Artur Davis: What We Lost in the Storm — A Review of “The Unwinding”

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The Great Recession of 2008-2010 was hell on dreams. For all of the trillions of dollars sunk in the stock market, and the staggering job losses, it is the collapse in confidence and optimism that lingers and that has had the most sustained impact on American life. So argues George Packer’s superb book, “The Unwinding”, which should stand as one of the most compelling narratives of the toll of our near depression.

The heart of this book is a series of extended profiles whose lives exemplify different themes: Tammy Thomas, a black woman in Youngstown Ohio, who makes the transition from an assembly line worker to community organizer; Dean Price, a working class North Carolina boy who makes and loses a fortune building truck stops before refashioning himself as a biodiesel entrepreneur, before he crashes again; Jeff Connaughton (whom I know as a fellow Alabama expatriate), who rides his on again, off again connection to Joe Biden to a backstage role as an influential Washington operator; and a mildly famous Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal who remains a considerable force in the venture capital world. Packer also fashions two places into virtual characters in their own right: the foreclosure wracked city of Tampa, Florida, which experienced some of the worst wreckage of the housing implosion of the last decade, and the confines of Zuccotti Park, the site of the original Occupy Wall Street protests.

Packer weaves back and forth between these subjects to sketch a canvass of what went wrong. The Rust Belt’s manufacturing base stops being a reliable conduit for high school educated men and women to climb into the middle class; hard working people start sliding backwards and become functionally poor while they are grinding themselves into poor health and exhaustion. The rural south stops being idyllic and becomes a hotspot for mental depression and social estrangement. Washington turns its leadership over to a permanent lobbying machine that reduces every policy debate to a transaction. Wall Street slips out from under the grip of regulators and plays by its own devil-may–care rules until it runs itself and the economy into a ditch. All over the country, the work ethic is fitfully rewarded, sometimes even punished; upward mobility operates on steroids at the top brackets of society and all but disappears at the middle and bottom rungs.

Some critics have pointed out that there is, in the wake of the first recession covered in 24 hour news cycles, not much that is deeply original about Packer’s inventory of decline, and that, as David Brooks argues, the storytelling genius does not compensate for the lack of sociological depth or data points in a book that is so openly ambitious to shape the national conversation. But the other chronicles of this period, Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum’s, “That Used to Be Us” and Ron Suskind’s “Confidence Men” come to mind, along with a host of other narratives that reconstruct the capital markets crisis, are simultaneously more precise and more bloodless than Packer: they rely, more or less exclusively, on the perspective of insiders who have a lot to reveal or justify but who certainly never missed a meal during the economic storm.  Packer puts his emphasis mostly on people who suffered genuine degradation and misery during the Great Recession.  And unlike the many accounts of this period who worry that we have too quickly reverted to normalcy, with not enough lessons learned, Packer captures the not so well understood fact that a discernible number of Americans have become permanently radicalized by their suffering: America does not look the same to them as it used to, and they drift into a destabilized zone that is alienated from the moral and social certainties of their youth. (more…)