George Packer, a staff writer at the Atlantic Monthly, has documented some of the critical changes in American society for many years – changes which have contributed powerfully to the rise of populism – and Donald Trump. His book The Great Unwinding, the subject of my review below, was published some years ago in 2013. I recalled reading and writing about it when I came across a new article by Packer in the Atlantic today (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/how-win-pennsylvania/680302/, I’m not sure that it’s available to non – subscribers!) which covers the same territory. In today’s article Packer reports on conditions and political sentiment in a small town – Charleroi – in western Pennsylvania. Packer concludes, in that article, that “The convergence of working class decline, corporate greed, and nativist anger will shape next month’s election in places like Charleroi” and, no doubt, in others in similar conditions. Paradoxically, this ‘base’ combines with pro Trump sentiment among the very wealthy to give him his political strength!
George Packer; The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America; Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 2013.
In the Prologue to this brilliant and powerful book, Packer states:
“No one can say when the unwinding began – when the coil that held Americans together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip first gave way. Like any great change, the unwinding began at countless times, in countless ways – and at some moment the country, always the same country, crossed a line of history and became irretrievably different….
The unwinding is nothing new. There have been unwindings every generation or two: the fall to earth of the Founders’ heavenly Republic in a noisy marketplace of quarrelsome factions; the war that tore the United States apart and turned them from plural to singular; the crash that laid waste to the business of America, making way for a democracy of bureaucrats and everymen. Each decline brought renewal, each implosion released energy, out of each unwinding came a new cohesion.” (p.3)
The ‘unwinding’ of which Packer writes is the decline of manufacturing, the rise of Silicon Valley and the extreme growth of the financial sector and the consequential dramatic increase in inequality in income and wealth among the American people over the past two or more decades. The political counterpart of this is the growth of the lobbying ‘industry’ in DC and State capitals and of ‘winner take all’ politics.
Packer tells the story of the ‘unwinding’ via a series of stories of the lives of individuals: workers who have lost jobs, small business people who have come to grief, others (Silicon Valley types, Alice Waters) who haven’t, a few politicians and regulators (Joe Biden through the eyes of a former staffer, Newt Gingrich, Colin Powell, and Elizabeth Warren), Wall Street operators, a political lobbyist, an urban area devastated by the sub-prime mortgage fiasco (Tampa, Florida) and, to top it all off, the Occupy Wall Street movement!
These are all compelling and frequently moving stories. Those of the people who suffered as a result of being thrown out of work are depressing; those describing the greed of Wall Street and the failure of governments to legislate and regulate against abuses provoke outrage.
Packer does not discuss how or when the US economy and society might escape from the ‘unwinding’ but that’s not what he intended to do. His portrait of contemporary American society provides a compelling, articulate and provocative complement to the many books discussing the problems and related policies at a more macro level.