George Packer, _The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America_

 I READ ABOUT 100 pages of this the year it was published (2013), but, not finding it all that engaging, I dropped it at that point. In 2017 it was often cited as helpful in explaining the forces that had elected Trump (cf. J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy and Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land); that made sense, insofar as the book looks at how working-class white Americans came to feel betrayed and forgotten, but did not inspire me to pick up the book again. Then I read that the book contained, in its later pages, an excellent profile of Peter Thiel. Okay, I thought--I will read that, at least.

Peter Thiel is an important backer of Vance's campaign for the Senate in Ohio, and my recurring nightmare is that Thiel's deeper-than-deep pockets and Vance's remarkable story and canny rhetoric will combine to create a politics that unites Trump's base with no-kidding, naked-fist authoritarian politics. Without a loose cannon like Trump at the head of the movement, what might happen? I fear some "it can happen here" nightmare.

So, I needed to know more about Thiel. Packer's profile (contained in the three chapters titled "Silicon Valley") is indeed excellent. It gives us a relatively familiar figure: brilliant nerdy kid (Dungeons and Dragons) gets elite education (Stanford), discovers conservative politics (Ayn Rand), makes an unfathomable amount of money as founder/early investor in what  grow to be internet colossi (PayPal, Facebook), and decides to remold American society.

The surprises: Thiel is gay (which might have made him more sympathetic to the situation of the marginalized and excluded, but no, seems not to have) and highly interested in achieving immortality (which might line him up as a potential Great American Eccentric, à la Howard Hughes).

But are my anxieties quelled? Not so much. Coming to this right after Vuillard's l'ordre du jour, I was wondering if Thiel could do for Vance what Krupp did for Hitler. Was January 6 just our Kapp Putsch? Just a prologue to the real tragedy?