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

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.

In this respect, Packer is not only innovative he is challenging much of the current orthodoxy about why American political life has suddenly turned so volatile. Packer is less absorbed by the nuanced moderation of Connaughton’s K Street, or the conveniently self-interested social and economic libertarianism of Thiel and a lot of his cohorts in the Valley.  There is a more interesting preoccupation with people whose views are unaligned or hard to track for a variety of textured reasons. In Dean Price’s rural upper south, which flipped from Democrat to Republican in twenty some months, his neighbor’s politics don’t add up. Their sensibilities are both unforgiving and underdog oriented, theological on gays and unborn babies, libertarian on guns, communitarian in their sensibilities about the virtue of small towns, coldly individualistic on healthcare and welfare. Tammy Thomas’ Youngstown is both racially segregated and liberal, wracked in a biracial way by broken families, with too many blacks reeling from crack and too many whites reeling from crank, and a lot of 40 year old grandmothers raising their teenagers and their teenagers’ babies. Abortion never caught on, for reasons of cost and faith, and one suspects that legalized marijuana and gay marriage probably haven’t either: what’s left of a leadership structure in Youngstown is too busy running petty dealers off the streets and selling young men on conventional marriages to have gotten the progressive memo. The loners and dreamers who try to build a coalition in Zuccotti Park fail in part because they are peeved at too many different things, and because their ideal of a government that leaves me alone and tells you what to do predictably never gets traction.

Packer does not bother, as political consultants would, with trying to unearth some formula that links all of these camps together. He doesn’t imagine that taken in their totality, they are anything like the political center that elections are supposed to be about. But he effectively captures that the most pervasive condition of modern civic life is that whatever your pain, there is a fair bet that no one in high places is listening.

It should not surprise that a book that dwells so much on alienation is hard on both parties.  Obama is only a spectral kind of presence in this book, one who drifts in and out of the debate without really shaping it. His candidacy politicizes Tammy Thomas for the first time in her life but neither the foreclosures nor the gutting of manufacturing work that made her a social crusader ever rise very high on his agenda. Obama helps inspire Dean Price to abandon the Reagan loving conservatism of his young adulthood, but the administration’s alternative energy policies falter because the president can’t seem to be bothered to sell them. Occupy Wall Street comes off as something much less genuine and devoted than some of the activists it inspired. What Packer calls the Professional Democratic establishment in Washington seems as susceptible to being bought off as its Republican counterpart.  Packer is devastating on conservatism, which he describes cruelly but not altogether unfairly, as a burned out force that can’t empathize with Americans who work hard and still fail. The Tea Party fervor of the past several years he dismisses as only so much inchoate hatred of Obama first and modernization second.

In fact, it is this part of Packer’s book that is the most clichéd: the notion that the real shortcoming of contemporary politics is the failure of liberals to be tough and committed enough to master the selfish, reactionary forces across the aisle. To be sure, Packer is right that liberalism has been inadequate in meeting the challenges of the last decade. But rather than being insufficiently aggressive in pursuing their goals, a highly debatable point given the constraints of divided government, the blunter truth is that liberals have proved incapable of translating their aims into values that resonate outside their base in downtown condos and the inner city. To the contrary, they see things that never were but unlike RFK or FDR, can’t consistently explain what it is that they see, much less tell why their vision matters if you aren’t uninsured or down to nothing.

Similarly, Packer’s observations about the rise of social equality and economic inequality at the same time are true but incomplete. The deeper reality is that Americans increasingly see little of themselves in each other, even when their circumstances suggest they should.  The retail workers and gun show patrons in Dean Price’s community are the same number of degrees of distance from prosperity as the former auto workers Tammy Thomas is mobilizing and the foreclosure victims on the outskirts of Tampa, but none of them really imagine it that way.   The affluent blacks who are second generation Harvard and the socially liberated day traders and hedge fund owners aren’t deeply moved by working class dropouts with Confederate flags in their windshields, and the Appalachians and rebel flag bearers know it, and return indifference with resentment. Packer himself is not immune. The right’s grassroots activists, the same ones whom Packer generally slights as muddle headed vessels of hate, actually share the discontent toward elites and the misuse of authority that so outrages Packer.

One wishes that Packer had understood this element of our national life better—that he had delved more into just how much the fratricidal politics of the last three years have to do with neither side seeing the other up close. Arguably, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street hardened at equivalent points, when each started internalizing the beneficiaries of policies they opposed as either freeloaders trying to wriggle out from under their medical bills or their mortgages (the hard right’s view of healthcare and foreclosures) or as pampered elites digging into the trough for their version of corporate welfare (the left’s take on the one percent).  And beyond the lack of empathy, there is not much left in the way of a vibrant sense of national community, very little at all in the way of mutual respect and accommodation.

Ultimately, the “unwinding” Packer describes is as wrenching and violent as he suggests, meaner than anything Obama or his adversaries appreciated about the months between November 2008 and November 2012. And in rendering it so vividly, he calls to mind what Robert Kennedy famously characterized as the “violence of institutions”. But it’s hard to read this remarkably good book without noticing how much of this violence we have done ourselves, in the form of our recriminations toward each other.