George Packer talks 'The Unwinding' of America
Packer follows four people through years of successes and failures in his latest book
In his latest nonfiction book The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, George Packer - author and New Yorker staff writer - presents the story of the American economic decline as no one else has. With the skill of a novelist to develop intimate portraits of a variety of characters, Packer follows four people through years of successes and failures, from wealthy entrepreneur, Peter Thiel to Youngstown, Ohio, community organizer, Tammy Thomas. Packer also takes the readers from Walmart to Tampa, Florida, to the Occupy movement to show the different front lines on which people are fighting the economic collapse. With no solutions offered, Packer avoids being didactic or heavy-handed, and lets the stories of various people speak for themselves.
CL discussed The Unwinding with Packer over email as he prepares for his reading at the Carter Center on Wed., June 19.
You state in your book that the current economic situation is part of a decline that started in the 1970s. How widespread is this understanding? Is it something that people aren't aware of or aren't discussing?
George Packer: If you ask Americans when our economic troubles began, a lot might say 2008 (the financial crisis), or 2000 (the dot-com bust), or 1994 (NAFTA). These are markers that the media recognizes too. But I think a lot of Americans, especially people older than, say, 40 or 45, know that things have been getting rougher for the middle class ever since the 1970s, which brought inflation, the oil shock, and the start of four decades of flattening average wages. My book begins in 1978 because a lot of important trends began right around then: deindustrialization in the Rust Belt, the rise of the conservative movement, the growth of the business lobby in Washington, the computer revolution in Silicon Valley. A lot of what we live with now, to the point where we hardly notice them - from income inequality to political polarization - began in the late seventies.