The Unwinding Quotes

“Nowhere was the complacency of the establishment, with its blind faith in progress, more evident than in its attitude toward an elite degree: as long as my child goes to the right schools, upward mobility will continue. A university education had become the equivalent of a very expensive insurance policy, like owning a gun.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“Some nights he sat up late on his front porch with a glass of Jack and listened to the trucks heading south on 220, carrying crates of live chickens to the slaughterhouses—always under cover of darkness, like a vast and shameful trafficking—chickens pumped full of hormones that left them too big to walk—and he thought how these same chickens might return from their destination as pieces of meat to the floodlit Bojangles’ up the hill from his house, and that meat would be drowned in the bubbling fryers by employees whose hatred of the job would leak into the cooked food, and that food would be served up and eaten by customers who would grow obese and end up in the hospital in Greensboro with diabetes or heart failure, a burden to the public, and later Dean would see them riding around the Mayodan Wal-Mart in electric carts because they were too heavy to walk the aisles of a Supercenter, just like hormone-fed chickens.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“His mind filled with visions of a decadent kleptocracy in rapid decline, abetted by both political parties. America's masses, fed on processed poison bought with a food stamp swipe card. Low-skill workers, structurally unable to ever contribute again and too dumb to know their old jobs weren't coming back. The banks in Gotham leaching the last drops of wealth out of the country. Corporations unrestrained by any notion of national interest. The system of property law in shambles. The world drowning in debt.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“The problem came down to this: Americans, who had invented the modern assembly line, the skyscraper, the airplane, and the integrated circuit, no longer believed in the future.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“The creation of virtual worlds had taken the place of advances in the physical world. “You can say the whole Internet has something very escapist to it,”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“If you were born in 1950 and were in the top ten percent, everything got better for twenty years automatically. Then, after the late sixties, you went to a good grad school, and you got a good job on Wall Street in the late seventies, and then you hit the boom. Your story has been one of incredible, unrelenting progress for sixty years. Most people who are sixty years old in the U.S.—not their story at all.” The establishment had been coasting for a long time and was out of answers. Its failure pointed to new directions, maybe Marxist, maybe libertarian, along a volatile trajectory that it could no longer control.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“There are times in everyone’s life when something constructive is born out of adversity. There are times when things seem so bad that you’ve got to grab your fate by the shoulders and shake it.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“Both Obama and Romney ended up in the wrong place: the former thought American exceptionalism was no longer true and should be given up while the latter thought it was still true. Neither was willing to tell Americans that they were no longer exceptional but should try to be again.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“And he began to understand how power worked in the White House. People didn’t have it—they made it. If you wanted to be included in a meeting, you didn’t wait for an invitation; you just showed up. He told Mikva, “If you don’t use your power, you won’t have any power.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“The companies that hauled the oil away were called renderers. Besides restaurant oil, renderers also collected animal carcasses—pigs and sheep and cows from slaughterhouses, offal thrown out by butcher shops and restaurants, euthanized cats and dogs from the pound, dead pets from veterinary clinics, deceased zoo animals, roadkill. Mounds of animals were trucked to the rendering plant and bulldozed into large pots for grinding and shredding; then the raw meat product was dumped into pressure cookers, where fat separated from meat and bones at high heat. The meat and bones were pulverized into protein meal for canned pet food. The animal fat became yellow grease, which was recycled for lipstick, soap, chemicals, and livestock feed. So cows ate cow, pigs ate pig, dogs ate dog, cats ate cat, and human beings ate the meat fed on dead meat, or smeared it over their faces and hands. Rendering was one of the oldest industries in the country, going back to the age of tallow, lard, and candlelight, and one of the most secretive.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“When the norms that made the old institutions useful began to unwind, and the leaders abandoned their posts, the Roosevelt Republic that had reigned for almost half a century came undone. The void was filled by the default force in American life, organized money.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“This much freedom leaves you on your own. More Americans than ever before live alone, but even a family can exist in isolation, just managing to survive in the shadow of a huge military base without a soul to lend a hand. A shiny new community can spring up overnight miles from anywhere, then fade away just as fast. An old city can lose its industrial foundation and two-thirds of its people, while all its mainstays—churches, government, businesses, charities, unions—fall like building flats in a strong wind, hardly making a sound.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“The unwinding brings freedom, more than the world has ever granted, and to more kinds of people than ever before—freedom to go away, freedom to return, freedom to change your story, get your facts, get hired, get fired, get high, marry, divorce, go broke, begin again, start a business, have it both ways, take it to the limit, walk away from the ruins, succeed beyond your dreams and boast about it, fail abjectly and try again.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“In other words, Foxx represented what Sarah Palin (speaking at a campaign fundraiser in Greensboro three weeks before the election) called “the real America,” by which she did not mean fallow farms and disability checks and crack.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“Anybody who thinks factory jobs were good jobs needs to go visit somebody on a line,” she said. “Most people wouldn’t survive in a factory. Mitt Romney would die in a week.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“From the back of the room a man drawled out a reply: “Bullll-shit…” As a southerner, Connaughton believed that whenever an investment banker from New York came down saying “We can save you money,” there needed to be someone in the room saying “Bullll-shit.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“And it was only after his death, after Wal-Mart’s downhome founder was no longer its public face, that the country began to understand what his company had done. Over the years, America had become more like Wal-Mart. It had gotten cheap. Prices were lower, and wages were lower. There were fewer union factory jobs, and more part-time jobs as store greeters. The small towns where Mr. Sam had seen his opportunity were getting poorer, which meant that consumers there depended more and more on everyday low prices, and made every last purchase at Wal-Mart, and maybe had to work there, too. The hollowing out of the heartland was good for the company’s bottom line.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“When clerks and truck drivers tried to join unions and Wal-Mart ruthlessly crushed them, firing anyone foolish enough to speak out, Mr. Sam would come around afterward and apologize to any associates who felt ill-treated, vowing to do better, and some of them said that if only Mr. Sam knew what was going on, things wouldn’t be so bad. When the departure of factory jobs for overseas turned into a flood, Mr. Sam launched a Buy American campaign, winning praise from politicians and newspapers around the country, and Wal-Mart stores put up MADE IN THE U.S.A. signs over racks of clothing imported from Bangladesh, and consumers didn’t stop to consider that Wal-Mart was driving American manufacturers overseas or out of business by demanding killingly low prices.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“And he saw that the voters no longer felt much connection to the local parties or national institutions. They got their politics on TV, and they were not persuaded by policy descriptions or rational arguments. They responded to symbols and emotions. They were growing more partisan, too, living in districts that were increasingly Democratic or Republican, liberal or conservative. Donors were more likely to send money if they could be frightened or angered, if the issues were framed as simple choices between good and evil—which was easy for a man whose America stood forever at a historic crossroads, its civilization in perpetual peril.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“In suburbia,” Van Sickler said, “no one can hear you scream.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“By then it was Newt Gringrich's city as much as anyone's. Whether he ever truly believed his own rhetoric, the generation he brought to power fervently did. He gave them mustard gas and they used it on every conceivable enemy, including him. At the millennium the two sides were dug deep in opposing trenches, the positions forever fixed, bodies piling up in the mud, last year's corpses this year's bones, a war whose causes no one could quite explain, with no end in sight: l'enfer de Washington.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“Sein Egoismus war eine rationale Reaktion auf die Wirklichkeit, in der er lebte.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“Thiel concluded that “greed is far preferable to envy: It is less destructive (I’d rather live in a society where people don’t share than in one where they try to take what belongs to everybody else) and it is more honest.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“It became the first company in the history of the world to offer cryogenics as part of its employee benefits package.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: Thirty Years of American Decline

“Neither was willing to tell Americans that they were no longer exceptional but should try to be again.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“You have dizzying change where there’s no progress.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“If you don’t use your power, you won’t have any power.” It was like fundraising, where you wanted to ask people for favors, just as a cow had to be milked in order to keep the milk”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“He had bought into a lie: go to college, get a good education, get a job with a Fortune 500 company, and you’d be happy. He had done all that and he was miserable. He’d gotten out of his father’s house only to find another kind of servitude. He decided to start over and do things his own way. He would become an entrepreneur.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America