The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“The people that built the roads followed the animals’ paths. And once that path is set, it takes a tremendous amount of effort and energy to take another path. Because you get in that set pattern of thinking, and it’s passed down generation to generation to generation...” 

Growing up, Dean realized those around him were stuck in a rut of doing the same things as their parents did. For Dean’s generation, coming of age during the unwinding, the world no longer offered the same certainties, as he and his classmates were no longer guaranteed a lifetime of good-paying jobs in tobacco or textiles. Because those existing paths failed him, Dean set out to make into reality the dream he had of forging new roads for others to follow, a dream that would lead him to biofuels.

“So Connaughton and the Mormon friend left and wandered around Russell—two young out-of-towners dwarfed by the white Vermont marble and Concord granite and dark mahogany and the clubby, bipartisan institutional dignity that was still intact, though it would soon begin to crack and then crumble—looking for a Republican senator to sign up.” 

To try to get a Republican senator to agree to the debate with Joe Biden at the University of Alabama that Connaughton had arranged, he and his friend visited the Capitol. Connaughton was still in awe of the way Washington worked and would not be disillusioned until years later. But the Washington he visited in college was not the one he would work in either; it was a pre-Gingrich, pre-hyper-partisan, pre-big lobbying group Washington that still functioned on mutual respect and a shared duty to the higher purpose encapsulated by the grandness of the institution, a Washington that had not yet been unwound. 

“All of it said that Youngstown was steel, nothing but steel, that everyone here owed life to the molten pour of iron shaped to human ends, that without it there was no life.”

As a girl, Tammy remembered the blast furnaces of the steel mills running all the time and the smell of sulfur in the air. But she also remembered the crowded shops and restaurants made possible by the jobs in the steel mills. When the mills closed, life changed in Youngstown, which became a crime-laden decaying city full of the downtrodden and destitute. The transformation in Youngstown epitomizes the changes that happened throughout blue-collar towns in America during the period covered in the book, as dependence on factories created decay when the factories were gone. 

“They didn’t have nine houses, or maybe any house; they couldn’t call John Travolta their friend; the laws of the universe left them vulnerable to mugging; they were not always attuned to their divine self; they were not all that they could be. And since there was no random suffering in life, Oprah left them with no excuse.” 

In the biographical sketch of Oprah, Packer notes her transformation from Oprah Winfrey to Oprah and the ways her audience lived through her luxurious lifestyles all while struggling more each year due to the unwinding. Her story showed the audience that anything was possible in America but also that there were no excuses for an individual who could not achieve great things or protect themselves from random events. Packer hints at the psychological toll that her viewers must have gone through, blaming themselves when it was the world that was changing, and he also implies that Oprah helped them ignore the ways the world had become harder for middle class and working class people. 

“Spiritual and material thirsting were always mingled in Americans, leaving them easy prey to hucksters of the cloth, the book, the screen. What Hill did was to take the limitless native belief in the powers of the self and organize it into a system that sounded like a practical philosophy. He taught Dean to believe that he was the author of his own destiny.” 

Dean’s life is transformed by reading Napoleon Hill’s book Think and Grow Rich, which offered tips for willing success and escaping poverty thinking. Hill’s book becomes a spiritual guide for Dean, though he sometimes wonders what separates Hill from the con artist his parents fell prey to. Packer notes that Americans have a long history of buying into cons that promised spiritual as well as material redemption, and he frequently describes other scams, such as real estate scams, in quasi-religious terms. 

“The boss became Mr. Sam, the object of a folksy personality cult.”

In the chapter devoted to Sam Walton, Packer describes his transformation from Sam to Mr. Sam, a man who would wear the same name tags Wal-Mart “associates” wore while leading them in pro-Wal-Mart chants. This folksy persona hides the truth about how Mr. Sam was profiting from Wal-Mart’s gutting of the American economy and made employees assume that he just didn’t know about how bad their working conditions were. Beyond being another example in the book of the way Wall Street hid what it was doing from the rest of the country, the transformation is also indicative of the theme of transformation highlighted in many of the book’s biographical sketches. 

“He made everyone feel that America still worked.”

In the chapter on Colin Powell, Packer describes a man who embodied the success of institutions that were already failing but invisibly so. He suggests that when Powell joined the partisan fray by joining the Bush administration and lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Powell hurt himself and hurt the nation, as Americans had trusted him. But he also notes that by that point, Powell was an anachronism, defending a political center and an institutionalism that had already been hollowed out by partisanship, defunding of schools, and growing inequality. With the fairytale language Packer uses in that section, he almost implies that nothing Colin Powell had stood for ever existed beyond popular myth and the feeling people had that America was working.

“When the benefits exploded on both Wall Street and Washington, then it became possible to make millions of dollars in corporate booty… when the cost of certain behaviors diminished, when norms began to erode and disappear that had held people back at least from being garish about the way they made money, the culture changed. It changed on Wall Street and it changed in Washington.” 

Later in his career, Jeff Connaughton developed a universal theory of money in American life since the 1980s with which the book largely agrees. The section on Wall Street and some of the more garish statements about the investment class in the newsreel chapters also confirm the vulgarity and lack of shame in greed, and the book is about the consequences of that cultural shift.

“For Dean, Bojangles’ had come to represent everything that was wrong with the way Americans lived: how they raised their food and transported it across the country, how they grew the crops to feed the animals they ate, the way they employed the people who worked in the restaurants, the way the money left the community—everything about it was wrong.” 

Where Dean had originally invested in fast food chains such as Bojangles’ as his primary business, he grows disillusioned by what fast food does to the American consumer and landscape. His views are shared in the book by Alice Waters who responds by making expensive restaurants for rich people to eat at and then by encouraging school gardens for low-income schools. This juxtaposition shows that two people who agree on the same issues will approach different solutions and also that, even for an advocate like Waters, few are paying attention to the middle class. 

“No, the growth was actually hostile to urban life. What it offered was the American dream in a subdivision, the splendid isolation of a new homestead an hour’s drive from downtown.” 

The growth machine in Tampa created subdivisions that were isolated from cities and encouraged sprawl and the death of cities, since the growth machine really was about growing the suburbs, not the downtown areas. Some Americans came to love this and saw later efforts to connect the suburbs to downtown through light rail as a threat to the American way of life. This led to further polarization for Americans, and Packer suggests that one way to re-wind America would be to redevelop cities so they are neither blighted like Youngstown nor desolate like Tampa. 

“Carriage Pointe was supposed to be a little slice of the American dream, but it felt like the end of days.” 

When Mike Van Sickler visits Carriage Pointe, a subdevelopment near Tampa that was especially hard hit by the mortgage crisis, he found abandoned lots and empty houses. Some of the homes were occupied by criminals, and the residents who still lived there were angry and scared. Carriage Pointe both epitomizes the apocalyptic visions people like Dean Price feared as well as the corruption of the American dream at the hands of Wall Street greed, greed that leads to Americans mistrusting each other and isolated. 

“For a long time the great mystery for the half of America that voted Democratic was why white people living in small, obscure places and getting poorer year by year were simultaneously getting more Republican—why the kind of Americans who, a century before, had passionately supported William Jennings Bryan were now voting in overwhelming numbers for the party that wanted to deregulate Wall Street and zero out the capital gains tax.” 

Packer notes this mystery before explaining that the Piedmont region had gotten so bad by 2008 that this long trend reversed itself and people voted for Democrats. This would prove to be a blip though, as the Tea Party wave swept the area in 2010. Bryan and populism in general are hinted at throughout the book, with Packer seemingly implying that a populist movement should arrive to challenge the bankers and corporations that destroyed the country, but any populist movement seems equally impossible given the partisan divide over every issue, making it difficult for even people of the same class to see eye to eye on the cause or solution to any problem.

“They arrived at houses where three months of mail lay in a pile at the front door, and houses where children were watching Dora the Explorer and adults had stopped answering the phone, and motels with 20 percent occupancy, and obscurely named investment entities with no known street address. They came like visitations from that laconic process server, the angel of death.” 

At the beginning of the second Tampa chapter in Part 2, Packer opens with a series of lists like this one that describe the foreclosure crisis. The list is dizzying in its length and detail. Beyond providing stylistic flourish, this quotation also captures the breadth of the foreclosure crisis and shows the vast array of experiences in dealing with the crisis and the vast differences between the types of entities that had homes foreclosed. 

“Sylvia began to prepare for her retirement by joining the growing subculture of middle-class people who got involved in real estate. She took a class with a Southern California investment guru named Marshall Reddick, who laced his seminars with godly inspiration and whose motto was ‘helping to wipe out middle-class poverty.’ The course was like a revival meeting, with people running out of the room to buy houses.” 

Sylvia Landis, like many others, was lured into overleveraging her assets to make a little more money in real estate. Though she didn’t blame anyone but herself, Reddick was sued by other followers. This quotation captures the mix of religion and materialism that so many Americans fell prey to during the unwinding period and hints at one of the themes of the book. 

“Justice, she concluded, was for rich people, not her.”

Usha Patel reaches this conclusion after getting a pyrrhic victory over HSBC in which she was able to keep her motel but still had to pay for the fraudulent loan she had taken out. This quotation captures one of the main sources of frustration for pretty much everyone in the book: Why didn’t Wall Street get punished for what it had done to ruin the American economy?

“The Blob was unkillable.” 

Jeff Connaughton uses the term “the Blob” to refer to the axis of people who switched between lobbying work, Wall Street work, and governmental work. His Blob was the world of finance, but there were other Blobs too in areas he didn’t know (like defense). When Connaughton returns to government work as Ted Kaufman’s chief of staff, he realizes that there will be no punishment for anyone on Wall Street because the influence of the Blob was too strong and could never be stopped. 

“But that had been three decades ago: years in which Washington was captured—captured—by the money power. He had been captured as well, and until now he hadn’t fully grasped how much the ‘influence industry’—the lobbying, the media campaigns, the grass tops, the revolving door—had transformed Washington.”

Back in government work with Ted Kaufman, Connaughton is distraught by the realization that, even though his own optimism about government work had returned, the Washington that had originally inspired him was gone. He complains about being unable to get senators on the phone only to find that his old lobbying boss can, and he gets frustrated at an inability to get any bill challenging Wall Street passed due to the corrupting influence of money. Connaughton is not above reproach though, as he has benefited from this industry too, though he realizes too late how wrong he was to do so.

“And if he happened to get an Agriculture Department official named Shirley Sherrod fired by releasing a deceptively edited video that seemed to show her making anti-white comments when in fact she was doing just the opposite—fuck it, did the other side play fair?” 

Andrew Breitbart is presented by Packer as a person who rationalized questionable (at best) behaviors that had profound impact on the discourse of the nation. The mindset Breitbart employs of assuming the other side is doing awful things too is the same mindset the Tea Party accolades use to justify their tactics; since they believe that, for instance, a light rail plan might be a Trojan Horse to getting the UN involved in America’s suburbs, anything they do to protect their way of life is justified. This makes sense, as Breitbart was a hero of the Tea Party and posted his (dis)information online to an audience all too ready to believe it and all too unwilling to be swayed by actual facts like those presented by journalists like Mike Van Sickler. 

“The contempt. Just like the comments that came in after one of his stories went up on the Web—they had nothing to do with what he’d written, minds were already made up, every local issue was drowned out by the shouting on national cable news.” 

After interviewing two young protesters at a transportation task force meeting, Mike Van Sickler recognizes in their words the same contempt he would see in online comments on his newspaper articles The words of the protesters sound similar to those voiced by Karen Jaroch, Andrew Breitbart, and other Tea Party activists. Packer implies that Americans no longer share the same set of facts and that what people believe is not penetrable by new facts, as, instead, every issue is shaped first and foremost by a national issue or outlook, meaning that opinions are formed before even understanding the issue. 

“Delphi was hailed as model of cost cutting through bankruptcy.”

Delphi is the company that Packard Electric was folded into in a restructuring. Its bankruptcy resulted in the elimination of thousands of American jobs and huge bonuses for its executives and people like hedge fund manager John Paulson who had invested in Delphi. The idea that those results would be lauded by the finance industry suggests the complete promotion of profit at the expense of real people and American workers that Wall Street had, a mindset that was not changed after the global financial crisis.

“These days it was hard to get people to agree to do anything together. He knew that it wasn’t any better for poor people back in the day. He could even remember being a boy in Pennsylvania and huddling around the kitchen stove for heat, eating government beans and peanut butter out of black-and-white cans. But what had changed since then was people. In the world today it was dog eat dog, every man for himself.” 

Danny Hartzell was poor his whole life and remembers people being willing to help each other, just as miners had done for each other in their unionizing efforts in the 1920s. But he recognizes that no one will join a union now, because they are scared of management and of losing what they have. Peter Thiel’s libertarianism espouses the same belief Hartzell does (that everyone is a selfish actor out to destroy everyone else to get ahead), but Hartzell sees it as a tragedy.

“Most people in bankruptcy weren’t irresponsible—they were too responsible.” 

Warren’s intellectual framework is based on the idea that Wall Street has sold the public a bill of goods that has taken advantage of regular Americans who have tried to play the game as offered. Thus, while some (like Karen Jaroch) argue that the foreclosure crisis was caused by the people who bought houses they couldn’t afford, Packer and Warren argue that bankruptcy and foreclosures are caused more by the banks and government than individual borrowers trying to maintain or achieve middle-classness in a world of growing social inequality.

“I just want to let you know, that story of Youngstown is the epitome of any older industrial city across the United States.” 

By the end of the book, Tammy is a leader of her community, and she leads by telling her story (including this line) and giving people the power to tell theirs. Her story is rooted in Youngstown, which is the story of a city dependent on one industry and what happens to it when that industry crumbles. Youngstown serves as a fill-in for all Rustbelt cities in the book, and Tammy makes that point explicit in this quotation.