct line to Speaker Rayburn; a senator needing campaign money needed Johnson’s good word with the Texas oilmen. Then he moved on committee assignments, the single biggest factor shaping a senator’s career, handed out by seniority for about a century. Practically overnight, many seats were instead negotiated by the party’s steering committee, which he controlled. In 1957 Estes Kefauver voted against him on an important motion; that same week, the coveted Foreign Relations seat he expected went to a far more junior senator named John F. Kennedy.

The second piece was the agenda. By default Senate debate is unlimited: a senator can talk as long as he likes and offer amendments as he goes, each one stalling the bill further. A unanimous consent agreement sets those freedoms aside for a single bill, fixing debate time and constraining amendments. Earlier leaders had rarely used them; Johnson made them the norm and wouldn’t let a bill reach the floor until one was in place. He wanted every vote settled privately beforehand, because private was where his leverage worked — a long public debate could change a senator’s mind at the last minute, and a surprise amendment could unravel a deal he’d spent weeks brokering. Senator Paul Douglas put it this way: under Johnson, all the action takes place offstage before the play begins.

The third piece was running the deals himself. Every committee assigned a staffer to tell him what was being drafted; he spent his days in the cloak room and the hallways cajoling and listening, so he knew what each senator actually wanted and what he would give up to get it. A session brings hundreds of bills and amendments, one senator’s vote tradeable against another’s, and Johnson made himself the instigator and the broker, which meant every deal left him ahead. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 is the example. He needed some civil rights bill to pass that year, however weak, because he wanted to be president and no southerner with his voting record could win the 1960 nomination. No version seemed strong enough for northern liberals yet weak enough to escape a southern filibuster, and the sticking point was who would preside over cases against southern election officials accused of turning black voters away. The South insisted on jury trials — and since southern states required jurors to be registered voters, an all-white jury would never convict a white registrar. Over seven months Johnson assembled a deal out of wholly unrelated factions: western senators got a vote on a federal dam between Idaho and Oregon they had wanted for years; midwestern Republicans with powerful railroad unions got the right to a jury trial extended to striking workers; moderates got a clause guaranteeing that black citizens could serve on federal juries, so they could tell voters they had created a new right. The jury trial guarantee for southern officials stayed in, which kept the bill weak enough that southerners agreed not to filibuster. A dam in Idaho, protections for union workers and federal jury rules had nothing to do with voting rights in the South — not to anyone lacking Johnson’s inside knowledge and political imagination.

The two men ran in opposite directions. What is Caro actually saying?

Both books read like manuals for getting ahead, and their subjects travel opposite paths: Moses moved from ideals toward power itself, Johnson from opportunism toward ideals.

In the 1910s Moses was a brilliant young reformer in the new good-government movement, trying to replace Tammany Hall patronage with honest, competent administration. He fought the machine for years, his reforms were killed, the machine won, and what he learned was that ideals are useless without the power to realize them. Caro writes that for the first decades of his career the power Moses amassed was a servant of his dreams; but power is not an instrument anyone handles with impunity. It is a drug that creates a need for larger and larger doses, and Moses was a user.

Johnson, for most of his career, shows little evidence of a coherent political ideology; he did whatever was most expedient at the time. When he arrived in the Senate the most powerful men there were the conservative southern Democrats, and the Johnson they encountered molded himself to their form. Writing the third volume, Master of the Senate, Caro interviewed former Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge and asked what impression he had taken from the freshman Johnson about the proper relationship between white people and black people. Two words: master and servant. Caro asked whether Johnson had any sympathy for blacks, any desire to improve their lot. His notes read “long pause,” then the two-word reply: none indicated. Another pause, and then: he was with us in his heart, I believed him, I believed him. As president, Johnson spearheaded the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The host also pushes back on the standard verdict. The Moses we remember was set in the 1970s, when The Power Broker came out and New York was living through crime, deindustrialization and white flight — the book’s subtitle is Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. His view is that the crisis had far more to do with larger structural factors: Detroit and St. Louis, which Moses had nothing to do with, collapsed harder. For the vast majority of his career he was enormously popular; in the 1930s and 1940s New York high schools voted him the most admired New Yorker. Caro writes that at park opening ceremonies it was not unusual for children brought by their parents to break into cheers.

One more detail I liked: whenever someone asked the host who he most wanted to interview and hadn’t, the answer for six years was Caro — he chased the agent, called the publisher, contacted the museums holding the archives, and sent handwritten letters.

So what can I do with this?

The situation most of us know looks like this: your company gives you a title that sounds large, and someone else still decides what you work on; or a stock you hold announces decent news and the price doesn’t move. The essay gave me two bridges to walk across.

The first is that the lifespan of an advantage lives in its renewal clause. Moses’s power outlasted every mayor because it lived inside bond contracts, and those contracts could be extended by refinancing. I spend most of my own effort on this quarter’s margin and growth rate, and this one pushed me toward the contract instead: how long the long-term agreements run, who can decline to renew them, whether pricing power can be taken back by the customer.

The second is to read the structure rather than the title. The majority leader held one formal power, and Johnson turned that chair into the second most powerful job in the country; Moses was never elected to anything. Set against how I read filings and news, the announced role, the nominal market share and the signed partnership sit a long way from who controls the schedule and who gets a seat. The question I ask now: who holds the unanimous consent agreement here.

Worth a look

• Dwarkesh Podcast video essay, October 29, 2026: “What I learned about power from LBJ and Robert Moses,” and the Robert Caro interview released the following day
• Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974)
• Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol. 3: Master of the Senate (2002)

One thing to take with you

One idea: the lifespan of power is written in the renewal clause. That phrase of Moses’s — paying off old bonds “from time to time” by issuing new ones — is the hinge of the whole thing. Anything that can extend itself has no real expiry date, and a position that cannot extend itself, however grand its name, lives only until the next appointment.

Something you can do today, and a thing I tried myself: find something you’ve signed — a lease, an employment contract, an insurance policy, a gym membership, a memorandum of understanding — skip every clause before it, and read only the renewal and termination lines. Then answer two questions: who has the right to extend this, and who has the right to end it. The first time I read my own lease that way, I found that the renewal price was the landlord’s to set, when I had assumed it was something the two of us would negotiate.

Raw Markdown

This article is an educational discussion of investment method. It is not advice to buy or sell any individual security, offers no target prices, and does not analyze any current holding. Investing carries risk; make your own decisions or consult a qualified professional.