The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

While the book as a whole is about the transformation of America through the unwinding, Packer organizes most of the chapters like a novelist would—with characters going through transformative arcs. This is most pronounced in the biographical sketches in which Packer uses different names to refer to the same character. The Colin Powell chapter, for instance, never uses his name, only his ever-rising ranks. Some transformations are even more explicit. “In that moment, Oprah Winfrey became Oprah,” Packer writes (60). And Sam Walton “became Mr. Sam, the object of a folksy personality cult” (103). Even place names are rechristened, with practically no one using the term “Silicon Valley” describe the peninsula stretching from San Francisco to San Jose in the 1970s.

All of America becomes something different throughout the book, and Packer highlights what some specific areas become. Silicon Valley replaces its middle class stores with “Bloomingdale’s and Louis Vuitton” (134). Dean’s area becomes a wasteland of unused farmlands and underemployed people who eat processed food. Tampa becomes something Packer seems to really despise: a sprawling community of isolated subdivisions, highways, strip malls, and stratification. But the biggest transformation is in Washington which goes from a place with “clubby, bipartisan institutional dignity” to a world in which members of one party won’t even return the phone calls of members of the other party (or of anyone who isn't a lobbyist) (29). What Washington becomes leads to the Tea Party and the vitriol it brings to communities.

On a more positive note, Packer’s main characters also transform. Tammy, for instance, transforms from a teenage mother to a union worker to an activist and leader and in the process becomes what she feels she was always meant to be. “I knew God was going to open up these doors,” she notes upon getting hired by MVOC (234). But her transformation is more than just a job. Tammy also transforms her beliefs about people in her process of becoming a leader. Where she had “always put the blame on individuals for failing to help themselves,” she learns to see all the problems affecting her entire community—”generational poverty, failed schools, the loss of jobs” (238). This transformation is one that Packer seems to hope his readers will undergo too so there are fewer people like Karen Jaroch, set in her ways and convinced that the problem in society was other people “cutting corners to ask for help” rather than living within their means (404).

This is the view espoused by most of the Tea Party, including the proto-Tea Partier Newt Gingrich who says that the problem with Occupy Wall Street is that it was started “with the premise that we all owe them everything,” an indication of “how much the left has collapsed as a moral system” (372). But the book proves are limited the opportunities for so many are. Through the Hartzells, Matt Weidner’s clients, and Elizabeth Warren, Packer proves how rigged the game is for so many. His goal is that by exposing the ways Washington works through Connaughton’s transformation from optimist to cynic and by showing a hopeful transformation of Tammy and Dean, the reader will come away less willing to blame individuals like the Hartzells for their troubles and recognize the societal transformation America will need to undergo to become united again.