The Unwinding

by George Packer

  She had a square face and wore her dark hair in teased bangs, eighties-style. She always voted Republican, though she didn’t like what Bush did with the Medicare prescription drug bill and No Child Left Behind—too much government. She and her husband always lived within their means, owned a $250,000 home, and when a couple she met at a dinner party making far less than her husband said that theirs was worth $700,000, she was appalled. “They were trying to make a buck off the bubble. They were going to live in it a year and pay interest only. They had all these grandiose plans, and here we were doing everything right. You knew it was trouble.” She blamed the government for that, too—not deregulation, Wall Street, or mortgage lenders. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1992 forced the banks to change their rules and give subprime loans to unqualified people so that more Americans could be homeowners. It was government driving the banks, not the other way around. Why would the banks want to lose money?

  Still, Karen was never active in politics, until 2008. At the beginning of the year she got her stimulus check from Bush—six hundred dollars—and she thought, “What is this? Why are they sending this off to everybody? It’s not the role of government to take money and redistribute it.” But she stayed out of the election, because John McCain didn’t interest her. Then came Sarah Palin in August. Palin electrified Karen. “I could relate to her in a number of ways—her spunk, conveying the views that I held and saying it and not being ashamed of it. She was the same age as me, she was married at the same age as me, her kids, being on the PTA, the way she viewed economics.” Karen was a vegetarian, but it didn’t bother her that Palin liked to hunt as long as she ate the meat. Palin wasn’t an elite—that was what Karen could identify with. Tampa was under the control of a powerful business elite, people like Al Austin, who built Westshore, people who had been making the same mistakes over and over with too much government. Karen’s first political experience had been Reagan, an outsider who came in and bucked the system. Like Palin. That was what Karen was looking for.

  The bank bailout, then Obama’s stimulus package, Cash for Clunkers, the auto bailout—spending was out of control, and it seemed like big business was in collusion with big government. Someone was making money, and it wasn’t the little guy. Karen didn’t know that a third of the stimulus was tax cuts, and she didn’t need to, because she was against it as soon as she heard about “shovel-ready projects.” People like her who had done what they were supposed to were being asked to bail out the freewheeling spenders, again and again, with no end. Judging by his actions, Obama didn’t believe in the American ideal that hard work pays off and you get to keep what you earn. His communistic father, the one he wrote a whole book about, and his radical mentors painted other ideas into Obama’s psyche.

  Karen began to fear that her America, the country she’d grown up in, would not be available for her children. One day, she was helping her son study for his midterm exam, which was on ancient Egypt, and it got her thinking. At the beginning, everybody farmed the land along the Nile and gave rice to the Pharaohs, but then the Pharaohs wanted to build pyramids for their own glory, and they started taxing the people. The same thing happened in Rome. The same thing was happening in the United States. The country was in decline, and her kids might not have her opportunities.

  Karen was a longtime listener to Glenn Beck—he got his break on talk radio in Tampa back in 2000—and because he was now saying so much of what she felt, she DVRed his new TV program on Fox News. The Glenn Beck show caught fire right after the election of Barack Obama, almost three million people tuning in every afternoon. In early February 2009, a few weeks after the inauguration, Beck told his viewers to meet one another: “There are more of you out there than you know.” Hearing that inspired Karen to spend ten dollars and set up an online meet-up site to organize the first gathering of the Tampa 9/12 Project. Beck’s crusade was based on nine principles, such as “America Is Good” and “I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to,” and twelve values, including Reverence and Hope.

  On March 13, 2009, people gathered for viewing parties in Hebron, Kentucky, and Golden Valley, Arizona, and other towns all across the country. Eighty people met at the Tampa Ale House. It was five in the afternoon and the Glenn Beck show was on. There was a video about September 11, 2001, the bravery and unity that followed the attacks, and then Glenn Beck was standing backstage of his set, with his blond brush cut, pinstriped suit, and sneakers, close to the camera, his face filling the frame, choking back tears. “Are you ready to be that person you were that day after 9/11, on 9/12? I told you for weeks, ‘You’re not alone.’” Beck looked upward and extended his arms. “I’m turning into a frickin’ televangelist!” and his voice was breaking, his eyes puffy, his features swelling with the hangdog hurt of the thousand failures and grievances that he carried for the millions of people watching him. He wiped away a tear. “I’m sorry. I just love my country, and I fear for it. It seems like the voices of our leaders and special interests and the media, they’re surrounding us—it’s sounds intimidating! But you know what? Pull away the curtain. You’ll realize, there isn’t anybody there! It’s just a few people that are just pressing the buttons, and their voices are actually really weak.” He leaned in closer and his eyes went hard. “The truth is, they don’t surround us. We surround them. This is our country.”

  The strangers who gathered at the Tampa Ale House didn’t watch the whole show. They were more interested in talking to one another. Karen had always been shy, right through adulthood—just taking on the school spelling bee for the PTA scared her—but now she found herself growing bold. “We all knew each other, in a way,” she said. “We didn’t know each other, but we all felt connected. We had never had a voice and we were starting to create our own voice.” They were people like her—not country club Republicans, just people who felt something was wrong. And she had brought them together. That was the beginning of Karen Jaroch’s life in politics.

  Summer brought Obamacare and a nationwide rebellion. On August 6, Tampa’s Democratic congresswoman, Kathy Castor, held a town hall meeting in a room that was far too small for the fifteen hundred people trying to get in. Things descended into chaos when members of the 9/12 Project, enraged by Castor, enraged by Obamacare, enraged that the doors to the jammed room had been shut on hundreds of protesters, started shouting, “You work for us! You work for us! Tyranny! Tyranny!” until Castor gave up trying to speak and had to be escorted out. Karen was there, and the next afternoon she received a call from a producer at CNN. Could she get downtown to appear that night on Campbell Brown’s show? Three hours later she was sitting alone in a studio with a satellite link, the voice in her earpiece out of sync with the small video screen just beneath the black hole of the camera where she tried to keep her gaze, feeling like a deer in the headlights.

  Campbell started in on her. “I’m all for civic engagement, but explain to me what the point is of shouting down your congresswoman, of yelling at them. What does that really get you?” Karen tried to answer, but Campbell interrupted. “I’ll let you finish, but nobody was being heard there, that was total chaos, everyone yelling.”

  “People are frustrated,” Karen said, bangs falling over her left eye. Her head shared a split screen with Campbell’s, or occupied one-eighth of the screen alongside the three pundits—a Republican strategist, a cable analyst, and a Web writer—invited on the show to talk about the incident. “Middle America feels disenfranchised. We are not being listened to. Our congresspeople are rushing things through,” she said. “People are scared they’re going to lose their health care. It’s going to create huge deficits that are going to outlast my children.”

  Campbell asked who her leaders were.

  “We’re grassroots,” said Karen, soft-spoken but standing her ground. “We’re local organizations. I’m not getting a dime from anybody.” She felt that Campbell was twisting things against the Tea Party, making it seem as if they’d been rowdier than they wer
e. It didn’t matter—the people she knew got their news elsewhere. Afterward, her friends in the movement congratulated her on standing up for the forgotten Americans and making the mainstream media look biased and stupid.

  Then came rail. Nothing Obama and Congress did got Karen as energized as the proposal for a taxpayer-subsidized light rail system in Tampa. The issue took over her life for the entire year 2010. She started a group called “No Tax for Tracks” and boned up by reading an antirail report from the Heritage Foundation. She argued that the system would cost too much, wouldn’t create jobs, wouldn’t have riders, had failed elsewhere, would burden the area with decades of debt. When a fact threatened to undercut one line of argument, she would switch to another, for Karen’s real objection to the referendum went far beyond dollars per mile.

  In the nineteenth century, rail was the future of transportation, the engine of American wealth. In the twentieth century it was a boring topic for public policy and budget experts. In 2010 it symbolized everything that the American right feared and hated—big government, taxes and spending, European-style socialism, a society in which people were forced to share public services with strangers and pay for them. Rail was a threat to the lifestyle of New Tampa, where the line was supposed to end. In New Tampa you drove to the supermarket once a week (instead of walking or taking the bus every day like in the city), then loaded up the minivan at Home Depot on weekends. Karen gave speeches decrying the influence of urban planners and warning against Agenda 21, a nonbinding United Nations “sustainable development” resolution from 1992 that many Tea Partiers regarded as a Trojan horse for world government, a danger to American sovereignty, and an ominous threat to its single-family homes, paved roads, and golf courses. The fact that President Obama made intercity high-speed rail a centerpiece of his stimulus bill only confirmed their worst suspicions. So streetcars were absorbed into the national fury and became the Tampa Tea Party’s signature issue in 2010, as tax cuts and abortion had been to earlier generations of conservatives.

  Once, backstage before a televised debate with Tampa’s mayor, Pam Iorio, who was the main political force behind light rail, Karen mentioned that her husband had recently been laid off from his job as a civil engineer. They were about to lose their health benefits and were going through a tough time.

  “Karen,” the mayor said, “won’t this initiative put him back to work?”

  “No, your plan isn’t going to create any jobs,” Karen said. It was a sacred principle, and she wouldn’t let her family’s misfortune weaken her. The battle against rail felt to Karen like David against Goliath. There were a lot of powerful forces on the other side—the Chamber of Commerce, the South Tampa elite, the editorial page of the St. Petersburg Times, and Commissioner Mark Sharpe—and rail proponents spent more than a million dollars. On Karen’s side there was another tireless Tea Party organizer named Sharon Calvert, whose Dodge Durango was festooned with bumper stickers declaring DON’T TREAD ON ME and TAKE AMERICA BACK! There was David Caton, an ex-pornography-cocaine-alcohol-Quaaludes-Ativan-and-masturbation addict turned Christian crusader against porn, homosexuality, and rail. And there was Sam Rashid, a Karachi-born businessman in Brandon, with the forbidding stare of a professional poker player (which he was), who funded right-wing political candidates, including Mark Sharpe—until Sharpe turned sellout, liar, and RINO by supporting the rail tax, an unforgivable breach, whereupon Rashid vowed to punish him by having him defeated in the midterms, along with his beloved rail.

  * * *

  On November 2, light rail went down in Hillsborough County by 58 to 42 percent. Karen Jaroch and the Tea Party had outhustled the downtown businessmen and politicians, as voters in the unincorporated boomburgs and ghost subdivisions didn’t see a benefit in rail or want to pay another penny of taxes in the depths of the recession. Rick Scott, a Tea Party hero, who had refused to meet with any newspaper editorial boards and received none of their endorsements, was elected governor, continuing unbroken Republican rule in Florida that dated back to 1998. Soon after taking office, Scott decided to reject $2.4 billion in federal stimulus money for a high-speed rail line connecting Tampa and Orlando, on which work was set to begin within weeks (the money went to California). The seventy-acre site for Tampa’s new downtown rail terminal remained a vast dirt field next to the interstate. A data company that studied statistics for fifty metropolitan areas, factoring in unemployment, commute time, suicide, alcohol use, violent crime, property crime, mental health, and cloudy days, announced that Tampa was the single most stressful city in the United States. Eight of the top ten were in the Sunbelt. Five were in Florida.

  Mark Sharpe survived the challenge from a Tea Party candidate handpicked by Sam Rashid. After being reelected to the county commission, Sharpe voted to put Karen Jaroch on the Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority board. After all, her side had won the rail war—and among his many Tea Party detractors, he found Karen to be the most reasonable.

  A few weeks after the election, Mike Van Sickler was assigned to cover a meeting of the Pinellas County Transportation Task Force, which was taking place somewhere near the St. Petersburg–Clearwater airport, in a government-academic-business joint use facility called the EpiCenter. As he drove past two-story apartment buildings, strip malls, and office complexes with no street numbers, he couldn’t find the EpiCenter to save his life. “Lost in Clearwater,” Van Sickler muttered, gripping the wheel of his Ford Focus. “Talk about no sense of place. Give me a sign!” Rio Vista, Bay Vista—these faux names! He hated it out here. If he screamed, no one would hear him.

  The defeat of light rail had depressed Van Sickler more than he expected. 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. We can’t try to be the next great city. We’re just going to settle for what we’ve got. We’re not happy with what we’ve got, but we can’t do any better.” That wasn’t the country he’d grown up in. He had grown up in a much more optimistic country.

  Van Sickler arrived at the EpiCenter half an hour late, red-faced with irritation. The Pinellas County Transportation Task Force was debating whether to proceed with its own rail initiative after the defeat in Hillsborough. There were a hundred people in the room, including Karen Jaroch. In the front row sat two men in their twenties, one in a green T-shirt with an Irish shamrock, the other in a red I’M STILL WAITING FOR MY BAILOUT! T-shirt. Whenever a member of the task force said something like “We keep talking about ‘when the economy turns’—part of the reason to do this is to turn the economy,” the two guys in T-shirts would cover their faces or throw their heads back in silent laughter.

  After the meeting, Van Sickler, in his corduroy jacket and tie, notebook in hand, approached the one in the lucky Irish T-shirt and identified himself as a reporter from the St. Petersburg Times. The guy gave him a hard look. Van Sickler asked what he thought of the discussion.

  “I think they’re a bunch of communist sons of bitches who want to raise taxes. If you listen to everything they say, it’s about how they’re going to pull the wool over the eyes of the public. They want to push their agenda onto the people. Would you ride it? It doesn’t go where I want to go. Who’s going to ride it in Pasco—the cows or the fences?” The guy’s name was Matt Bender. He was a jobless construction worker, looking for any kind of work, but he refused to apply for unemployment benefits. “I’ll make my own way,” Bender said. “We have the pursuit of happiness, not the guarantee. I’m tired of both parties not listening to what the people want, and the corruption, the inside deals, the backroom deals. We have to eliminate the political class bit by bit.”

  As Van Sickler drove back to the office to write up his story, he thought about the way Bender had looked at him. The contempt. Just like the comments that came in after one of his stories went up on the Web—they had nothing to do with what he’d written, minds were already made up, every local issue w
as drowned out by the shouting on national cable news. There were no longer any facts that everyone in America could agree on at the start. For example, his paper had gone to great effort and expense to dig up information about the benefits, as well as the costs, of light rail in Tampa, and none of it had sunk in. What had sunk in was “No tax for tracks”—maybe because light rail seemed kind of fanciful to people in Hillsborough County who just wanted to hunker down, raise their families, hang on to their jobs. And it had been the same with Sonny Kim, his big story from the financial crisis. Van Sickler had waited two years for heads at higher levels to roll, and instead the U.S. attorney’s office had nothing to show but a low-life mortgage fraudster. Van Sickler was beginning to wonder about the relevance of newspaper work. The weeks and months it took for an investigative reporter to map the story out, get it right, and deliver, with the hope that something might change as a result—and then nothing happened. What was he doing it for—his ego? Because it didn’t seem to matter to anyone else.

  But he wasn’t about to stop believing in journalism. “You’ve got to believe in something,” he said. “I don’t believe in God—I believe in this. I believe in the possibility that man can improve himself, that we as a civilized society can get better, and journalism is the part of it that makes sure things are working.” For most of the twentieth century in America, things worked about as well as they ever had in human history. Even if that was no longer true, and 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.