The Unwinding

Author:: George Packer Full Title:: The Unwinding Tags:#media/book

• themes::
  • theme 1
• Summary::
  • The Unwinding does a great job telling the story of a very complex issue in a way that is accessible to the masses. A lot of people approach the widening inequality gap in america and the shrinking of the middle class and the unwinding of society as a very technical thing that they have to speak in technical language to address. They are playing the game that got us into this mess, playing the game of the elites and the technocrats. Trying to change the system from within, speaking to the wrong audience. George Packer is able to make normally boring and complex subjects accessible and gripping by telling them through the lens of people and making the emotion visceral and intimate to readers. ^RkU8vTMrd
    • mini-essays on how to communicate idea
      • tweets from visakanv on figuring out what’s compelling to you (develop your personal taste) and then figuring out the ways to make it compelling to others — catering the story to the audience and medium storytelling permanent ^mre1j4ej1
  • institutions that we’ve always held sacred are failing normal people. Everyone is struggling for a better future but the dream and contract we were promised is no longer holding true. Outsized outcomes for inputs, rich getting richer, and poor getting poorer. There are a class of people that are forgotten. Perhaps we’ve never followed our ideals, but we’re more clear-eyed about the reality of life now where there will always be people that think they deserve greatness
  • underlying message of hope, that the american exceptionalism we were taught is a lie, but that doesn’t mean we can hope to actually achieve it. There are normal people everywhere who have survived so much hardship and are fighting for what they believe to be right. They are the beacons of hope while the case studies on more famous people give this first-person perspective on someone you grow to hate but can still sort of understand how they got there?
    • 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. (Location 6533) ^ALyf01Rmv

* Highlights first synced by Readwise 2021-01-07

* Like any great change, the unwinding began at countless times, in countless ways—and at some moment the country, always the same country, crossed a line of history and became irretrievably different. ([Location 44](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=44))
* 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. ([Location 49](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=49))
* Winning and losing are all-American games, and in the unwinding winners win bigger than ever, floating away like bloated dirigibles, and losers have a long way to fall before they hit bottom, and sometimes they never do. ([Location 58](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=58))
* 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. ([Location 60](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=60))
* In the unwinding, everything changes and nothing lasts, except for the voices, American voices, open, sentimental, angry, matter-of-fact; ([Location 71](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=71))

* New highlights added 2021-01-07 at 11:44 PM

* 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. ([Location 252](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=252))

* New highlights added 2021-01-09 at 12:22 AM

* 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. ([Location 354](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=354))
* 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. ([Location 357](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=357))

* highlights from 2021-01-12

* In Nashville, as in Milwaukee, she had better relations with white people than with her own family, and later she would say that she never felt oppressed except by black people who disliked her very dark skin or envied her success. ([Location 962](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=962))
* Empowerment, entrepreneurship, the self-made celeb, wealth as the ultimate and inevitable emblem of worth ([Location 971](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=971))
* Her bond with her viewers was unbreakable. Many of them had never had a black person in their living room before, except on a sitcom, and she made them less lonely, more tolerant and open, more curious about books and ideas, while they made her unimaginably rich. ([Location 992](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=992))
* they were not always attuned to their divine self; they were never all that they could be. And since there was no random suffering in life, Oprah left them with no excuse. ([Location 1009](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=1009))
* Remaining Ordinary Joe became a point of aggressive pride. He was as incorruptible as he was ungrateful. ([Location 1070](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=1070))
* In Washington, elected officials considered themselves a higher breed. They were “principals,” had shown the moxie and endured the humiliation of standing before the public, and in their eyes, staff were a lower form of human beings—parasites that attached themselves to the front man for the ride. ([Location 1071](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=1071))

* highlights from 2021-01-13

* Ray wanted to write a novel. But a man who was trying to wash six loads of clothes in a Laundromat while his wife was serving food somewhere and the kids were waiting for him to come pick them up somewhere else and it was getting late and the woman ahead of him kept putting more dimes in her dryer—that man could never write a novel. To do that, he would need to be living in a world that made sense, a world that stayed fixed in one place so that he could describe it accurately. That wasn’t Ray’s world. ([Location 1181](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=1181))
* Hard work, good intentions, doing the right things—these would not be enough, things would not get better. ([Location 1187](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=1187))
* His characters spoke a language that sounded ordinary, except that every word echoed with the strange, and in the silences between words a kind of panic rose. These lives were trembling over a void. ([Location 1203](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=1203))
* “Most of my characters would like their actions to count for something,” Ray once said. “But at the same time they’ve reached the point—as many people do—that they know it isn’t so. It doesn’t add up any longer. The things you once thought important or even worth dying for aren’t worth a nickel now. It’s their lives they’ve become uncomfortable with, lives they see breaking down. They’d like to set things right, but they can’t.” ([Location 1205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=1205))
* Ray had his fingers on the pulse of a deeper loneliness. He seemed to know, in the unintentional way of a fiction writer, that the country’s future would be most unnerving in its very ordinariness, in the late-night trip to the supermarket, the yard sale at the end of the line. He sensed that beneath the surface of life there was nothing to stand on. ([Location 1217](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=1217))
* “They sold his stories of inadequate, failed, embarrassed and embarrassing men, many of them drunkards, all of them losers, to yuppies,” one of his old friends said. “His people confirmed the yuppies in their sense of superiority.” ([Location 1246](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=1246))

* highlights from 2021-01-16

* After Sheetz opened, his margins went down, but he kept his price right at theirs and stayed in business. What he learned later was that Exxon Mobil was selling gas to Sheetz for three or four cents a gallon less than he had to pay. That was the difference between two hundred fifty Sheetz stores and two Red Birches. That was life as an entrepreneur. ([Location 1389](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=1389))
* Getting rich was a matter of wanting to be rich, wanting it with “a white heat of desire,” teaching yourself to imagine wealth as specifically as possible, learning to concentrate your mind on the desired goal and the means, and to eliminate besetting fears and other negative thoughts. These were lessons that Americans, living under a system of capitalism and democracy, were uniquely equipped to apply in their lives. ([Location 1430](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=1430))
* What Hill did was to take the limitless native belief in the powers of the self and organize it into a system that sounded like a practical philosophy. He taught Dean to believe that he was the author of his own destiny. ([Location 1458](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=1458))

* highlights from 2021-01-20

* all of it said that Youngstown was steel, nothing but steel, that everyone here owed life to the molten pour of iron shaped to human ends, that without it there was no life. ([Location 671](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=671))
* But no one imagined that Sheet and Tube would go down overnight. When it happened, there was no local industrialist, no member of the Youngstown elite, no powerful institution or organization, to step in and try to stop it. The steel barons were long gone, local businesses had no clout, city politicians were fractious and corrupt, the Youngstown Vindicator resorted to shallow optimism. The city had no civic core to rally around. ([Location 819](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=819))
* the city became an icon of deindustrialization, a song title, a cliché. “It was one of the quietest revolutions we’ve ever had,” Russo said. “If a plague had taken away this many people in the Midwest, it would be considered a huge historical event.” But because it was caused by the loss of blue-collar jobs, not a bacterial infection, Youngstown’s demise was regarded as almost normal. ([Location 858](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=858)) ^FOTfn-xFA
* Tammy survived for nineteen years. She never thought of that as anything special, and when anyone asked how she got through the work of doing the same thing a bazillion times, she hardly knew what to say. She did what she was supposed to do. It was a paycheck, a decent paycheck, and that saved her so she could save her kids. ([Location 1539](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=1539))
* The Walton family owned 69 percent of the shares, and Sam was worth around $15 million. Entrepreneurship, free enterprise, risk—the only ways to improve other people’s quality of life. ([Location 1688](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=1688))
* The face like a good-natured bird of prey under a blue-and-white Wal-Mart baseball cap smiled more as it aged. As long as Mr. Sam was alive, Wal-Mart was a great American story out of Bentonville. ([Location 1728](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=1728))
* 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. And in parts of the country that were getting richer, on the coasts and in some big cities, many consumers regarded Wal-Mart and its vast aisles full of crappy, if not dangerous, Chinese-made goods with horror, and instead purchased their shoes and meat in expensive boutiques as if overpaying might inoculate them against the spread of cheapness, while stores like Macy’s, the bastions of a former middle-class economy, faded out, and America began to look once more like the country Mr. Sam had grown up in. ([Location 1739](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=1739))
    * **Note**: No free lunch. The middle of the line was killed out for expensive or super cheap
* There had always been a transactional aspect to Connaughton’s obsession, and now it was the central aspect. Biden had used him, and he had used Biden, and they would go on using each other, but that would be all. It was a Washington relationship. ([Location 1800](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=1800)) ^rb92ToByU
* There was only one wall between him and the high-stakes meetings in Mikva’s office, but in Washington that wall made all the difference. ([Location 1850](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=1850))
* 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.” 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 coming. ([Location 1868](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=1868))
* So much in the world of power came down to chance. ([Location 1957](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=1957))
* Tolkien, sci-fi, chess, math, computers: in the 1970s and ’80s, especially among high-achieving boys in places like the San Francisco Bay Area, these attributes were often correlated with one another and with a worldview, which was libertarianism. It had the prestige of abstract logic behind it. ([Location 2025](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=2025))
* If he were a Marxist, he would have called it alienated labor—working eighty hours a week at something he didn’t believe in so that eight years on he might make partner, with the next forty years of his life laid out before him. His chief rivals were under the same roof, working right next to him, competing like crazy for stakes that were all internally assigned, with no transcendent value. ([Location 2108](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=2108))
* he never gossiped, avoided the infighting that was part of working with other people, and presented such a rational demeanor that it became a barrier to intimacy. ([Location 2128](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=2128))
* There was a contemporary word for what Girard described: status. In New York the struggle for it was ubiquitous and ferocious. Everyone was on top of everyone else in an infinite skyscraper—you looked down and it went as far as you could see, you looked up and it went as far as you could see, you spent years climbing the stairs, all the while wondering if you had moved up at all or if it was just an optical illusion. ([Location 2132](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=2132))
* Thiel, his roommate, and some other friends rented a time-share in the Hamptons. It turned into a nightmarish weekend, with everything costing too much, the service bad, the whole vacation a fight with other people from start to finish—a classic example of something generated without regard to its real value. ([Location 2135](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=2135))
* Unlike New York, Silicon Valley wasn’t a zero-sum game. ([Location 2159](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=2159))
    * **Note**: Is this still true today?
* But it became clear that setting up an account on the PayPal website, which enabled transactions with anyone who had an e-mail address, was a far more popular way to send money than trying to get Palm Pilots to mate on a restaurant table (the mobile Internet was in its earliest, glitch-ridden stage). The e-mail idea seemed so simple that it would be only a matter of time before competitors figured it out. ([Location 2196](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=2196))
* Miller, his senior executives, and the banks would be the winners. The losers would be Delphi’s American workers. ([Location 2501](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=2501))
* WALL STREET GIANTS PROSPER AMID DOWNTURN … He displays other Master of the Universe attributes, including a fabulous art collection, a power wardrobe, and an attractive, blond second wife several inches taller than he is.… ([Location 2549](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=2549))

* highlights from 2021-01-21

* But he was building his life on that ideal, so he remained practical, and his self-control became almost inhuman. The institutions showed their health by lifting up a man of his qualities, and even when they went off course, their ultimate power lay in self-correction. ([Location 2588](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=2588))
* He was holding together the foreign policy establishment without knowing that it was gone. He needed structure to thrive, but the structures that held up the postwar order had eroded. The Council on Foreign Relations and the Ford Foundation no longer mattered. The statesmen and generals had become consultants and pundits. The army was composed of professionals, not citizens. The public schools were leaving the children of the whole people semiliterate. The parties were locked in a war of attrition. ([Location 2631](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=2631))
* He was trying to function inside institutional failure, but that was incomprehensible to the stellar product of great American institutions. The administration was rotten with ideologues and operatives who showed contempt for the institutions. ([Location 2635](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=2635))

* highlights from 2021-01-29

* The United States seems keener than most countries to celebrate the new millennium in style: maybe the nation is wealthy and optimistic enough that big parties seem apropos.… COAST-TO-COAST FIREWORKS … “This is a unique moment for our country,” Clinton told a crowd assembled just off the National Mall, where a gala public celebration was scheduled for later Friday night. “Light may be fading on the twentieth century, but the sun is still rising on America.” ([Location 2271](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=2271))

* highlights from 2021-01-30

* A colleague at the firm once said that when Quinn Gillespie hired a new lobbyist, only two things mattered: “One, is he comfortable asking his friends to do favors for him? And two, is he willing to do this?” The colleague made a show of spreading his legs. “Does he understand that we’re here to make money? If he’s not hungry to make money, he’s not going to come to work every day doing what he needs to do.” ([Location 2705](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=2705))
* wanted to get things done and play at high levels. He’d never made it there with Biden—public service seemed to bring more humiliation than triumph—but the private sector was closer to a meritocracy: you got rewarded according to what you produced, not the whims and flaws of the boss. ([Location 2709](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=2709))
* but the ones who stayed in public service longest painted themselves into a corner financially. In Washington there were no crosscurrents, no career opportunities that came along other than the one business of the company town. It was the capital of the planet and unimaginably richer than at any time in American history, but still an isolated town, a world apart. ([Location 2723](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=2723))
* “universal theory” of money in American life since the 1980s: “When the benefits exploded on both Wall Street and Washington, when it became possible to make millions of dollars in corporate booty—I’m a living example of it, no one’s ever heard of me and I walked out of Washington with millions of dollars—when the cost of certain behaviors diminished, when norms began to erode and disappear that had held people back at least from being garish about the way they made money, the culture changed. It changed on Wall Street and it changed in Washington.” ([Location 2737](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=2737))
* Wealth added to their power, power swelled their wealth. They connected special interests to party officials using the adhesive of fundraising. They ate breakfast with politicians, lunch with the heads of trade associations, and dinner with other Professional Democrats. Behind their desks were “power walls”—photo galleries showing them smiling next to the highest-ranking politicians they knew. Their loyalty was to the firm first, then their former boss in politics, then their party, and then—if he was a Democrat—the president. ([Location 2745](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=2745))
* In Washington, pillow talk could be worth millions. ([Location 2759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=2759))

* highlights from 2021-02-01

* 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. ([Location 2829](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=2829))
* Instead of mass production, it would be production by the masses. The future would take America back into its past. ([Location 2861](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=2861))

* highlights from 2021-02-03

* Alice loved the revolutionary atmosphere of Berkeley in the late 1960s, but hers was going to be a revolution of the senses, a communal experience of pleasure. ([Location 2988](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=2988))
* For some Americans, the local, organic movement became a righteous retreat into an ethic defined by consumer choices. The movement, and the moral pressure it brought to bear in parts of society, declared: Whatever else we can’t achieve, we can always purify our bodies. ([Location 3048](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=3048))
* you were buying or you were dying. Shopping malls and megachurches sprang up nearby, and the two-lane highways got so crowded that they had to be widened. ([Location 3098](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=3098))
* No place was too remote or unpromising for development. ([Location 3099](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=3099))
* The growth machine became the employment agency. Other than minimum wage jobs at restaurants and big-box stores, it was hard to find work outside the real estate industry. ([Location 3112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=3112))

* highlights from 2021-02-08

* When the war began, the president said that he was sleeping like a baby. “I’m sleeping like a baby, too,” the secretary said. “Every two hours, I wake up screaming.” ([Location 2646](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=2646)) ^qMJGuXDTJ
* Life was richest and most creative where people of different backgrounds could meet face-to-face and exchange ideas. And that happened in cities—cities of a particular kind. ([Location 3202](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=3202))
* As a result, strangers were never obliged to engage with one another. “No encounters happen by accident in Tampa,” Van Sickler said. “Or if they do, they’re traumatic.” ([Location 3212](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=3212))
* A strain of thought said that urban life was un-American, and Van Sickler felt its presence in the growth machine out in Hillsborough County. The corporate-built houses in the subdivisions looked like bunkers, with tiny windows, no breezeways or courtyards to suit the climate, air conditioners running all the time in cavelike darkness. Inside, families sat in their carpeted living room before a large-screen plasma TV, with the blinds drawn against the sunlight. Outside, the long, long streets of identical houses without shade gave people no reason to want to walk anywhere, so they went from car to driveway to house and never got to know their neighbors. They were retreating from the world, and their isolation was deepened by a pervasive paranoia. ([Location 3214](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=3214))
* Florida drew the transient and rootless on the eternal promise of a second chance, with more than its share of scammers and con men. ([Location 3220](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=3220))
* The whole concept of home ownership had been warped beyond recognition. These houses were disposable commodities. That was what drove the demand. ([Location 3225](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=3225))
* But the collapse of the Ponzi scheme was unspectacular, with no demolished factories or abandoned farms. The ghost subdivisions were pretty, in a way. Under the brilliant aquamarine sky the houses looked like perfect cardboard cutouts, the surfaces smooth and regular, the blinds drawn, the landscape almost untainted by human life. ([Location 3294](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=3294))
* The banks had thrown money at fraudulent borrowers to overpay for crappy houses because the risk was immediately passed on to someone else. ([Location 3392](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=3392))
* Rubin was giving his best economic advice, always disinterested and on the merits. (If it happened to be Wall Street’s view too, well, the economy had become dominated by the financial sector, and any Democratic president would be destroyed if he lost its confidence, especially after the party began to raise most of its money on the Street.) So Clinton, elected as a middle-class populist, governed as a pro-business centrist, ([Location 3626](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=3626))
    * People using shield of humility to hide their fortune and their absolute confidence and refusal to admit guilt
* Rubin had spent his career trying to harmonize his and Wall Street’s interests with America’s, and when that became impossible in 2008, he disappeared. ([Location 3679](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=3679))
* Near the Pine Ridge reservation, a Native American woman told Connaughton, “You only care about us once every four years.” It burned a hole right through him because he knew it was true—the plight of people like her moved him every presidential election cycle, and then he forgot about them. ([Location 3729](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=3729))
* A campaign like Biden’s was an exercise in collective self-delusion. Ted Kaufman, who was a senior adviser to Biden, told Connaughton, “In a presidential campaign, you’re either faking it or you’re dead.” ([Location 3740](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=3740))
* If it was true, everything he had learned in business school about efficient markets, everything he had learned in law school about the standards of disclosure at banks, about the professional duty of the lawyers and accountants they hired to reveal material information and protect investors, was bullshit. He believed in those institutions—he had to. ([Location 3750](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=3750))
* All the large institutions in Youngstown were distrusted, because they had failed: industry, unions, banks, churches, every level of government. The only way to bring about change in the Valley was block by block. ([Location 3778](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=3778))
* a kind of raw power. It came from her passion about the east side and how it had been forgotten. He saw it as the pilot light that would get her up day in and day out for a job that would not be easy. ([Location 3806](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=3806))
* The goal was to recruit local people and train them as leaders, so that they would bring others along, and slowly the disempowered would gain a sense of agency and the voiceless would begin to speak. ([Location 3841](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=3841))
* She had always put the blame on individuals for failing to help themselves. “One of the things that would frustrate me is when you see a person who ain’t got nothing, ain’t trying to get nothing, and don’t want nothing. An unmotivated person who doesn’t want to get better.” There was a lot of that in Youngstown, but now she saw it as the problem of a community. ([Location 3899](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=3899)) [[quote]] [[community]] 
    * Community organizing as true way to change things
    * [[What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem]]
* Generational poverty, failed schools, the loss of jobs—“A lot of it is not that they don’t want. It is because the system is designed in some instances like it feeds on people a little bit and messes up people’s minds. People get caught in it and they don’t know how to stop it.” In ([Location 3902](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=3902))
* People could pick and choose whether someone was an important inventor or activist, but a black president—nobody could deny that. It wasn’t just black history, it was American history. ([Location 3930](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=3930))

* highlights from 2021-02-19

* the elites in America didn’t have answers for the problems of the working and middle class anymore. Elites thought that everyone needed to become a computer programmer or a financial engineer, that there would be no jobs between eight dollars an hour and six figures. Perriello believed that the new ideas for making things in America again would come from unknown people in obscure places. ([Location 4020](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=4020))

* highlights from 2021-02-20

* In 2010 it was easier living in his imagination of the past and the future than on the stretch of Route 220 that was his life, ([Location 4148](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=4148))

* highlights from 2021-02-22

* They didn’t have a dream, they had a check, surviving nine to five, but he wasn’t trying to survive—he was trying to live it to the limit. Better die enormous on the street than live dormant in a little box called Apartment 5C. ([Location 4207](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=4207))
* He gave Marcy a voice, and the nightmare that America had locked in the basement was suddenly playing in kids’ bedrooms. They wanted to live the American dream with a vengeance, like Scarface, like Jay-Z, they wanted to break the laws and win because only fools still thought you could do it in an orange uniform or a cheap suit when that game was fixed, and there could be a shortcut with a big payoff. ([Location 4234](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=4234))
* When critics called him a sellout or materialist, he had the answer: selfishness was a rational response to the reality he faced. Everything has to be put in context. ([Location 4257](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=4257))
* He was a mogul and a revolutionary, an icon and a thug (that was the perfect hustle), worshipped for getting to the top with a big fuck-you and no standing in line, still telling the world why he was dope, doper than you. ([Location 4266](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=4266))
* Worst of all if Ms. Besser or Mr. Lucas appeared in person, for then the court would have to confront the human face of a foreclosure, the particular lineaments of anxiety etched there by the prospect of losing one’s home, and embarrassment would settle over the proceedings, as if a terminal patient had wandered into a room where doctors were coldly discussing her hopeless prognosis, and the judge might be more likely to ask a few hard questions of the plaintiff’s attorney. ([Location 4311](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=4311))
* Justice, she concluded, was for rich people, not her. The bankers and lawyers benefited while she went broke. The banks made their money by bullying little people, first trying to intimidate her into surrender, and then, when she fought back, burying her in paperwork, hiring appraisers and inspectors who filed false reports about the condition of her motel, smearing her name. ([Location 4609](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=4609))

* highlights from 2021-02-23

* Connaughton, a moderate Democrat, was in the process of being “radicalized by a stunning realization that our government has been taken over by a financial elite that runs the government for the plutocracy.” ([Location 4628](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=4628))
* All at the top of their field, all brilliant and educated to within an inch of their lives, all Democrats, all implicated in an epic failure—now hired to sort out the ruins. How could they not see things the way of the bankers with whom they’d studied and worked and ate and drunk and gotten rich? ==Social promotion and conflict of interest were built into the soul of the meritocracy. The Blob was unkillable.== ([Location 4681](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=4681)) ^2hMpMSCn7

* highlights from 2021-02-24

* If we don’t treat a Wall Street firm that defrauded investors of millions of dollars the same way we treat someone who stole five hundred dollars from a cash register, then how can we expect our citizens to have faith in the rule of law?” ([Location 4796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=4796)) ^wdw1r2awC
* There were three thousand lobbyists swarming Capitol Hill, urging Congress not to do anything fundamental about the wreckage the banks had made. Who stood on the other side? An angry but distracted public that didn’t know how to use the levers of power. ([Location 4843](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=4843)) ^mQ40MhjY0

* highlights from 2021-02-25

* The political war was all about culture. ([Location 5013](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=5013)) ^sL_hStOJn
* Reporters were spooked because Jayson Blair made up stories in the Times and Dan Rather aired phony documents on 60 Minutes, while watchdogs on the right and left barked ferociously at their every hint of bias and upstarts of the New Media jeered the frightened gatekeepers, ==until no one knew who was right and what was true and no one trusted the press and the press stopped trusting itself.== ([Location 5019](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=5019)) ^yJ9MYzCkm
* Old Media’s rules about truth and objectivity were dead. What mattered was getting maximum bang from a story, changing the narrative. ([Location 5049](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=5049)) ^OYhnohlm5
* People would get off the train and walk, and walking (without fear of traffic death) would change the urban landscape, away from the shopping plaza, the parking lot, the gas station, and the roadside sign to townhouses, cafés, bookstores, the kind of places that encouraged pedestrians to linger, and their presence would spur other businesses to cluster, and before long there would be density—Jane Jacobs’s heaven. Strangers would meet in nontraumatic accidental encounters and exchange ideas. ([Location 5101](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=5101)) ^D6SoHNh-P
* It seemed as if America was becoming a country that no longer believed in itself. “We can’t, we can’t, we can’t. Let’s not do that rail project because it’s not going to work. ([Location 5226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=5226)) ^m4wUpIte5
* most Americans no longer trusted reporters like him, what was the alternative? Who else was going to be the public’s eyes and ears? He didn’t see Daily Kos or Red State at city hall, he didn’t see Google or Facebook at the county commission. ([Location 5257](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=5257)) ^TttUeM_CG

* highlights from 2021-02-26

* The elites were biased toward other elites, even after they had failed massively. “Empires decline when elites become irresponsible.” Obama was a progressive insider, not a populist outsider, and Perriello got no cover from the administration when he went out to face his struggling, irate, misinformed constituents. ([Location 5345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=5345)) ^FDyeoqJZ5

* highlights from 2021-02-28

* He classified himself as a “blue-collar-type guy,” not a “behind-the-counter-take-your-money-can-I-help-you-find-your-dress-size-type guy,” but the only jobs left were in retail, and he lacked the right look and manner. ([Location 5622](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=5622))

* highlights from 2021-03-01

* Most people in bankruptcy weren’t irresponsible—they were too responsible. ([Location 5845](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=5845))
* She had arrived at radicalism, like many conservatives before her, by seeing the institutions that had sustained the old way of life collapse. ([Location 5879](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=5879))
* But Kevin found out pretty quickly that banking wasn’t that hard. Wall Street used this purposefully opaque language to intimidate outsiders, but to succeed you just had to be somewhat comfortable with math or else with bullshit—the former went into trading, the latter into sales, and a quant who could lie made the big money. ([Location 5906](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=5906))
* In a crisis you realized that society operated without anyone knowing deep down what the hell was really going on. ([Location 5929](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=5929))

* highlights from 2021-03-04

* November 13: I lived in my old apartment in Seattle for nearly a decade and barely knew 2 other tenants … i’ve lived in liberty square for just over a month and regularly talk with many of my neighbors and have made many new friends. ([Location 6233](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=6233))
* He also didn’t like the way some protesters demonized everyone who worked in finance, just the way his colleague at the bank demonized everyone in the park. ([Location 6273](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=6273))
* Read by the dozens, these compressed, homemade life stories amassed the moral force of documentary research from hard times, or a Steinbeck novel. And they explained why Occupy Wall Street became an instant brand name. ([Location 6294](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=6294))

* highlights from 2021-03-05

* If a sort of unwinding was happening in America, status markers became weirdly problematic—in a screwed-up society, they could not be the correct, real things. Almost nothing that had high status was a good thing to invest in. ([Location 6446](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=6446))
* The seventies was the decade when things started going wrong. A lot of institutions stopped working. Science and technology stopped progressing, the growth model broke down, government no longer worked as well as in the past, middle-class life started to fray. ([Location 6450](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=6450))
* Your story has been one of incredible, unrelenting progress for sixty years. ([Location 6526](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=6526))
* 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. ([Location 6533](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=6533)) ^ALyf01Rmv

* highlights from 2021-03-08

* 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. ([Location 7035](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=7035))
* Sometimes, while Dean was describing his vision, he would get too far out ahead of himself and start to lose them. ([Location 7217](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=7217))
* “Never go to the second thing first.” It suddenly hit him why he was having so much trouble with the schools. He was going to the second thing first ([Location 7264](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=7264)) ^O72WTusoB
* He was reading a biography of Steve Jobs that talked about the rarefied air you breathe when you have an idea that you know is going to change the world and nobody knows it yet. ([Location 7299](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=7299))
* It was strange how small the idea had to get before anyone would give it a chance. A school fundraiser—as if Dean was a chocolate chip cookie dough salesman. But that’s what he had to become. The work could not have been less auspicious, less like the making of the Apple II. ([Location 7301](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ANI9GIQ&location=7301))