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George Packer: You can’t write about America today without taking account of the power of money and fame and success. Celebrities have in some ways taken the place of institutions and occupy an outsized role in people’s imaginations. So I included biographical sketches of ten famous Americans, figures who both amplify and offset these characters’ lives.
The two figures closest to Jeff’s world are Newt Gingrich and Robert Rubin. In different ways each one represents the failure of important institutions and the elites who lead them. Those failures run right through the whole book. When American institutions were healthy, celebrities mattered less. In the unwinding, they offer tantalizing pictures of power and success that often turn out to be hollow at the core.
Alex Star: Your book portrays a country bedeviled by inequality and instability and an almost elemental unfairness. Of course, the years you cover were also years in which the country became more tolerant and inclusive of women, minorities and gays, and others. How do you understand the relationship between these two parallel stories? Did you choose to put more emphasis on one than the other?
George Packer: My book isn’t a complete history of our era, not by a long shot. Foreign policy is missing — so is sports. Nor is it an “issue” book. The Unwinding is an idiosyncratic narrative shaped by certain themes that preoccupy me. “Elemental unfairness” is a good term for them. I’m writing about the deep forces threatening the economic opportunity and national cohesion — the sense that there’s a place for everyone — that our democracy depends on. At the same time, the country is increasingly open to previously excluded groups. In a way, those two stories — greater social equality and economic inequality — are unrelated. There’s no reason why the fortunes of the middle and working class had to decline while prospects for women and minorities rose. They all could have improved together, which is what seemed to be happening in the late sixties/early seventies. Millions of women and members of minority groups belong to the class of Americans who have seen their lives and communities decline since the 1970s. And in the case of one of my characters — Peter Thiel, a brilliant and very wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor, who happens to be gay — his success had nothing to do with the struggle of homosexuals for greater equality.
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