But there turned out to be, if not a cliff, at least a gulch still embedded in the deal. That deal supposedly allowed the economy to avoid going over the “fiscal cliff,” and its aversion was a source of much relief in Washington and on Wall Street. Their customers’ money-some of it-has gone back to the government, in the form of the two-per-cent increase in payroll taxes that took effect with the new budget deal on New Year’s Day. The executives answered their own question. In internal e-mails that were leaked, one corporate vice-president described the situation as “a total disaster,” while another asked, “Where are all the customers? And where’s their money?” Last week, Bloomberg News reported that Walmart’s sales in the first days of February were abysmal. (China, of course, is the huge beneficiary: Apple’s factories and Walmart’s imports have become staples of the world’s second-largest economy.) Together, Apple and Walmart represent the intense separation of American life into blue and red, rich and poor, overpriced and undersold, hyperconnected and left behind. Walmart shoppers pushed and shoved to score fifteen-dollar mp3 players on Black Friday, the riotous discount-shopping event on the day after Thanksgiving. Apple fanatics lined up in the early darkness on Palo Alto’s University Avenue to get the first iPads, then their upgrades.

If Jobs cultivated a priestly air of élite taste, Walton catered to cheapness and averageness. The hollowing out of the heartland was good for Walmart’s bottom line: its slogan might have been an amoral maxim attributed to Lenin-“The worse, the better.” By applying relentless downward pressure on prices and wages, the company came to dominte both consumer spending and employment in small towns and rural areas across the middle of the country. Walmart’s period of explosive growth coincided with decades of wage stagnation and deindustrialization. He came out of the heartland, where he saw the potential for a strategy of low cost and high volume in overlooked backwaters like Siloam Springs, Arkansas, and Coffeyville, Kansas. Jobs’s stylistic and philosophical opposite was Sam Walton. Steve Jobs’s genius for design and marketing helped create the consumer taste of that educated upper class-the spare, sleek, Bauhaus-inspired devices the turtlenecks and jeans the self-congratulatory language of revolution and inspiration the Einstein fetish-with the Apple Store a kind of secular temple for devotees in prosperous cities and suburbs, mostly along the two coasts. Two companies have defined the years of the Unwinding: one is Apple, the other, Walmart. The trade-off: more freedom, less security. The middle class has shrunk tax rates (especially on upper brackets) have plunged inequality has exploded the safety net (especially for the poor) has weakened the old power structure has given way to a more diverse and broad-based upper class based on education bipartisanship-well, you know and business culture has become entrepreneurial, fast, risk-taking, and harsh. In the decades since the mid-seventies-you could call it the Reagan Republic, but I prefer the “Unwinding”-the social contract has frayed to the point of disintegration.

Walmart action packer