Issue #30, Fall 2013

Unwound

Four years after Obama took office, George Packer sees little hope for the liberal project. Why is he—along with many, many others—so depressed?

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America By George Packer • Farrar, Straus and Giroux • 2013 • 448 pages • $27

George Packer’s brutal and riveting new book, The Unwinding, was supposed to have a happier ending. Passionately and meticulously reported during the Great Recession and the rise of Barack Obama, Packer’s work awaited a “Rooseveltian moment,” one of those “big bangs” of history when an epochal economic crisis meets a leader and a movement that have emerged to solve it. For all the positive accomplishments of the Obama presidency, that moment never arrived—or at least hasn’t yet. And so Packer and his subjects and his readers are stranded in history, trying to make sense of the unraveling of the American economy, maybe the whole damn American experiment.

I’ve struggled with how to describe a book that I think people should read in terms that don’t make it sound like a grim slog. In The New York Times, Dwight Garner (who loved it) compared it to “a three-day flu.” I’d say the flu lasts longer than that. It’s like reliving the last 30 years of political history but really paying attention this time, and knowing how the story ends for most of us, at least for now: badly.

In a book that stubbornly resists prescription, and maybe even argument, this widely quoted passage from the prologue has to suffice:

If you were born around 1960 or afterward, you have spent your adult life in the vertigo of that unwinding. You watched structures that had been in place before your birth collapse like pillars of salt across the vast visible landscape—the farms of the Carolina Piedmont, the factories of the Mahoning Valley, Florida subdivisions, California schools. And other things, harder to see but no less vital in supporting the order of everyday life, changed beyond recognition—ways and means in Washington caucus rooms, taboos on New York trading desks, manners and morals everywhere. When the norms that made the old institutions useful began to unwind, and the leaders abandoned their posts, the Roosevelt Republic that had reigned for almost half a century came undone. The void was filled by the default force in American life, organized money.

Packer keeps himself out of The Unwinding, but he was born in 1960 himself, and graduated from high school in 1978, which is where he places the beginning of “the unwinding,” and where he starts the book. (This is roughly my own timeline, which is why the book was sometimes painful to read.) It opens with what becomes a recurring device throughout the book: a pastiche of headlines and pop culture detritus from that year, from the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” to a sentence from a Jimmy Carter speech about inflation to an ad for Vantage cigarettes to a headline about Jonestown. You know from the beginning you’re going to wander through some depressing precincts.

If you require such wandering to lead you from despair to hope and a renewed sense of political direction, this is not the book for you. The Unwinding has its heroes, but their heroism lies in perseverance, not achievement. A committed liberal optimist (like myself) may come away from it with his or her optimism unwound. But spending time facing how feebly we’ve met the challenges of the last 30 years and how much harder life is for so many people despite our political exertions can be restorative, too. Sometimes it’s bracing to admit: Yes, things are as bad as they seem. Sometimes we have to hit bottom. We can only hope that what The Unwinding depicts is the country’s bottom.

An inspiring and sometimes inscrutable work of memory and witness, The Unwinding tells its story through the experiences of five main characters: Dean Price, a Reagan Republican turned Obama supporter with a “Think and Grow Rich” optimism and a passion for alternative energy; Tammy Thomas, an African-American factory worker who sees one job after another disappear as her city, Youngstown, Ohio, slips under the waves of deindustrialization; Jeff Connaughton, a career lawyer/politico who early in his career attaches himself to a young pol named Joe Biden and goes almost everywhere Biden goes, but with a growing sense of futility; a character whose chapters are named “Silicon Valley” but who is actually Peter Thiel, the libertarian co-founder of PayPal; and finally, an actual city, Tampa, Florida, whose chapters deserve a whole book in themselves.

Packer, a New Yorker staff writer, tells their stories (even Thiel’s) with patience and empathy, and they’re so very distinct you’re never at risk of getting them confused, even if you wonder what they’re all doing in the same book.

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Issue #30, Fall 2013
 
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Bernecky:

Maybe George Packer's depressed because, despite his best efforts, most Americans still don't believe that Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi and Claire McCardill figure their taxes on forms marked "D" for Democrat.

Sep 18, 2013, 2:55 PM

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