The Unwinding is the perfect title for this book. It portrays and revolves around the sad and unsettling history of the last four decades in the United States. His topic is the fall of the structure of the national government. Packer makes remarks regarding the unraveling of unspoken agreements about the limits to Wall Street's greed, about what a congressman would or wouldn't do for the right price, about what a company owes its workers, and what the wealthy should contribute in tax. As Packers narrative moves through spectrum of inequality, from inner-city Ohio to Silicon Valley, to the exurban McMansions of Florida, and to Washington's corridors of power, he explains that each is fundamentally on his or her own. At the first glance, it seems as though Packer is just summarizing the change of the social order when the Roosevelt republic collapsed. But as you progress, it becomes apparent that he is asking a very important question: How did you get here? The book revolves around this question, and as Packer continues through the answers in the lives of each of the characters, he relates all of our lives through the last few years. We were all present, and even if we didn’t fully understand what we were seeing we still saw it. The way life seems to drain from us, dollars from our paychecks, jobs from communities, hopes out of expectations. Packer gives a story to the characters and in those stories he relates us. This book relates to many aspects of government but it mainly appeals to my own personal opinion. Government no longer consists of genuine politicians seeking to help the people, banks are no longer the staid institutions we once knew, and American manufacturing and the stable union jobs that accompanied it are mostly gone. As Packer notes, the loss of these institutions has obviously hurt some and helped others to prosper. The President in my eye is a puppet in the scheme of things and isn’t the one running the show. But rather, his ideas are formed
