George Packer.追逐美国梦的南方白人农民、失业的非裔女工、美国总统乔·拜登的资深幕僚，还有依靠互联网发迹的PayPal创始人——帕克笔下的主人公是4位60后美国人，他们成长于美国战后经济迅速增长的黄金年代，成年后经历了南方烟草业的衰败、锈带地区的去工业化、金融危机等事件，“美国梦”和他们的人生一起下坠。除了上述四位主人公，帕克还在书中穿插了几位大人物的故事——沃尔玛创始人山姆·沃尔顿、说唱歌手Jay-Z、共和党元老纽特·金里奇等，用一个个人物的经历来讲述这个国家在过去四十年里的社会变迁。2013年，这部作品因“揭开美国的破碎裂痕”而获得了美国国家图书奖。
《下沉年代》 [美] 乔治·帕克 著 刘冉 译新经典文化·文汇出版社 2021-1
在作者描述的美国过去四十年的时间里，究竟是什么在解体？什么在下沉？又或者，这些现象仅仅在美国发生吗？日前，在北京举办的《下沉年代》读书分享会上，嘉宾们一同讨论了美国梦的消逝。
精英阶层极化敲碎了美国梦的隐形契约
《下沉年代》的英文原名为“Unwinding”，作者用来形容某种生活方式及社会结构的解体过程。那么，解体的究竟是什么？
活动现场，清华大学社会学系副教授严飞提出，对美国的长时段观察有三个最重要评判的核心指标。第一是重叠的共识——一个社会可以听见不同的声音，有不同的秩序观；大家虽然持有不同想法，但是可以彼此辩论、交流，在讨论基础上变成重叠的共识；如果一种声音压制另外一种声音，一种社会秩序观取代所有秩序观，就会发生秩序的崩塌。第二是心灵的惯性，也是一个社会最小的单元是社区。在美国的小镇里，每个人都不断勇于自发参与到公共事务中，不断与世界，与周围社会、组织、社群产生共鸣。第三是公共的美德，也就是彼此尊重，有道德感。
哪怕是经过体制崩塌的大风大浪，如果这三点还继续存在，那么社会最终不会分崩离析，还是可以继续往前走。媒体人梁文道补充称，在重叠的共识、小镇公共文化以及公共美德之外，一些根本原则，例如《独立宣言》或美国宪法对美国整个国家的维系也很重要。在历史上，无论政见不同的各方如何争论，总还是会相信这个美国历史神话。但是，到了特朗普时代，美国政治已经到了可以直接怀疑建国精神的地步，“这是最近几年美国政治最大的一个变化。”
Unwinding还有另外一层涵义，梁文道指出，在于书里的几位主要角色及其祖辈都曾相信，一个美国人和这个国家有一份不言自明的隐形契约：好好工作，做善良而正直的美国公民，就将有机会找到体面的安身之所和生存之道。严飞也谈到，他在美国读书期间曾碰到偷渡客，这位偷渡客完全不懂英文，却愿意乘风破浪到纽约，这是因为他相信可以通过勤奋努力不断打工，汇款给家里盖房，这就是美国梦的真实写照。然而，这份隐形契约在《下沉年代》中不复存在，因为有的人飞黄腾达，有的人则不断下坠。
背后的原因在于精英阶层的极化，严飞说，这意味着1%的人占有99%的资源。他看到，精英学生毕业后可以去麦肯锡、波士顿咨询公司这些顶级投行，顶级投行也愿意去精英学校招人。但是精英学校的学生的来源是哪里呢？严飞引用哈佛大学一位印度裔学者的研究称，如今，美国精英学校有14.5%学生来自于全美1%的阶层。曾经在硅谷生活过的严飞说，硅谷虽然是全美最自由、最有创新力的财富聚集地，但其背后也有很多凄凉的故事——这里有很多无家可归的流浪汉，没有地方睡觉，不愿睡在公园长椅上，就会花两美金买票坐22路公交，一路大概一个半小时，睡到终点站被叫醒后，带着全部家当下车，再换另外一辆车返回，四趟八美金就可以解决一晚的住宿问题。
严飞 出版社供图
严飞说，《下沉年代》中也有类似的“unwinding”例子，书中有一位主人公叫塔米，本来塔米连续工作几十年，可以获得相对稳定的收入，每小时25美元，并有退休金。但突然有一天，塔米被告知这家工厂要裁员1.5万人，员工要面临一个选择：买断剩下所有工龄，一次性拿走14万美金，或是原来25美金的时薪降为13美金，工作量增加一倍。原本只要勤奋工作就可以获得尊严、自由和社会地位的信仰，一下子崩塌了——整个工厂都在哭泣。
贫富差距悬殊成为一种全球现象
《下沉年代》的写法是跟随几个主要人物，观察他们在不同年代的经历，中间穿插很多小篇幅，讲述一些大人物的故事。梁文道认为：“这本书厉害的地方在于，虽然只是四个人物，但是作者通过描写他们周边的社会环境，就能让读者感觉到这四个人不只是个体，而是反映了美国社会的很大一部分。”严飞则看到，有的人说这本书缺少理论框架，但读者依然可以从中看到，个人的困境可能是由结构性变化推动的。
《下沉年代》看起来是一部唱衰美国的作品，事实如何？英国《金融时报》专栏作家马丁·沃尔夫在今年撰文称，中国精英千万不要相信美国已经衰落。他认为，美国仍掌握着大量资源，尤其是在经济领域。马丁·沃尔夫看到，全世界最有价值（注：全世界最有价值的公司是根据市值来进行评定的，即公司发行的股票数量乘以一股价值计算得出）的10家公司中，有7家总部设在美国，前20强中有14家总部设在美国；科技公司前20强中有12家是美国公司；在生命科学领域，美国公司在前10名中占据了7席。从这些例子来说，美国仍是全球最有创意的经济体。而梁文道在活动中反驳了马丁·沃尔夫的观点，他认为，《下沉年代》一书中最大的丑角就是华尔街，这里有一群贪婪、自私的人，当年美国的金融风暴要由他们来负责，但最后他们平安无事，该赚钱照样赚钱。这样的资本力量以及沃尔夫谈到的影响未来经济的全球大公司，和美国中下层社会是没有关系的。
梁文道看到，沃尔玛创始人山姆·沃尔顿去世时，其家族六位成员的财富加起来等于全美国30%底层人民的全部财富。而贫富差距悬殊也早就不是一个国家的问题，在今天已经成为全球问题。在全世界范围内，城市是全球化经济网络里面的节点，获益最多，离它稍远的郊区则被排除在外，梁文道有这样一种印象，并不是仅仅只有美国在下沉，全世界都面临着这样的状况。因此，也不仅仅在美国，全球很多地方的年轻人都“产生了厌倦、倦怠的情绪”。
The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
https://www.amazon.ca/Unwinding-Inner-History-New-America/dp/0374534608
by George Packer;United States; English, 2013
American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown, and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. In The Unwinding, George Packer tells the story of the past three decades by journeying through the lives of several Americans, including a son of tobacco farmers who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South, a factory worker in the Rust Belt trying to survive the collapse of her city, a Washington insider oscillating between political idealism and the lure of organized money, and a Silicon Valley billionaire who arrives at a radical vision of the future. Packer interweaves these stories with sketches of public figures, from Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z, and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics. Packer's novelistic and kaleidoscopic history of the new America is his most ambitious work to date.
The Unwinding
From Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unwinding
The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America is a 2013 non-fiction book by the American journalist George Packer. The book uses biographies of individual Americans as a means of discussing important forces in American history from 1978 to 2012, including the subprime mortgage crisis, the decline of American manufacturing, and the influence of money on politics. The Unwinding includes lengthy profiles of five subjects: a Youngstown, Ohio factory worker turned community organizer, a biodiesel entrepreneur from North Carolina, a Washington lobbyist and Congressional staffer, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel, and people involved in the distressed housing market in Tampa, Florida. Interspersed with these longer accounts are ten briefer biographical sketches of famous Americans such as the rapper Jay-Z, the politician Newt Gingrich, and the restaurateur and food activist Alice Waters.
In an interview with PBS NewsHour, Packer defined the book's theme as the unraveling of
The Unwinding follows the decline of a number of American institutions that Packer believes underpinned this contract, including locally owned businesses, unions, and public schools. According to Packer, the "void" left by the decline of these institutions "was filled by the default force in American life, organized money."[2]
The book's format and style were inspired by John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy, a series of novels published in the 1930s. Like The Unwinding, the U.S.A. trilogy combined longer narrative accounts of its main characters with short biographies of influential figures of the time period and collections of newspaper headlines and song lyrics.[3][4]
The Unwinding won the 2013 National Book Award for Nonfiction[5] and was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award.[6]
Contents[edit]
Jeff Connaughton[edit]
Jeff Connaughton began a decades-long affiliation with Senator Joe Biden in 1979 when, as a student at the University of Alabama, he invited the Senator to speak to a campus group. Connaughton was so impressed by Biden that he committed to working for Biden if the Senator ever ran for President. After earning an M.B.A. degree and working for a few years in the financial industry, Connaughton joined Biden's 1988 presidential campaign as a fundraiser. After the campaign imploded, Connaughton found a job on the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He later worked for Abner Mikva in the White House Counsel's office during the Clinton administration. Although Connaughton was identified in Washington as a "Biden guy" he was deeply disappointed with what he perceived as ingratitude by Biden – for instance, the Senator refused to call Mikva to recommend Connaughton. Still, after leaving the White House, Connaughton parlayed his connections into a career as a lobbyist for the firm Quinn Gillespie & Associates, representing clients such as Laurent Gbagbo, the President of the Ivory Coast. Connaughton held frequent fundraisers for politicians in order to gain access to their offices.
When Biden became Vice President and Ted Kaufman, Biden's former Chief of Staff was appointed to fill Biden's Senate seat, Connaughton went to work for Kaufman. Together, Kaufman and Connaughton worked on reform of the financial services industry in the wake of the Great Recession. They encouraged criminal prosecution of financial fraud cases as well as limits to the size of banks, but met with limited success. Connaughton found that the lobbyists he used to work with had better information and more input on financial reform regulation than he had as a Senate aide. Connaughton believed that advocates for U.S. financial system reform, such as the group Americans for Financial Reform, were being overwhelmed by industry lobbyists. After Kaufman's term ended, Connaughton, disillusioned with Obama/Biden and Washington, moved to Savannah, Georgia and published a memoir of his experiences, The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins.
A version of this section of The Unwinding was published in The New Yorker, where Packer is a staff writer.[7]
Dean Price[edit]
Dean Price came from a family of tobacco farmers in the Piedmont Triad region of North Carolina. A devotee of the self-help books of Napoleon Hill, Price opened a number of fast-food restaurants, convenience stores and gas stations along U.S. Route 220. Price witnessed the decline in the 1990s of all three of the region's important industries: tobacco, textiles and furniture. After Hurricane Katrina led to diesel shortages, Price became enamored with the idea of biodiesel. He believed that biodiesel, made from locally-grown crops, could help struggling local farmers while also avoiding what he believed would be the catastrophic consequences of peak oil. With partners, Price founded a business that would refine locally-grown canola into biodiesel, which was then sold at Price's gas stations. This was the first establishment of its kind in the country and it attracted the attention of the local Congressman, Tom Perriello and the Obama Administration. However, Price's restaurants and gas stations failed amidst the Great Recession and Price lost control of the biodiesel company. After these failures, Price began a new venture: using used cooking oil from restaurants to provide fuel for local school buses.
Tammy Thomas[edit]
Tammy Thomas is an African American woman from Youngstown, Ohio. The child of a heroin addict, she was raised by her great-grandmother, a maid. Thomas witnessed the dramatic consequences of the collapse of Youngstown's steel industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The city's population declined from 140,000 in 1970 to 95,000 in 1990[8] (it was about 67,000 in 2010) and crime increased precipitously. Despite becoming a mother as a teenager, Thomas was the first member of her family to graduate from high school. Determined not to become dependent on welfare, in 1988 she got a union job at a Packard Electric plant that made automotive parts for General Motors. The job enabled Thomas to become a homeowner and send her three children to college. In 2006 Packard Electric's successor company, Delphi Automotive, announced that it would close most of its American plants, including those in Youngstown, as it shifted production to Mexican maquiladoras. Thomas took a buyout offer from Delphi. Thomas found a new job as a community organizer in Youngstown, recruiting local residents to advocate for neighborhood improvement and mapping the city's many abandoned properties.
