The economy is hot, but the people are bothered. Americans think the country is in dreadful economic shape despite strong wage growth, low unemployment, and steadily declining inflation. We know this from survey after survey. What we don’t really know is how people formed those judgments. To find out, The Atlantic commissioned a new poll. When the results came in, one finding jumped off the screen: Americans are really, really unhappy about grocery prices.

Working with Leger, a North American polling firm, we asked 1,005 Americans how they felt about the economy. As with other recent polls, this one painted a gloomy picture. Only 20 percent of people said that the economy has gotten better over the past year, compared with the 44 percent who said it has gotten worse. (There was a big partisan split, but even among self-identified Democrats, only 33 percent said the economy has improved.) Then we asked them to choose, from a long list, what factors they consider when deciding how the national economy is doing. The runaway winner was “The price of groceries for your home”: Twenty-nine percent of people picked it as their top choice, and 60 percent of people selected grocery prices among their top three. Other than “inflation” itself, nothing else came close—not gas, not housing, not interest rates, not the cost of major purchases. And when we asked what people had in mind when they reported that their personal finances were getting worse, 81 percent chose groceries.

Americans’ economic attitudes used to track official statistics, including the inflation rate, pretty closely. That changed in 2020. When the pandemic hit, both the indicators and sentiment plummeted. But then, even as the economy recovered, sentiment remained low. Something broke the relationship between metrics and perception during the pandemic, and housing struck me as the likely culprit: Home prices, which are not included in the consumer price index, have gone absolutely bananas since 2020, rising far more than overall inflation in that time period.

[Annie Lowrey: Inflation is your fault]

But although the cost of housing may dominate the psyche of people like me—Millennial professionals who rent apartments in super-expensive cities such as Washington, D.C., and wonder whether we can ever afford to buy a house—nearly two-thirds of American households already own their homes, and a spike in prices makes them wealthier. “For a large share of households, the increased cost of housing prices is an increase in equity in their homes,” Betsey Stevenson, an economist at the University of Michigan, told me. “They’re not really complaining that the value of their house has gone up.” Housing costs are a real pain, but only for some people.

The poll cast doubt on a few other popular hypotheses. On the left, one argument posits that Americans are unhappy because they miss the generous government welfare payments enacted during the pandemic, such as the stimulus checks and the expanded child tax credit. But only 17 percent of our poll respondents said their finances were better during the pandemic. (Fifty-five percent said they were doing better before the pandemic, and 28 percent said they’re doing better now.) People with children at home were generally more positive on the economy than people without kids. That isn’t what you’d expect if Americans were fuming over the expiration of the expanded child tax credit.

What about the contagious power of negative vibes on social media? This is very hard to test, because people might not be good judges of what shapes their worldview. But, for what it’s worth, we asked where people get their news on the economy, and those who chose Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok expressed more positive views than people who didn’t. So, too, did those who say they read national and financial newspapers. The most negative sentiment was generally among older people, not Gen Z TikTokers, which is consistent with other surveys.

No single poll is definitive, and you can get answers only to questions you think to ask. We didn’t ask about restaurant prices, for example, or the cost of child care. What’s clear is that the biggest cause of America’s current economic discontent is the fact that prices are higher than they were before the pandemic. And groceries are, at the very least, one of the things that people are most upset about. Grocery prices increased by 11.8 percent in 2022, far ahead of the overall rate of inflation, which was 6.5 percent. And unlike with housing, few ordinary Americans benefit from higher grocery prices. Everyone buys groceries, but unless your last name is Kroger or Walton, you probably don’t sell them.  

Knowing that grocery prices drive negativity doesn’t, on its face, solve the puzzle of why sentiment has diverged from the economic indicators. Most Americans are making more money, even adjusting for inflation, than they were before the pandemic. If they were coldly rational, they would recognize that their income more than offsets higher grocery prices—they’re spending more, but they still have more left over.

Or maybe it isn’t much of a puzzle at all. We haven’t seen inflation like this since the 1980s; food prices in particular haven’t risen so fast since the late ’70s. The models, in other words, have been trained on four decades of low inflation. Asking them to accurately predict what happens when prices finally, suddenly jump doesn’t make a lot of sense. “Collectively, there’s still this coming to grips with the idea that we’re never going back to 2019,” Joanne Hsu, the director of consumer surveys at the University of Michigan, told me. “We’re in a new normal now, and we’re still adjusting to what that new normal feels like.” In this unfamiliar post-inflationary territory, people seem to care more about how much things cost than about how much money they have, even if economists insist that those things are symmetrically important.

[Rogé Karma: The 1970s economic theory that needs to die]

I should confess that I’m among the many Americans who experience prices as an atmospheric economic condition and income as something I earn. Early in the pandemic, I got in the habit of making an egg-and-cheese sandwich for breakfast pretty much every day. I recall a six-pack of Thomas English muffins costing about $3.50 at the time. Today, one costs $5.59 at my nearest Wegman’s and $5.29 at the nearest Safeway and Harris Teeter. An economist would probably say I shouldn’t worry about it. After all, since the start of the pandemic, I have changed jobs twice, and my income has risen more than enough to easily cover the extra $2 a week on English muffins. Still, I can’t bring myself to buy them. My higher income feels like something I accomplished through hard work and patience, but the higher price of English muffins just feels wrong. I settle for cheaper, inferior brands while waiting in vain for Thomas to go back under $5. (Or I grab them when I’m at Target, where for some reason they’re still only $3.49.) Unlike most poll respondents, I don’t conclude from this that the economy is bad. On the very specific dimension of egg sandwiches, however, I suppose I do feel worse off.

But perhaps not for long. Grocery prices seem to have finally stopped rising faster than the overall rate of inflation. In fact, according to the most recent government data, they have basically flattened out, increasing by only 0.1 percent in October. The bad news is that, once prices hit a certain level, they tend to stay there. According to Hsu, consumer sentiment has made up about half the ground it lost from the eve of the pandemic to its nadir in June 2022, when inflation was at its peak. How quickly we close the rest of the gap may hinge on how long it takes Americans to stop pining for 2019 prices that are never coming back. Personally, I still can’t wrap my head around paying $5.29 for six English muffins. Ask me again in six months.

Martha Thomas' goal gives Tottenham a first Women's Super League victory over north London rivals Arsenal, who squander the chance to move top of the table.

Thomas Bach says Ukraine is "one war among 28 wars and conflicts going on this world".

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week I asked readers how much time they spent with peers in adolescence. This is the first batch of responses.

Michael is a member of the Silent Generation:

Hanging out with peers meant playing outside with the neighborhood kids: flying kites, playing baseball, football, rock fights, climbing trees, digging foxholes in our yards, and little parental oversight. But then, we were close to home and any misdeeds could and were quickly reported back for subsequent corporal punishment. (In today’s environment my parents could be prosecuted for abuse.) We had no car, so transportation was by shank’s mare or bicycle. On special occasions, we might take the bus downtown to go shopping with our mother. Once I started work at 13, there was less time for goofing off. As for the effects on my later life, well, I suppose you could say I haven’t noticed. It was just the way it was. I do miss flying those kites in the summer. In no way am I critical of current generations hanging at the mall. Hell, I wish that we had had a place like that, although a timber-covered fox hole is pretty neat, if dirty.

Molly is 80:

My high school had a sock hop every other Friday in the gym (hence the socks). On alternate Fridays, we had rollerskating, swimming, volleyball, and just hanging out. We could get snacks in the dining room. The school was packed. I am still grateful to the teachers and parents who gave up their time so we could have coed activities in a safe place.

Thomas was born in 1949 to a mother and a father who had both been American officers in World War II.

I was fortunate to attend U-High, the junior and senior high of the “laboratory school” of a midwestern state university. It was the brightest group I competed with until grad school. The smartest people I knew were Black, the children of an engineering professor. When I dated one of them, I got no trouble from my parents; her parents, whom I met when I picked her up; our friends; or people who saw us walking together. Civilized behavior has prevailed for a long time in some places.

After school we met at the cafeteria of a women’s dorm on campus. Sometimes we played casual games of bridge, but mostly we just shot the breeze. You were there not because of the academic, economic, or social status of your parents, but because you were a bright kid with a keen sense of humor. I somehow learned to swear in sixth grade, which made me somewhat precocious at the time, although I didn’t know what some of the words meant until seventh grade. The guys swore like sailors, but never in the presence of girls. We liked the girls and respected them whether they were present or not. Banter with girls could be light and innocent, but we also had serious conversations, just as we had with other guys. I’m sure it was an easier time to be a girl than my daughter faced 40 years later, and partly because boys tended to be “gentlemen.” It was easier for young girls to remain “ladies” for as long as they wanted to, because we assumed that they were.

I hiked and took long bike rides in the country with my best friend, and we taught ourselves to tie flies and fly-fish by reading books. My school had no girls’ athletic teams, but most of the boys played some sport at least once. If you went out for a team, you were on the team, which gave athletics a nice egalitarian ethos. Boys who otherwise had little interaction acquired a structured peer group where you were respected for doing your best. That helped to unify us as a community.

Children of the Baby Boom grew up with more siblings than kids often have now. I will not argue for a higher birth rate, but largish families did help to socialize kids. You were part of a family with other kids as well as a member of a peer group of kids. The dynamics are different but supportive, and teach complementary things. Even in 1965, kids grew up in a society that was much more like the hunter-gatherer societies for which we are adapted than like our modern, increasingly technological and impersonal society. Kids could learn at school and by reading, and they were freed from the very non-hunter-gatherer drudgery of household, farm, or industrial labor that had once dominated childhood. For a few decades, we had a golden age of childhood.

Donna from New Jersey recalls the 1960s as a fabulous time to be a teen.

My neighborhood had a lot of kids my age, and then there were the kids we met in school. The [Catholic Youth Organization] and Knights of Columbus used to have dances with live bands, and boys and girls all danced together. In the summer we would hang out at Fifth Ward Park or Warinanco Park; winter found us ice-skating on the frozen lake at Warinanco with a wooden boathouse with a pot-bellied stove we made hot chocolate on, or walking to the ice rink. Sometimes we all got together and sang a cappella or lip-synced to popular music.

The ’60s were a turbulent time in history. Vietnam images came nightly on the news. However, there was no 24-hour news, and newsmen reported the facts. No internet, cellphones, or video games. We were aware of what was going on, especially when friends/relatives got drafted, but it was not uppermost in our minds. Sounds idyllic now; conversations with my grandchildren made me realize that the ’60s were not so bad to grow up in.

Lu, who was born in 1959, reflects on her ’70s adolescence.

I was lucky to spend every summer in our cottage on a small island in the St. Lawrence River just off the island of Montreal, Canada. There were no cars, just a few electric golf carts for the elderly. We had a pool for the 200 or so people who lived on the island, a tennis court, and a playing field. As teens we inherited a shack called The Wreck from those older than us. The rule was no adults (older than 20) and no one under the age of 12. It had electricity, an old television, a couple of old couches, and a wobbly card table with equally wobbly chairs. My sister, six years older than me, and her cohort took over the shack first, and when we girls were 11, all we wanted was to be old enough to be in The Wreck with our older siblings.

When I was 11, The Wreck was laboriously put on huge rollers and moved by strong men out of the woods and into a more public area near the ferry landing and the mooring area for all of our boats. I guess the parents felt The Wreck needed to be more visible, but they still weren’t allowed inside. When I turned 13 in the month of May, so did my best friend, Anne. Jennifer was allowed to join us all, even though her birthday was in late July. It would have been too cruel to leave her out on the technicality of a few months.

For years during the summertime we hung out in The Wreck. It was awesome! We played cards, watched grainy bad television, and fought over the best seat on the best couch. I flirted with David. Jennifer flirted with my brother John, and Anne sulked because she didn’t have anyone to flirt with. There was no alcohol involved. We would have had to go across the water in an open boat and bring it into an area near where our parents and neighbors were passing by all the time. Although they weren’t allowed in, they could knock, stand at the door, and look inside.

We didn't really want alcohol anyway. There were runs across to the mainland (which was actually Montreal Island) to get candy and soda pop. There was eventually some pot smoking as well, on the part of the older boys. We also played a game we called Chase with the younger children and the older adolescents. The oldest was about 18, and the youngest was about 10. One of the older boys, almost grown up, would announce that a game of Chase was going to be played after supper. Everyone would gather at “base” which was a particular maple tree. The island was a mile long and a quarter mile wide, so the playing area, including everyone’s backyard and the rocky beach surrounding the island, was very large. There were two teams, equally composed of a mixture of younger and older boys and girls. It was like hide-and-seek in teams. We would play as the long summer evenings brought in dusk and eventually darkness. The only real danger was being eaten alive by mosquitoes.

It was unlimited freedom, or so it seemed. Jennifer’s dad was difficult, but we broke her out of being “grounded” with a good ladder more than once. My mother’s only rule was that we had to be home for supper. She had an old schoolhouse bell that she would ring at five minutes to six. We could hear that bell from halfway across the island. All the other mothers told their children to come home when they heard the bell. There were minor disagreements between us girls, but we knew that it was best to work things out. The coming of autumn and the school year always meant that we had to say goodbye until the next May, when the melting of the ice and the opening of the ferry landing would allow us access to our beloved island once again.

Russell is 63, and his socially formative years were in the ’70s:

I was the oldest, with three siblings, and our house was absolutely the go-to house. How my mom tolerated that, I’ll never know. Our house was almost always full of kids, and sleepovers happened with regularity even on weekdays. We had all smoked pot before we were 15. None of us made it to 18 as virgins, in spite of being raised Catholic and Mom teaching Bible study. By 15, I had girlfriends all the time. We played coed pickup-game sports, went to movies and concerts; our big thing was hanging out at Lyon’s restaurant (gone now) and drinking endless coffee. The guys and gals that I was friends with then are still my friends.

Some of us got together this year in Las Vegas, since only a few of us actually stayed planted. A couple of months ago, I visited with an ex-girlfriend from when I was 18; we’ve been just buddies since then. I was lucky; I met people when I was young that were worth having lifetime-long relationships with. A funny note: One of the friends that went to Las Vegas this year spends time on his phone like he is a 14-year-old girl. I still tease him mercilessly about that. Another friend from that trip who was the most awkward then is probably the most together of us now. We still love him anyway. One aspect of those days that I think a lot of kids nowadays would appreciate, if they could, is that although our parents would insist on always knowing where we were and what we were doing, they never did. There were no cellphones to be tracked or to keep us on short leashes.

I no longer live close to anybody I grew up with, and have tried making new friends in my new locale. I have moved often and have always made friends easily. I find it much harder now. In just five years, I have already had people just drift away, while I still tried to maintain [the relationships]. COVID, politics, and cellphones have definitely made an impact on current social behavior.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

Thanks to Donald Trump’s presidential term, the conservative legal movement has been able to realize some of its wildest dreams: overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, ending affirmative action in college admissions, and potentially making most state-level firearm restrictions presumptively unconstitutional. That movement long predates Trump, and these goals were long-standing. But, like the rest of conservatism, much of the conservative legal movement has also been remade in Trump’s vulgar, authoritarian image, and is now preparing to go further, in an endeavor to shield both Trump and the Republican Party from democratic accountability.

The federal judiciary has become a battleground in a right-wing culture war that aims to turn back the clock to a time when conservative mores—around gender, sexuality, race—were unchallenged and, in some respects, unchallengeable. Many of the federal judges appointed during Trump’s presidency seem to see themselves as foot soldiers in that war, which they view as a crusade to restore the original meaning of the Constitution. Yet in practice, their rulings have proved to be little more than Trump-era right-wing punditry with cherry-picked historical citations.

The 2016 Trump administration was focused on quickly filling the judiciary with judges who are not just ideologically conservative but dedicated right-wing zealots. But that administration “didn’t have all of the chess pieces completely lined up” to get right-wing ideologues into every open seat, Jake Faleschini, of the liberal legal-advocacy group Alliance for Justice, told me. More restrained conservative jurists filled some of those seats. Trump and his allies will be better prepared next time, he said. “Those chess pieces are very well lined up now.”

[Read: Trump's most lasting legacy could be his judges]

The federal district judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a former anti-abortion activist, is the prototypical Trumpist judge. He has publicly complained about the sexual revolution, no-fault divorce, “very permissive policies on contraception,” and marriage equality, and has opposed nondiscrimination protections for the LGBTQ community. And like many of his Trump-appointed peers, Kacsmaryk has predictably issued rulings flouting precedent when doing so is consistent with his personal morals.

One of the most egregious examples came in September, when he dismissed a lawsuit filed by students at West Texas A&M University after the school’s president, Walter Wendler, banned a drag-show benefit aimed at raising money for the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ-focused suicide-prevention organization. Wendler made clear his political objections to the show, referring to drag as “derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny.” But even Wendler himself recognized that the show, as expressive conduct, was protected speech; amazingly, he admitted that he was violating the law. He would not be seen to condone the behavior of the show’s actors, Wendler wrote in his message banning the event, “even when the law of the land appears to require it.”

The case landed on Kacsmaryk’s desk. And because Kacsmaryk does not like pro-LGBTQ speech, he simply ignored decades of precedent regarding free-speech law on the grounds that, by his understanding of history, the First Amendment does not protect campus drag shows. The drag show “does not obviously convey or communicate a discernable, protectable message,” Kacsmaryk wrote, and consists of potentially “vulgar and lewd” conduct that could, he suggested, lead to “the sexual exploitation and abuse of children.” (The confidence with which conservatives have accused their political opponents of child sexual exploitation in recent years is remarkable, especially because their concern applies almost exclusively to situations, like this one, that justify legal suppression of their favored targets. It is far easier to find examples of pedophilia in religious institutions—hardly targets of either conservative ire or conservative jurisprudence—than it is to find drag queens guilty of similar conduct.)

The key to Kacsmaryk’s ruling was “historical analysis,” which revealed a “Free Speech ecosystem drastically different from the ‘expressive conduct’ absolutism” of those challenging Wendler’s decision. Echoing the Supreme Court’s recent emphasis on “history and tradition” in rulings such as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, which struck down gun restrictions in New York State, Kacsmaryk simply decided that the First Amendment did not apply. If not for its censorious implications, the ruling would be an amusing example of some conservative beliefs about free speech: A certain form of expression can be banned as “nonpolitical”—nothing more than obscenity—even as those banning it acknowledge their disapproval of that expression’s political implications.

The invocation of “history and tradition,” however, is no joke. The prevailing mode of conservative constitutional analysis for the past half century has been “originalism,” which promises to interpret the Constitution as it was understood at the time of its writing. As the dissenters pointed out in Dobbs, the Founders themselves imposed no such requirements on constitutional interpretation, noting that the “Framers defined rights in general terms, to permit future evolution in their scope and meaning.” And in practice, originalism has just meant invoking the Framers to justify conservative outcomes.

[Harry Litman: Originalism, divided]

“It’s a very subjective inquiry,” the NYU law professor Melissa Murray told me. “This insistence on originalism as history and tradition ties you to a jurisprudence that’s going to favor a particular, masculine kind of ideology. Because those are the only people making meaning at that moment in time.”

In 1986, the late conservative legal scholar Philip B. Kurland observed, “We cannot definitively read the minds of the Founders except, usually, to create a choice of several possible meanings for the necessarily recondite language that appears in much of our charter of government. Indeed, evidence of different meanings likely can be garnered for almost every disputable proposition.”

“History should provide the perimeters within which the choice of meaning may be made,” Kurland wrote. “History ordinarily should not be expected, however, to provide specific answers to the specific problems that bedevil the Court.”

Right-wing justices have in all but name imposed this expectation, despite Kurland’s warning. It is no surprise that Kurland was not heeded—he testified against the nomination of Robert Bork, the father of originalism, to the Supreme Court, and cautioned that “he will be an aggressive judge in conforming the Constitution to his notions of what it should be,” one “directed to a diminution of minority and individual rights.” Now, with six Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, every judge is slowly being forced to conform the Constitution to Bork’s notions of what it should be.

[Adam Serwer: The most baffling argument a Supreme Court justice has ever made]

In Dobbs and Bruen, and in a later case striking down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, the conservative justices cited historical facts that strengthened their arguments while ignoring those that contradicted them, even when the evidence to the contrary was voluminous. In Dobbs, Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, ignored the history of legal abortion in the early American republic and the sexist animus behind the 19th-century campaigns to ban it. In Bruen, Justice Clarence Thomas was happy to invoke the history of personal gun ownership but dismissed the parallel history of firearm regulation. In the affirmative-action case, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Thomas’s imposition of modern right-wing standards of “color blindness” on the debate over the Fourteenth Amendment was ahistorical enough that it drew an objection from Eric Foner, the greatest living historian of the Reconstruction era.

Not every right-wing judge is as blatantly ideological in their decision making as Kacsmaryk, nor is every Republican appointee a Trumpist zealot. But those with ambitions to rise up the ranks stand out by how aggressively they advertise both qualities. And the proliferation of the language of “history and tradition” is turning originalism from an ideology of constitutional interpretation into something more like a legal requirement. Judges are expected to do historical analysis—not rigorous analysis, but the kind that a prime-time Fox News host will agree with. Conservative originalists seem to see themselves as the true heirs of the Founders, and therefore when they examine the Founders, they can see only themselves, as if looking in a mirror.

It is no coincidence that as conservatism has become Trumpism, originalism has come to resemble Trumpist nationalism in its view that conservatives are the only legitimate Americans and therefore the only ones who should be allowed to wield power. The results for the federal judiciary are apparent as right-wing appeals courts turn “fringe ideas into law at a breakneck pace,” as the legal reporter Chris Geidner has put it, in the hopes of teeing up cases for the Roberts Court, which can hide its own extremism behind the occasional refusal to cater to the most extreme demands of its movement allies.

It is not only the substance of the rulings that has changed—many now resemble bad blog posts in their selective evidence, motivated reasoning, overt partisanship, and recitation of personal grievances—but the behavior of the jurists, who seek to turn public-service roles into minor celebrity by acting like social-media influencers.

Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho, a favorite of the conservative legal movement and a potential future Trump Supreme Court nominee, is one example. In 2022, Ho announced that he was striking a blow against “cancel culture” by boycotting law clerks from Yale after an incident in which Yale students disrupted an event featuring an attorney from a Christian-right legal-advocacy group. In 2021, the Trump-appointed judge Barbara Lagoa complained publicly that American society had grown so “Orwellian” that “I’m not sure I can call myself a woman anymore.” She later upheld an Alabama law making gender-affirming care for minors a felony, arguing, of course, that such care was not rooted in American “history and tradition.” In June 2023, in the midst of a scandal over Justice Thomas receiving unreported gifts from right-wing billionaires with interests before the Court, the Trump-appointed judge Amul Thapar went on Fox News to promote his book about Thomas, and defended him with the zeal of a columnist for Breitbart News.

During Joe Biden’s presidency, the appointment of far-right ideologues has meant a series of extreme rulings that have upheld speech restrictions and book bans; forced the administration to pursue the right’s preferred restrictive immigration policies; narrowed the fundamental rights of women, the LGBTQ community, and ethnic minorities; blessed law-enforcement misconduct; restricted voting rights; limited the ability of federal agencies to regulate corporations; and helped businesses exploit their workers.

[Read: Red states are rolling back the civil-rights revolution]

All of this and more will continue should Trump win a second term. Conservative civil servants who placed their oath to the Constitution above Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election were depicted by Trump loyalists not as heroes but as internal enemies to be purged. Republican-appointed judges will take note of which path leads to professional advancement and which to early retirement.

Already imitating Trump in affect and ideology, these judges are indeed unlikely to resist just about any of Trump’s efforts to concentrate power in himself. They will no doubt invoke “history and tradition” to justify this project, but their eyes are ultimately on a future utopia where conservative political power cannot be meaningfully challenged at the ballot box or in court.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “A MAGA Judiciary.”

The death of the 16-year-old, known as Thomas, sparked protests from far-right groups in November.