The Unwinding Pdf An Inner History of the New America Summary
A riveting examination of a nation in crisis, from one of the finest political journalists of our generation
American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown, and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives.
The Unwinding journeys through the lives of several Americans, including Dean Price, the son of tobacco farmers, who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South; Tammy Thomas, a factory worker in the Rust Belt trying to survive the collapse of her city; Jeff Connaughton, a Washington insider oscillating between political idealism and the lure of organized money; and Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire who questions the Internet’s significance and arrives at a radical vision of the future. Packer interweaves these intimate stories with biographical sketches of the era’s leading public figures, from Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z, and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics that capture the flow of events and their undercurrents.
The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation. Packer’s novelistic and kaleidoscopic history of the new America is his most ambitious work to date.
One of the iTunes Bookstore’s “Ten Books You Must Read This Summer”
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The Unwinding An Inner History of the New America Book Review
Joseph MorrisTop Contributor: Photography
5.0 out of 5 stars Economic history via biography: “Empires decline when elites become irresponsible.”
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 28, 2017
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Something changed in America around 1970. If you read political economists, it might be variously characterized as the end of the New Deal, globalization, national productivity separating from average pay, deindustrialization, the beginning of the income inequality spike, or the rise of neoliberalism. Those are hard to digest in the abstract. Packer tells the story of these changes, but through biography. The chapters are fairly short and mostly independent, although some characters recur as the book progresses from 1978 to 2012. Each chapter is told as the stories of people: mostly ordinary people who were in a position to be particularly representative of a particular part of the power cycles of American life.
Tammy Thomas is a Black woman in Youngstown, Ohio, born at the apex of Black inner-city success, when well-paying blue-collar jobs in steel factories had been a fact for a generation; during her lifetime Youngstown collapses due to jobs moving to lower-pay locations, the short-sightedness of local elites, and the indifference of far-away capital that dismembers its industry. She manages to navigate it all, living factory life and eventually becoming a activist against the forces that ravaged her home city. Jeff Connaughton goes through the politics-lobbying-politics revolving door, wavering between his desire to change the world and the desire to get American-dream wealthy. Dean Price is an energetic, self-help-book reading entrepreneur, trying to succeed in the businesses of truck stops. He succeeds at first as an outpost of big oil companies and fast-food franchises, but finds that it is very, very hard to succeed when he tries to convert it to a biodiesel business that keeps its profits in the community. The city of Tampa is a recurrent theme, showing ground-zero of the housing crisis; the Hartzell family stands out: because they are living on minimum wage working at Wal-Mart, they can only afford to shop at Wal-Mart. All of these are based on first-person interviews, and I was very aware that I was reading something written by a journalist: the stories are detailed, vivid, and Packer really lets you inhabit the lives of the people he is writing about.
Scattered throughout there are biographies of well-known figures. Although there were more, the collection that stood out for me were Sam Walton, Oprah, Jay-Z, and Alice Waters. These characters are self-made millionaires, American Dream success stories. Also among these is Peter Thiel, a PayPal founder, venture capitalist, well-known for his libertarian and pro-Trump political stances; he differs in that Packer actually interviewed him and Thiel shows up in several “Silicon Valley” chapters.
These chapters on self-made American elites show the startling contrast between the haves and the have-nots. The individuals are not caricatures, but fully understandable as humans. They demonstrate that each of them, after they hit the stratosphere culturally and commercially, becomes separated from ordinary Americans and fully immersed in the sense of being self-made royalty, beholden to no one. They stand in stark contrast to the chapters about ordinary Americans. You’ve got Tammy Thomas in one chapter, a single mother trying to raise a child on $7.30 and hour at a factory in Youngstown, and then you’ve got Oprah in the next chapter saying “A black person has to ask herself, ‘If Oprah Winfrey can make it, what does it say about me?’ They no longer have any excuse.” Alice Waters did change the way Americans think about food, but it is hard to imagine Tammy Thomas shopping organic. Sam Walton just wanted to open some big stores, and was always modest and homely even as he suppresses unions and turns main streets into economic wastelands. These self-made elites at least approximately seem to have their heart in the right place and just seems like she hasn’t thought through the values of the system in which they have succeeded; if they have cognitive dissonance between their success and the failure of others, they suppress it well.
Thiel, though, does seem to have thought these values through that are only implicit in the behavior of the other elites. He comes across almost like a malignant Vulcan: with contempt for other humans, except those that are as successful as he is, or that he feels will be as successful as he (and even then, perhaps only as a good investment). He feels like technology will create a utopia, if only welfare beneficiaries and women didn’t muck it up by voting for people that don’t really understand capitalism. It is not really clear, though, how that would affect the lives of Tammy Thomas, or Wal-Mart employees like the Hartzell family. It would be a utopia . . . for people as competent as Peter Thiel.
Packer’s brilliance is that he clearly has a bias, but it is subtle, a slope that shows up in the quotes he chooses and the intersections of the characters. The top Amazon review for this book starts off with “First off, this is not a polemical book with Packer trying to thrust his viewpoint down your throat. Packer’s own voice is largely absent from this book. Instead, he lets his characters speak for themselves.” That’s sort of true, but the juxtapositions of the elite and working-class characters, the successes and the failures, the small fry getting squashed and the elites clinking glasses in catered parties, tell a story of extreme class separation loud and clear. At one point Packer quotes Tom Perriello, then a Congressman from Virginia, saying “Empires decline when elites become irresponsible.” It’s a passing quote by a passing character, but when I came across it 70% of the way through the book, it stuck with me as Packer’s implicit but central thesis of this book.
2.0 out of 5 stars The Truth Untold by Packer
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 30, 2013
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The book has three parts and many chapters (23 in the first part, 10 in the second part, 15 in the third part) that are almost all written like either news headlines or a 60 minutes report about a specific character. Here’s my review after skimming the entire book and then reading the first seven chapters that introduce the three main characters .
The reader can tell packer has a false view of history and maybe a hidden agenda even in the Prologue. In the Prologue, George Packer (GP) literally says “the unwinding is nothing new, has occurred every generation or two” and “brings freedom”. I strongly disagree. The decline of America since 1970 that has created income inequality is unique in history. New legal opinions enacted by SCOTUS such as Citizens United that have given “citizen” rights to corporations have fundamentally weakened democracy. The decline since 1970 has decreased freedom by weakening democracy and has destroyed the fair distribution of wealth in the economy needed to maintain freedom and market demand from consumers. Capitalism needs democracy for regulation of wealth. America was founded on the principles that combined capitalism and democracy and GP doesn’t understand.
GP has written a deceptive work of nonfiction that hides the truth and provide an inaccurate and very inadequate explanation of the decline as an “unwinding”. GP is promoting the ideology of “you’re on your own” (YOYO) vs. “we’re in this together” (WITT). The “Unwinding” appears to be Ayn Rand propaganda intended to deceive the reader by claiming that capitalism without regulation (by democracy) is the natural and best order of things. By subjectively selecting and describing certain people and giving his view of the events of history, GP deceives the reader into accepting his hidden message that unregulated capitalism is the natural (and cyclical) order of things.
A good nonfiction work should objectively select and tell the story of real people as characters who reveal the issues that are causing events. Packer is blaming poor people and Democrats while praising Republicans, and he ignores incompetent business management and doesn’t give a comparative analysis of government policy. The Unwinding is superficial and it doesn’t explain the real causes of decline in America.
There are three main characters in the Unwinding – small businessman Dean Price, southern Democratic political staffer Jeff Connaughton and black poor unwed teenage mother Tammy Thomas – and each represents a theme of economic or political decline. The question is – what’s the cause? Packer is making a statement by his selective story telling that certain characters have bad traits that are the cause- it’s not the system, globalization, business, or government incompetency. I have a real problem with Packer’s view of history.
The introductory chapter on Tammy Thomas and the steel industry in and around Youngstown, Ohio significantly reveals Packer’s (subjective, false/ incomplete) view and introduces the most important issue and unanswered problem in America – what caused decreased manufacturing employment and income inequality since 1970. What Packer doesn’t adequately or even accurately explain is why the decline in manufacturing occurred. Here’s my view described with a case study with the factual data of the history of the American steel industry. GP doesn’t provide any of this data and analysis. He just makes the reader think that people (workers) like Tammy don’t contribute to business competitiveness and that the collapse of the steel industry in and around Youngstown was a natural evolution because of people like Tammy.
A combination of four things drove explosive growth of the steel industry in the United States for a century from 1870 to 1970 and that growth created economic wealth throughout America and especially in the mid-west region – (1) abundant iron ore around Lake Superior, (2) abundant and high quality coal in Pennsylvania, (3) low cost transportation over the Great Lakes and connected rivers, and (4) continuous innovation/investment over decades in steel making by community (Pittsburgh) business entrepreneurs like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Frick and their bankers like Thomas Mellon (community banks provided support of radical innovation to entrepreneurs in their communities unlike than the large national banks we now have as a result of deregulation who are risk averse) in other mid-western regions like the one around Youngstown. As a result, the world’s leading steel industry was created in America with corresponding shared wealth in the mid-western region from Chicago to Cleveland, Youngstown and Pittsburgh that once produced about 80% of America’s steel. Steel production in America peaked in 1969 at 141 million tons up from 1 million in 1880, 10 million in 1900 and 24 million in 1910. By 1988, steel production had decreased to 88 million tons from global competition and the lack of domestic innovation/investment. The decline in steel production (and especially mid-western steel) that occurred after 1970 was the direct result of a lack of innovation/investment in the mid-west to offset the increase in productivity which had more than tripled in terms of production per worker between 1975 and 1988 and to offset the loss of domestic jobs from global competition driving foreign imports into America.
Radical innovation in steel production to survive in business after 1970 eventually shifted about 50% of steel production to new plants using an electric arc furnace (EAF) and almost all of these new plants were located outside the mid-west because the raw materials for EAF were no longer ore and coal but mainly recycled steel scrap.
Steel industry innovation/investment in the mid-west, and especially in Youngstown, had essentially stopped after the 1960’s for a number of reasons all traceable to bad management – not bad workers or unions. As an overall result, the steel industry in America employed 457,000 workers in 1975 and 167,000 in 1988. Most of the decline occurred in the mid-west and throughout Pennsylvania . In 1999, domestic production had risen to 107 million tons but imports were 36 million tons. Bad management and government and free trade were killing American jobs – not the message that Packer conveys that the cause was the natural order of capitalism and poor performing workers . The number one challenge in the steel industry since 1970 has been foreign competition followed by compliance with environmental regulations. Foreign competition and the Clean Air Act of 1970 had a large impact on the steel industry and radical innovation/investment was required to survive. The EPA was largely created in 1971 to enforce clean air standards. However, only about 15% of the steel industry’s capital investments go to environmental compliance. Other investments fought foreign competition with radical innovation. This is a pattern throughout human history that Packer totally ignores. The increase of productivity caused by innovation in agriculture moved workers into Industrial Age factories, but the increase of productivity in manufacturing since 1970 combined with the lack of radical innovation and globalization with government policy that encouraged offshoring has destroyed manufacturing jobs in America. But policy and competency in Germany (business, education and government/social policy and competency) protected manufacturing jobs in Germany. Manufacturing jobs peaked in America in 1979 at 19.4 million. During 8 years of Reagan, manufacturing jobs decreased by about 1 million. During 4 years of GHW Bush, manufacturing jobs decreased at twice the earlier rate by about another 1 million to less than 17 million. During Clinton’s 8 years, the decline of manufacturing jobs stopped and jobs increased half a million to 17.5 million. During the 8 years of GW Bush and the first 2 years of Obama, manufacturing jobs decreased at an accelerated rate every year to 11.5 million in 2010.
An excellent book has been written, Innovation Economics, that describes the cause of the decline as bad government and business policy and the lack of innovation/investment – not bad workers.
In 1970, 25% of American workers were employed in manufacturing whereas only 10% are in 2013. In Germany the decline of jobs in manufacturing (even after the Great Recession since 2008) has been much less and about 23% of workers are in still manufacturing in Germany. Note – that’s almost the same percentage as in America in 1970. Government, social and industrial policy in Germany regarding labor, education and innovation/investment in manufacturing has sustained competitiveness and manufacturing employment in Germany. A similar policy to support domestic manufacturing has been absent in the United States not by accident but by majority intention from both political parties, academia, economists and business. In the United States, “free market” and “free trade” economic policy and incompetency in innovation (by universities, business and government) have discouraged any support of domestic manufacturing, the decline of which was deemed to be natural evolution to a “knowledge economy” that we were falsely assured would not be offshored – but offshoring has begun, is significant and is being hidden by unwarranted H1-B visas (and proposed immigration policy) bringing foreign workers into America. As a result, the trade imbalance in America is large and increasing, causing high and sustained unemployment and budget deficits. Incompetent government and business and bad government and industrial policy have been the root cause of the decline. The decline was not caused by unions or any attribute in workers.
Packer has a bad view of history and apparently a hidden political agenda.
About George Packer Author Of The Unwinding pdf Book
George Packer Author Of The Unwinding pdf Book (born August 13, 1960) is a US journalist, novelist, and playwright. He is best known for his writings for The New Yorker and The Atlantic about U.S. foreign policy and for his book The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq. Packer also wrote The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, covering the history of the US from 1978 to 2012. In November 2013, The Unwinding received the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His award-winning biography, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, was released in May 2019. His latest book, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal was released in June 2021.
- ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0374534608
- Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Reprint edition (March 4, 2014)
- Language ‏ : ‎ English
- Paperback ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
- ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780374534608
- ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374534608
- Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
- Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.4 x 1.23 x 8.34 inches
- Best Sellers Rank:Â #176,712 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #403 in Economic History (Books)
- #456 in Political Conservatism & Liberalism
- #4,185 in United States History (Books)
- Customer Reviews: 4.4 out of 5 stars    1,203 ratings
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