On September 22, when federal prosecutors accused Senator Robert Menendez of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, Representative Andy Kim, a fellow New Jersey Democrat, asked one of his neighbors what he thought of the charges. “That’s Jersey,” the man replied.

The neighbor’s shrug spoke volumes about not only a state with a sordid history of political corruption but also a country that seemed to have grown inured to scandal. In nearby New York, George Santos had settled into his Republican House seat despite having been indicted on more than a dozen counts of fraud and having acknowledged that the story he’d used to woo voters was almost entirely fiction. Criminal indictments have done nothing to dent Republican support for Donald Trump, who is currently the front-runner for both the GOP nomination and the presidency next year.

It turns out, however, that the supposedly cynical citizens of New Jersey did care that their senior senator was allegedly on the take. In the days after the indictment was unsealed, multiple polls found that Menendez’s approval rating had plummeted to just 8 percent. New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, and its other Democratic senator, Cory Booker, both called on Menendez to quit. All but three of the nine Democrats in New Jersey’s House delegation have urged the senator to resign, and one of them is his own son.

Menendez has pleaded not guilty to the charges and rejected calls to resign. A son of Cuban immigrants, he has denounced the case against him as a racially motivated persecution. But his days in the Senate are almost certainly numbered, whether he leaves of his own accord or voters usher him out. Kim has announced that he will challenge Menendez next year, and so has Tammy Murphy, New Jersey’s first lady. Menendez’s trial is scheduled for May, just one month before the primary. Early polls show Menendez barely registering support among Democrats.

[Casey Michel: We’ve never seen anything like the Menendez indictment]

“I hit a breaking point,” Kim told me, explaining his decision to run. “I think a lot of people hit a breaking point, where they’re just like, ‘We’re done with this now.’”

Accountability has come more swiftly for Santos. National party leaders had largely protected him—Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his successor, Mike Johnson, both needed Santos’s vote in the GOP’s tight House majority. But a damning report from the bipartisan House Ethics Committee proved to be his undoing: Earlier this month, Santos became just the sixth lawmaker in American history to be expelled from the House.

The government’s case against Menendez could still fall apart; he’s beaten charges of corruption before. But the public can hold its elected officials to a higher standard than a jury would. If the appearance (and, in this case, reappearance) of impropriety can cause voters to lose faith in the system, the events of the past few months might go some way toward restoring it. That both Menendez and Santos have suffered consequences for their alleged misdeeds offers some reassurance to ethics watchdogs who have seen Trump survive scandal after scandal, and indictment after indictment. “You can’t get away with anything. There are still some guardrails,” Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me.

Yet Trump’s enduring impact on political accountability remains an open question. Has he lowered the standards for everyone, or do the laws of political gravity still apply to ethically compromised lawmakers not named Trump? “Donald Trump is a unique animal,” Lisa Gilbert, the executive vice president of the Washington-based nonprofit Public Citizen, told me. “He has built a cultlike following and surrounded himself with people who believe that no matter what he does, he is in the right.” Few politicians could ever hope to build such a buffer.

Trump hasn’t evaded accountability entirely: The ethical norms he shattered while in office likely contributed to his defeat in 2020. And although he’s leading in the polls, one or more convictions next year could weaken his bid and demonstrate that the systems meant to hold American leaders in check function even against politicians who have used their popularity to insulate themselves from culpability. “He is being charged,” Gilbert said. “There are accountability mechanisms that are moving in spite of that apparatus. And to me, that’s a sign that eventually the rule of law will prevail.”

At the same time, the Menendez and Santos examples provide only so much comfort for ethics watchdogs. The allegations against both politicians were particularly egregious. The phrase lining his pockets is usually metaphorical, but in addition to gold bars, the FBI found envelopes of cash in the pockets of suit jackets emblazoned with Menendez’s name in his closet.

The earlier allegations Menendez faced were almost as lurid; prosecutors said he had accepted nearly $1 million in gifts from a Florida ophthalmologist, including private flights and lavish Caribbean vacations, in exchange for helping the doctor secure contracts and visas for his girlfriends. A 2018 trial ended in a hung jury, and the Department of Justice subsequently dropped the case.

Santos was caught lying about virtually his entire life—his religion, where he had gone to school, where he worked—and then was accused of using his campaign coffers as a personal piggy bank, spending the money on Botox and the website OnlyFans.

[Read: George Santos was finally too much for Republicans]

Some of the charges against Trump, such as falsifying business records and mishandling classified documents, involve more complicated questions of law. “A lot of the Trump scandals that he's been indicted for may sort of be beyond the grasp of the average voter,” says Tom Jensen, the director of the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling, which conducted one of the surveys finding that Menendez’s approval rating had sunk after the indictment. “Gold bars are not beyond the grasp of the average voter. Voters get gold bars, and when it’s something that’s so easy for voters to understand, you’re a lot more likely to see this sort of precipitous decline.”

Jensen told me that in his 16 years as a pollster, he had seen only two other examples where public support dropped so dramatically after the eruption of scandal. One was Rod Blagojevich, the former Democratic governor of Illinois who was convicted of attempting to sell the Senate seat that Barack Obama vacated when he became president in 2009. The other was John Edwards, who, after running for president as a Democrat in 2008, admitted to having an affair while his wife, Elizabeth, was battling a recurrence of breast cancer. (He would later admit to fathering a child with his mistress, and face charges that he illegally used campaign funds to hide the affair; Edwards was found not guilty on the one count on which the jury reached a verdict.)

The Trump era has revealed an asymmetry in how the parties respond to scandal. Republicans have overlooked or justified all sorts of behavior that would have doomed most other politicians, including multiple allegations of sexual assault (such as those that Trump essentially admitted to in the infamous Access Hollywood video made public in 2016). Although Santos was expelled by a Republican-controlled House, Democrats provided the bulk of the votes to oust him, while a majority of GOP lawmakers voted against expulsion. Democrats were quick to pressure Senator Al Franken to resign in 2018 after several women accused him of touching them inappropriately. (Some Democrats later regretted that they had pushed Franken out so fast.) The party also forced a defiant New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to step down in 2021 amid multiple allegations of misconduct and harassment.

Trump’s gut-it-out strategy seems to have inspired politicians in both parties to resist demands to resign and to bet that the public’s short attention span will allow them to weather just about any controversy. Gone are the days when a scandalized politician would quit at the first sign of embarrassment, as New York Governor Eliot Spitzer did in 2008, less than 48 hours after the revelation that he had patronized high-end prostitutes. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam was able to serve out his full term despite losing the support of virtually the entire Democratic Party in 2019 after photos surfaced of him dressed in racist costumes in a medical-school yearbook. Cuomo defied calls to resign for months, and Santos forced the House to expel him rather than quit. Menendez has similarly rebuffed the many longtime colleagues who have urged him to leave.

Shame may have left politics in the Trump era, but consequences haven’t—at least in the cases of Menendez and Santos. “Maybe these can be first steps,” Bookbinder told me, sounding a note of cautious optimism. “If you say nothing matters, then really nothing will matter. I hope we can go back to the place where people do feel like they owe it to their constituents to behave in an ethical and legal way.”

Moscow slams Washington's sanctions on a new LNG plant in the Arctic as 'unacceptable'.

The sooner President Joe Biden acknowledges that Americans will likely be drawn into a fight to protect shipping traffic through the Suez Canal, the more time the U.S. military has to plan, and the less severe the harm will be to the global economy. For months, ever since a deadly Hamas incursion into Israel triggered a massive Israeli military campaign in Gaza, the United States has sought to deter Israel’s enemies, most notably Iran and its proxy Hezbollah, from spreading the conflict to other fronts in the Middle East.

The administration’s fears are warranted but also moot. The war is already expanding in a way that endangers the global economy—specifically, through attacks by Iranian-backed forces on the crucial shipping lane from the Indian Ocean through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean Sea. Whereas the U.S. military need not play any substantial role in the war in Israel and Gaza, keeping the path to Suez open and safe is a global priority, and no other country can lead that effort.

[Read: Americans have no idea what the supply chain really is]

Late last month, the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in northern Yemen began targeting commercial ships in the Bab al-Mandab Strait, which connects the southern end of the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. The Houthis claim that they are doing it to support the Palestinians as Israel and Hamas wage war. The Houthis’ first target was the Galaxy Leader, a Japanese-operated cargo ship reportedly owned in part by an Israeli investor. The attackers were able to capture the vessel.

This week, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced a 10-country coalition, led by the United States, to protect the Suez route. The initial plan is to park warships close to the coast of Yemen and use them to defend against any Houthi attack. But more may be required of the American military, including naval escorts for vulnerable ships and air strikes against Houthi military infrastructure.

About 12 percent of global trade, and 30 percent of the world’s container shipping, passes through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, the quickest route between Asia and Europe. Subsequent missile attacks have so far caused shipping companies to divert more than 100 vessels from the Suez route, redirecting them around the Cape of Good Hope, at the southern tip of Africa—where the waters are so treacherous that the area is called the “Graveyard of Ships.” That response adds 6,000 nautical miles and perhaps three to four weeks to the journey, thus tying up vessels and disrupting shipping all around the world. Past disruptions in Suez—including an eight-year stoppage after the 1967 Six-Day War and the 2021 stranding of a large vessel that blocked others from passing—show both that shippers can do without Suez and that doing so involves enormous cost and risk.

[David A. Graham: Why ships keep crashing]

The mission to protect ships on the Suez route is called Operation Prosperity Guardian—a provocation, arguably, to Western progressives who bristle at the use of military force to protect economic interests. But framing the mission purely as a defense of global commerce is wise. Safeguarding the seas is essential to countries far less wealthy and powerful than the U.S., and denying a small band of rebels the power to choke off a crucial shipping lane is a long-term investment in global security. Until the maritime industry is convinced that the Suez route is safe, the rest of the world will suffer, meaning the United States and its allies will have to strike harder.

The Houthis and, by extension, their Iranian sponsors have had the ability to attack global shipping for years, but presumably refrained for fear of provoking a military response from the United States. Their bet seems to be that the war in Gaza has given them more freedom of action in the Red Sea because Washington is nervous about stepping in.

The Houthis are unlikely to be dissuaded by a perfunctory U.S. effort now. Why would they be? The group thrives at a choke point for the global economy, and for relatively little investment, the Houthis have given themselves leverage in diplomatic talks to end Yemen’s civil war.

Any U.S. strikes on Houthi launchpads in Yemen would carry some possibility of direct conflict with Iran, but the risk is probably overstated. Iran is, after all, already engaged against the interests of the United States and allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia. “Compared to the risk of increased engagement between Israel and Iran through Hezbelloh in Lebanon, we aren’t likely to go to war with Iran over U.S. offensive strikes against Houthi launch sites in Yemen,” Eric Rosenbach, a former Pentagon chief of staff during the Obama administration, told me. “The risk is far outweighed by the need to end this nonsense fast.”

Right now a rebel group is dragging down a global economy. A maritime conflict has begun, and the U.S. has little choice but to fight.

The Washington, D.C., my sisters and I grew up in was known as Chocolate City for good reason. As Black children in the city then, we were a majority. We sauntered from school to store to home to kickball field, oblivious to our segregation. When I was a tween, and just beginning to be conscious about the giving of gifts, my sisters and I were Christmas shopping at one of the festive pop-up markets in our corner of the city. We found a stellar gift for one of our grandmothers, which we knew for sure she would love. We knew for sure because of her religiosity.

No one was more openly devoted to the will of the Lord than Ma Jones, our father’s mother. Mabel Irene Young Jones was her name. She traveled very few miles in her lifetime, and yet she traveled a long way during her 65 years in Northwest Washington, D.C., where she was born, Black and poor, in 1912. When she died, in 1977, she was proud to have obtained with her mother and daughter a rowhouse, which they’d purchased collectively and occupied as multiple generations.

Unlike so many Black parents who faced unrelenting poverty and all the attendant ways that Black lives are cut short, Ma Jones had managed to raise to adulthood all four of her children. She had not had to live her life out of order. Her children buried her, and not the other way around.

By her own careful design, Ma Jones was the personification of Black matriarchy: loving, hovering, caring, devoted almost to the point of martyrdom. She worked three jobs not for herself, but for the family; not for herself, but for our future. Not one of us doubted that she modeled herself after Jesus—his behaviors, his ideals. For the most part, we did not talk about religion with Ma Jones; we watched her Christianity in action. For Ma Jones, the principles of Christianity were to be accepted, not discussed.

We found a painting of Jesus who was as chocolate brown as Ma Jones. I can still see her—dark skin ringed with wisdom lines, showing age in the same way as trees. To me, this was definitely a gift opportunity, because the image was recognizable as the holy man Ma Jones was so engaged with. The painted image carried the same gaze as the generalized, ubiquitous portrait of Jesus. But this one was a Black man. His rich brown skin was a pleasant surprise. We had found a religious artifact, but with an update.

Black Jesus in his frame was too big to wrap, so we covered the painting in a sheet and stood it upright behind our grandmother’s couch, which was slipcovered in plastic and never sat upon. Not even by visitors. (If you came into the house and someone was sitting on the sofa, you knew it was death. Or the census. Or the pastor, bringing holy counsel.) Our Black Jesus waited his turn in the holiest spot in the house.

[Read: Insisting Jesus was white is bad history and bad theology]

When gift-giving time came, my sisters and I worked as a team to ceremonially reveal our studiously selected present. Our grandmother looked on, smiling. We carefully unsheeted our Jesus, and we watched our grandmother as recognition slowly dawned. Our grandmother’s smile turned downward. While we stood, primped and positively beaming, her smile transitioned to a gasp. Our spirits could not help but droop. Our Christmas dresses and shiny knees at once seemed like overkill. Our grandmother turned and left the room, holding her hand over her mouth. Sacrilege!

Babies of the ’60s, we were shocked, incredulous. Before our era, Black people were discouraged at every turn. We were conditioned to look white or be called ugly. Mostly everything you bought was organized for the white-skinned. Makeup, toys, hosiery, books. White all around. The color marked “nude” or “flesh” was pink or beige. American culture ignored our melanin.

But those days were done! We emerged from the belligerent, fire-hose, and dog-mauling ’60s with hard-won new energy, and big new pride. We chanted with James Brown: Say it loud. I’m Black and I’m proud. We wanted to wear hose dyed for our brown legs, to see dolls with sienna skin and woolly hair, to be self-reflective and not subject to images as imposed. We could and did make purchases that included and reflected our history and our interests and our ebullient view of our culture. We put ourselves on platforms in fashion we curated: kente, head wraps, Afros, African metallurgy, along with flowers, bell-bottoms, and platform shoes. We danced openly to djembe drums.  

My sisters and I, though young, were somewhat conscious of the change we were living. We knew we had made progress. We had mantras. Cue James Brown. And so, that Christmas Eve, we watched our grandmother wordlessly flee our unveiling, and we felt dejected and confused. We rested the frame of the painting on our insteps, between the strap and the arc of our patent-leather shoes. Ma Jones’s displeasure and abrupt departure shut down Christmas Eve.

We looked to the adults, assembled and bedecked in their Christmas red, to explain why our grandmother had run from our lovely, if revolutionary, gift. Could they, or would they, explain why our grandmother had not liked our Black Jesus? We were heartbroken that our deep-brown Jesus hadn’t inspired delight. No explanation was forthcoming. But even as a child, raised Christian, you learn that God is a power and a spirit. Children are aware that pictures and books emerge from the human hand.

To see Ma Jones so startled and unsettled has never left me as a memory of this season, even after decades of Christmases. Ma Jones could not or would not face a Black person depicted as the son of a God generally heralded as white. At that time, young and with a limited vocabulary, I was dancing between a poem and a theorem in my mind: If the good God cannot be Black, then just like they say, no Black can be good, and no good can be seen in Black you.

We did not keep the painting. My father took our gift out of the house; I distinctly remember a vibe of removing a bad spirit. We recognized this situation as a peculiar limitation. Ma Jones could love us so thoroughly, and yet her Jesus could not be like us. You learn, quickly, as a Black child in America, that what we can imagine and what we can achieve is bound by the time in which we live. Our Jesus experience raised questions about believing as a Black person in a God depicted and envisioned as white. Ma Jones was not to be blamed that the Jesus that hung in her household was an image of a young white man. She was like other Black Americans passing by that same picture of Jesus as one of the triumvirate of martyrs: Jesus, John F. Kennedy Jr., and Martin Luther King Jr.

Over time, I have come to view this episode as a clash of generations. We could never deny our grandmother’s great pride in her three granddaughters. She was convinced of our beauty and enamored of our potential, and she consistently demonstrated her fond appraisal.

But in her expansive religion, she could not apply any vision of us, or of herself, to the image of the God she worshipped. It is a contradiction resoundingly emblazoned on my formative spirit. Most Christmases, I think of Ma Jones with deep appreciation. And now that he is gone, I think of my father, her devoted son, who whisked away our revolutionary childhood choice, our gift of Black Jesus, into history, into erasure, into the realm of solemn memory. Each new generation barrels on from the past. My sisters and I are now barreling toward matriarchy, but we remember the Christmas when we, as children, had to face my grandmother’s burden of envisioning all that is holy as white.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.

On Tuesday, Colorado’s Supreme Court disqualified Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot after determining that his actions on January 6, 2021, made him ineligible under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause.

The Colorado court’s actions come on the precipice of another tumultuous year in politics, one featuring a general election and a likely rematch of the 2020 race between the former and present U.S. presidents.

Joining editor in chief of The Atlantic and moderator, Jeffrey Goldberg, this week to look back at 2023 and discuss what to expect in 2024 are Lisa Desjardins, correspondent at PBS NewsHour; Adam Harris, staff writer at The Atlantic; Zolan Kanno-Youngs, White House correspondent at The New York Times; and Susan Page, Washington bureau chief at USA Today.

Read the full transcript here.

The wind washed over the rows of white tombstones and carried the last leaves of autumn on its breath. I held the map of Arlington National Cemetery up to my face, clinging to its edges as its corners fluttered. I looked up, and saw the statue I was searching for in the distance, encircled by tall steel fencing that caught and held the light from the afternoon sun. Inside the fence, concentric circles of tombstones surrounded the memorial—gravestones of the more than 200 Confederate soldiers buried beneath. Workers in white construction hats and highlighter-yellow vests moved about while security officers in dark sunglasses and black uniforms stood along the fence’s edge. To my left was a massive yellow crane whose engine rumbled steadily as it sat staring at the bronze memorial before it.

I had come to the Confederate Memorial at Arlington on Monday in anticipation of the statue’s removal. Following a review from the Department of Defense’s Naming Commission, the memorial had been scheduled to come down this week, but as I arrived, I received an alert on my phone that a federal judge had just issued a temporary restraining order at the request of a group named Defend Arlington. The group argued that the decision to take down the monument had been too hurried, that it would damage the surrounding tombstones, and that the DOD had failed to comply with federal law by not preparing an environmental-impact statement. What would happen next was unclear.

The limbo of the situation was evident in the bodies of the workers. Many of them stood in conversation or sat on the ground, leaning back against the fence. I walked over to a group of them chatting around a large stack of wooden planks. I asked when they thought the statue would be coming down. They turned to one another, exchanging skeptical glances, before one of them looked at me and said, “To be determined.”

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, as of April 2023, nearly 500 Confederate symbols have been removed, renamed, or relocated since Dylann Roof massacred nine people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015. The Confederate memorial here, in one of the nation’s largest cemeteries, surrounded by the graves of some 400,000 people, is perhaps the most significant to face the possibility of removal.

[Read: A memorial at the barn]

The statue was paid for and erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group of southern white women who were the wives, widows, and descendants of Confederate soldiers. The organization was responsible for erecting hundreds of Confederate monuments across the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was built by the sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a former soldier in the Confederate army, and unveiled by President Woodrow Wilson on June 4, 1914, which was the day after the 106th anniversary of the birth of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. The statue’s most dominant image is of a woman—symbolizing the South itself—who wears an olive wreath atop her head. The monument also features depictions of two Black people that reify the subservient positions they occupied under slavery and the Confederacy. Arlington National Cemetery acknowledges:

Two of these figures are portrayed as African American: an enslaved woman depicted as a “Mammy,” holding the infant child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war. An inscription of the Latin phrase “Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Caton” (“The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause to Cato”) construes the South’s secession as a noble “Lost Cause.” This narrative of the Lost Cause, which romanticized the pre–Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery, fueled white backlash against Reconstruction and the rights that the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments (1865–1870) had granted to African Americans.

For decades, southern politicians claimed that the statue was simply a part of a larger project of reconciliation, a way for political leaders to solidify national unity at a time when the wounds of the Civil War were still fresh. In some ways, they were right. It was intended as a symbol of reconciliation and unity. But for whom? Certainly not for Black Americans, who, in the decade leading up to the erection of this statue, had been terrorized by more than 700 lynchings across the country.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy did not conceal what they meant by reconciliation. To them, reconciliation meant demanding that Reconstruction—which is to say, any efforts oriented toward pursuing Black social, political, or economic equality—was acknowledged to have been a mistake. The best way to achieve national unity, they thought, was to allow southern white people to govern themselves, with no repercussions from the federal government for the routine torture, destruction, and murder of Black people. As the Confederate veteran and former secretary of the Navy Hilary A. Herbert wrote on behalf of the UDC when the statue was unveiled in 1914:

In 1867, the seceding States were subjected to the horrors of Congressional Reconstruction, but in a few years American manhood had triumphed; Anglo-Saxon civilization had been saved; local self-government under the Constitution had been restored; ex-Confederates were serving in the National Government, and true patriots, North and South, were addressing themselves to the noble task of restoring fraternal feeling between the sections.

According to Samantha Baskind, an art-history professor at Cleveland State University and the author of a forthcoming biography of Ezekiel, the United Daughters of the Confederacy didn’t want just anyone to construct this statue; they specifically wanted him. Ezekiel, the first Jewish student ever to attend the Virginia Military Institute, was a veteran of the famous Battle of New Market. In the battle, 257 institute cadets, some as young as 15 years old, were ordered to help close the Confederate line. They did so, and against the odds, forced Union troops to retreat. So many soldiers lost their boots in the mud caused by days of rain that the battlefield became known as the “Field of Lost Shoes,” and the victory would take on an outsize, mythologized importance in Confederate memory. “Ezekiel is a famous sculptor, a famous southerner, a famous veteran—who could be better in their mind?” Baskind told me.

Whether or not Ezekiel intended it, the particular images he used have come to be understood as Confederate propaganda. The image of the Black servant following his white master into battle, for example, has been used by groups such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans to perpetuate the myth that Black men served as soldiers for the South during the war. This idea, as the historian Kevin M. Levin writes in his book Searching for Black Confederates, was used to buttress the claim that the Civil War had been fought not over slavery but over states’ rights. If Black people served in the Confederate army, the logic goes, then the war could not have been about their enslavement.

[Tom Nichols: The mysterious return of a Soviet statue in Russia]

“There is no question that Ezekiel used iconography that is unacceptable,” Baskind told me. And in doing so, she believes, he took what could have been a true opportunity to create a meaningful site of national reconciliation and ruined it. “He’s the one who really has doomed the monument in the 21st century,” she said. “It was supposed to be the premier symbol of sectional reunion, but it has white-supremacist origins in its iconography.”

In 2017, following the murder by a white nationalist of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, a group of Ezekiel’s descendants wrote a letter demanding that the Arlington statue come down. “Like most such monuments, this statue intended to rewrite history to justify the Confederacy and the subsequent racist Jim Crow laws. It glorifies the fight to own human beings, and, in its portrayal of African Americans, implies their collusion,” they wrote. “As proud as our family may be of Moses’s artistic prowess, we—some twenty Ezekiels—say remove that statue.”

The statue stayed up—but in 2020 a plaque was placed nearby, explaining to visitors that the memorial contained “highly sanitized depictions of slavery.” Then, in 2021, Congress created the Naming Commission to devise a framework to effect the removal of Confederate monuments and memorials at military facilities—and as a military cemetery, Arlington was included. After the decision was made to take down the statue, more than 40 Republican congressional representatives sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, urging him to intervene. Nevertheless, the Pentagon said that the statue needed to be removed by January 1, 2024.

Making sense of Arlington’s Confederate Memorial is impossible without understanding the larger history of the land it sits upon. Although many people today think of Arlington National Cemetery as a place to commemorate the lives of fallen American soldiers, that was not its original purpose. Before the land became the national cemetery, it was the plantation of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Prior to the Civil War, about 200 enslaved people lived and worked there.

Lee had come to own the plantation through his wife, Mary Curtis, whose father, George Washington Parke Custis, had built the mansion that sat at the edge of the plantation to memorialize his adoptive grandfather, President George Washington. The marriage of Mary Curtis and Robert E. Lee brought together two of the most powerful families in the South. But in 1861, as the Civil War began, Lee and his family fled from their Arlington plantation, which was soon seized by Union soldiers. The estate served as an important strategic outpost for the Union army throughout the war. Three years into the conflict, in 1864, the first military burial took place, and the land began to evolve into the cemetery it is today. One of the cemetery’s goals, from the beginning, was to establish justice for the Union cause, which, as I looked up at the statue, makes the presence of a memorial glorifying the Lost Cause all the more perplexing.

I made my way from the Confederate Memorial to the Robert E. Lee Memorial at Arlington House, the white mansion that sits on a hill and has a panoramic view of Washington, D.C., that I had never encountered. Why this place had become so valuable to the Union during the Civil War was clear: Officers would have been able to see any army approaching the city from miles away.

Behind the home were former slave quarters, spaces that had been transformed into exhibits documenting the lives and stories of those who had been enslaved there. I began to wonder what the families who had once lived in those quarters would think about the Confederate Memorial—its presence, and now its removal.

I called Stephen Hammond, a scientist emeritus at the U.S. Geological Survey who is a descendant of the Syphax family, one of several families that were enslaved on the plantation. He is a family genealogist and docent at Arlington House, where he tries to ensure that his family’s story and the stories of other Black people who once lived there are preserved.

[From the December 2023 issue: The Confederate general whom all the other Confederates hated]

“I’m conflicted,” Hammond told me, when I asked about the memorial’s removal. “I think it’s important to be able to tell the entire history of a space,” he said, before pausing. “And yet, there are aspects of that memorial that are very offensive to me, and I feel like they don’t represent what our country is about.”

Although the Confederate Memorial did provide an opportunity for historians, docents, and visitors to discuss the wider history of the cemetery, Hammond told me, he does not subscribe to the idea that the statue’s purpose was unity. “On the news this week, I’ve heard people saying we shouldn’t tear it down, because it’s a ‘reconciliation monument,’” he said. “That couldn’t be farther from the truth.”

When Hammond walks through the cemetery, he attempts to hold all of its complexities together—the cognitive dissonance of its being the final resting place of the enslavers and the enslaved, a place that tells the story of those who fought for the Union and those who fought to destroy it. Although doing so is not always easy, he told me, he tries to extend empathy and grace to all, in the same way he hopes visitors will extend them to his own ancestors.

“I honor those that have died in that space,” Hammond said of the memorial, “but I also recognize that not more than two or three football fields away, my family members were enslaved, and were forced to labor and serve other people for exactly the reasons that the war was fought.”

“I don’t want history to be lost by the removal of something that creates a gap,” he went on. “But at the same time, what was filling that gap is not reflective of what history really was.”

This is why, for Hammond, the issue of who is commemorated at the cemetery, and how, goes beyond the Confederate Memorial. He is currently leading an effort to remove Robert E. Lee’s name from the Arlington House site. In a 2022 op-ed for The Washington Post, Hammond and Lee Crittenberger Hart, a descendant of Lee, wrote, “Our families realize that the name ‘The Robert E. Lee Memorial’ focuses solely on one side of those who lived at Arlington House and excludes and diminishes the lives and histories of those who were enslaved.”

[Clint Smith: Donald Trump vs. American history]

Earlier this year, Representative Don Beyer and Senator Tim Kaine, both Democrats of Virginia, introduced legislation that would change the name to the Arlington House National Historic Site. Hammond is hopeful that the law will pass. In the meantime, he continues with his personal effort to inform visitors about the full history of Arlington House, giving an account of those whose stories went unacknowledged for so long.

“People get off of the trolley,” he said, referring to the small hop-on-hop-off bus tours that bring people around the cemetery, “and they walk over to see that beautiful view, and they have no idea what that space really is.”

On Tuesday, Judge Rossie Alston, the federal judge who’d earlier issued the stay, visited the site and, saying he “saw no desecration of any graves,” cleared the way for the memorial’s removal. Judge Alston—who is Black and was appointed to the bench in 2019 by President Donald Trump—commented that the memorial contains a depiction of a “slave running after his ‘massa’ as he walks down the road. What is reconciling about that?”

In something of a full-circle moment, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who had argued against removing the memorial, announced that the statue would be relocated to land owned by the Virginia Military Institute at the New Market Battlefield State Historical Park, where Ezekiel and his fellow cadets fought the battle that made them Confederate legends.

On Thursday, I traveled back to Arlington to see the remainder of the memorial taken down before it was packed up and transported to its new home. The crane was now swinging its neck inside the fence. After the workers secured the final section, one of them signaled to the operator, and the bronze was lifted from the memorial’s stone base, floating above our heads like an asteroid caught in a new orbit. Some of the workers pulled out their phone to record the moment.

Before I left, I took one last look at the stone base upon which the statue had stood for more than a century. The space was not conspicuous in its emptiness. I took a photo and turned around to make my way back toward the main road.

The memorial is gone. But the question of how we remember who we’ve been isn’t going anywhere.

Everyone says Lytton was a beautiful place to live. The small Canadian town sits at the confluence of two rivers and was built on one of the oldest continuously inhabited areas in North America—the Nlaka’pamux people have called it home for more than 10,000 years. About 250 people lived in the Lytton of the recent past, on a few cross streets and several dozen lots—you could take it in all in one breath. One blistering June evening in 2021, a wildfire burned through the entire place, and the neighboring Lytton First Nation.

Patrick Michell, the former chief of a nearby Nlaka’pamux community, was at the band office when he got a succession of texts from his wife in the span of minutes: Somebody just called and said Lytton is burning. Then, Our reserve is on fire, and then: Our house is on fire. After that, the cell service cut out. In the hours that followed, roughly 1,000 people were evacuated; two people died. Ninety percent of the town of Lytton was destroyed, as were dozens of homes and community buildings across Lytton First Nation. The hundreds of residents who lost their homes scattered across British Columbia.

Less than a week after the blaze, the province’s then-premier, John Horgan, pledged his government’s support to help Lytton rebuild as a “town of tomorrow,” more resilient to future climate-change challenges. More than two years later, that tomorrow still hasn’t arrived. The first residential-building permit was issued last month, and the town had remained under a state of local emergency until June, which meant that residents were prohibited from setting foot there. The plan that the village council initially offered—to become a model of minimizing carbon emissions—wasn’t the plan that many residents wanted, either. They didn’t want to live in the town of tomorrow. They just wanted to come home.

This idea of rebuilding to meet the climate of the future is becoming conventional wisdom among disaster-recovery experts, and it makes sense: What were once record-breaking weather events are becoming routine. So why wouldn’t we want to prepare for the worst-case scenario while building back in ways that don’t make the problem worse? The day before the fire, Lytton’s temperature had crept to 121.3 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest ever recorded in Canada; high winds and a once-in-10,000-year heat dome, virtually impossible without human-caused climate change, helped create the tinderboxlike conditions for the town’s quick and near-total devastation. This summer, Canada endured its worst wildfire season ever, with the most land burned in the country’s recorded history. More than 6,700 blazes have burned roughly 45.7 million acres of land—an area larger than Washington State—and even now, in December, more than 200 fires are burning, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. In August, multiple fires burned across British Columbia, surrounding Lytton First Nation and the village. Nearly 200,000 Canadians were placed under an evacuation order this year and 30,000 in British Columbia alone this summer; some members of Lytton First Nation who fled in 2021 were forced to evacuate yet again.

[Read: One huge contradiction is undoing our best climate efforts]

As these fires burned, Canada wrestled with the limits of its disaster-response approach. Without a national body akin to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the U.S., Canada’s patchwork approach involves the military and three levels of government on a case-by-case basis, with the affected locality usually taking the lead. “In Canada, we’re not going to have somebody thousands of miles away tell me how to fix my community,” Paul Kovacs, the executive director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, in Canada, told me. Historically, recovery after flooding or wildfire has also been more reliant on the private sector. There’s an expectation that the pockets of affected homeowners will get what they need through their insurance, Sara Shneiderman, a professor of anthropology and public policy and a co-lead of the Disaster Resilience Research Network at the University of British Columbia, told me: “But because of climate change, we’re seeing that it can be this mass-scale devastation, which means you need a very different kind of approach.”

In Canada, disaster recovery is flexible by design, but flexibility, as Lytton learned, can look like having no plan at all. Many people lost their home, their pets, and anything they were unable to take with them at a moment’s notice. The year of the fire, a third of Lytton’s residents were 65 and older, likely retired and living on fixed incomes, and less than half of the town was adequately insured. Most of the town’s infrastructure and services burned. Lytton also lost its governance records, bylaws, and policies when its server and backup server burned. A model that focuses on local knowledge and autonomy, Kovacs admitted, wasn’t well suited for a town where “nobody had a home, and nobody could get to work—there was no one to do it.”

Everything that had given Lytton its charm before the fire had now become a liability. Lytton’s mayor, its small staff, and the small village council, elected uncontested and used to handling wastewater treatment and other day-to-day issues, were ill-equipped to deal with high-level crisis communications or to reconstruct a town. What’s more, Lytton was broke—its tiny tax base had been decimated and could not fund the removal of toxic dirt and debris, let alone a complete rebuild. Bringing in consultants, experts, and construction workers to help with the recovery was a challenge too, in part because of the town’s small size and relative isolation, and because of the remote area’s limited accommodations. On top of all of this, not long after the fire, heavy rains, atmospheric floods, and snowstorms left many of the region’s main arteries impassable for extended periods.

Lytton was on its own. The provincial government provided initial recovery funding, but for months, the only support offered to residents was a $2,000 payout. As the council struggled behind closed doors to come up with a plan, residents saw little opportunity to offer input. After months of pressure from their constituents, the council asked for more direct support from the province; in October 2021, the town finally announced a short-term recovery plan and hired a recovery team using provincial money. In December 2021, residents started getting $1,300 a month for interim housing.

But within a month of the fire—without officially consulting the community—the mayor had already announced to the media that Lytton would be rebuilt as a carbon-neutral town. Residents were mystified and infuriated in equal measure. “It would be fine to do something like this if you were planning a brand-new subdivision,” Denise O’Connor, a lifelong Lytton resident and a former school principal, told me in October 2022. “But when you’re in a disaster, it doesn’t make sense … There’s been zero sense of urgency for the people.”

The initial plans required residents to rebuild their homes to net-zero standards for heating and cooling. The council also considered installing power lines belowground to minimize fire risk, as well as solar sidewalks—hardened solar panels fitted into sidewalks—and wind turbines to power municipal buildings. When I asked Jan Polderman, who was mayor at the time, what prompted this decision, he told me the council had looked at the available provincial and federal grant funding, and seen money for sustainable and net-zero initiatives. “Working towards being net-zero and fire-resilient—obviously, after that type of fire, that’s a pretty high priority—was the best route to go for the next 100 years,” Polderman said. Plus, because the city of Vancouver is aiming to require net-zero buildings by 2032, “we pitched the [provincial] government to use Lytton as a test model… so that by the time Vancouver and Kelowna have to go net-zero, they have proven technology to use,” he told me. The council had a nice story to tell about the long-term benefits of building back better from a devastating climate disaster. But all residents heard was that it was going to take far longer to move home.

Some of their neighbors were already rebuilding. Tricia Thorpe and her husband lost everything in the fire, but because their farm was located outside Lytton proper, they were exempt from the village’s rebuilding rules. “It’s a silver lining that we fell through the cracks. Otherwise, we’d still be waiting to rebuild,” Thorpe told me. They weren’t insured, so they relied on crowdfunding, donations, and volunteer labor. “We’re trying to be as energy efficient and fire resistant as we can,” Thorpe said. The property’s electrical lines run underground from a stand-alone shed to the house; the house and the barn have cement cladding, metal siding, and metal roofs to improve fire resistance; sprinklers cover their property’s southeast side, the direction from which another fire would most likely blow in. They put in a heat pump, have radiant floor heating, and are planning to get solar panels as soon as they can afford them.

Meanwhile, a major chunk of federal and provincial funding for Lytton took until 2022 to come through; the federal government launched its homeowner grant program only this past May.  People in the Lytton area can apply for grants of $10,000 toward rebuilding to fire-resilient standards and, depending on home size, about $84,000 to rebuild to net-zero standards—using solar panels or better-insulated walls and roofs, as well as thicker, more airtight windows.

[Read: I turned my house into a zero-carbon utopia]

It’s a good policy in principle, Ali Asgary, a professor of disaster and emergency management at Toronto’s York University, told me: “We want to rebuild in a way that buildings and infrastructure receive less damage and cause no death during future similar events.” But the net-zero requirements go beyond that—and some in Lytton struggle to see why they have to jump through these extra hoops to get help. “Sure, it might be a positive thing to be a model community that helps plan for others in the future,” Shneiderman, of the Disaster Resilience Research Network, said. “But that’s not necessarily serving the needs of the people who are actually there.”

In the months following the fire, lacking information and any sense of when they’d be back home, residents grew discontented. Some, like Thorpe, believe that the plans for Lytton to become carbon neutral were a PR move more than anything else. One council member resigned; recovery managers came and went. On Facebook, people shared what little information they had and vented. After uproar from residents, the council softened some of the other proposed green-building regulations; any official talk of solar sidewalks stopped. But by then, it was too late—goodwill had been lost. In large part because of her frustration with the net-zero standards, O’Connor ran for mayor, and won.

A big problem with the current net-zero grants, she told me, is the number of boxes residents must tick to qualify—you can’t meet just some of the requirements; it’s all or nothing. And because most of the federal grant money would only be paid at the end of the rebuild, some people are forgoing the grants, O’Connor told me. In December 2023, a Canadian insurer, in partnership with the federal government, did offer to advance residents the money to rebuild to fire-resilient and net-zero standards. But this process has gone on for long enough that some people have already decided against moving back to town at all. When the village council polled former residents this past April, before the announcement of the federal and insurance funding, 65 percent of households that had relocated planned on moving back to Lytton. And although 60 percent said that they would rebuild to fire-resilient standards, only 13 percent were planning to rebuild with net-zero standards in mind.

For two years, Lytton was an eerie collection of signifiers that a town once thrived here: cracked sidewalks and intact metal fences; the bones of a concrete building that had once been a health clinic; a small cemetery that was still recognizable; a set of burnt, misshapen plastic Adirondack chairs on someone’s lawn. As recently as this fall, recovery workers were still clearing debris, cleaning the soil of toxins, and working to uncover thousands of Indigenous artifacts, including a 7,500-year-old spear point, copper grave goods, tools, and red ochre wrapped in birch bark, which was central to ancestral burials—another stumbling block along the long road to the Lytton of tomorrow. As of this writing, no homes have been built.

In contrast to the town of Lytton, the neighboring Lytton First Nation’s recovery has moved more swiftly. Its losses were less total than the village’s, and it works directly with Indigenous Services Canada, which has separate funding. Although many still feel that the Lytton First Nation recovery is lacking, last summer, the Nation set up temporary housing, which meant that Michell—now Lytton First Nation’s rebuild director—and others were able to come home while they waited to rebuild on their lots. Their rebuilding plan includes a mix of prefab homes and homes made of wood and constructed on-site, with a focus on climate resilience, done their own way. They are cognizant of fire: This summer, Michell, still living in temporary housing on Lytton First Nation and told that he could have to evacuate for nearby fires at any moment, was out every day, cutting his neighbours’ grass, making sure everything was as fire safe as it could be. He called himself a climate refugee. “Three years of wildfire-evacuation alerts and orders in Lytton, and I’m still here,” he told me. He plans on staying, but part of him wonders how many more hits this place can take—and what the Lytton of the future could look like for his grandchildren.

Washington Wizards fans didn’t need a new reason to be miserable. As a Wizards diehard, I’m used to following their annual descent in the NBA standings. But I experienced a fresh sort of pain at the recent announcement that the team would be moving from its convenient downtown-D.C. home to a new, $2.2 billion “world-class Entertainment District” in the Virginia suburb of Alexandria. What’s so sad about my terrible team leaving the emptiest arena in the NBA for a gleaming palace across the Potomac? Sit down and let me explain—right here, in row G, seat 11, because I couldn’t find anyone else to go to the game with me.

In many cities, having NBA season tickets is a status symbol. Not in D.C. lately. I’ve had Wizards season tickets for the past 10 years, a fact that tends to be met with the sort of pitying curiosity that I assume is familiar to Civil War reenactors and ferret owners. I love this team. I really do. I follow the Wizards religiously, by which I mean: regular attendance, tithing, and a vague promise of salvation through suffering. That suffering stretches back 45 years. The then–Washington Bullets won the franchise’s only NBA title in 1978. The following year they went back to the finals but lost. Since that season, the team has never made it past the second round of the playoffs and hasn’t even made it to 50 regular-season wins, the longest such streak in the league by two decades. (Last season alone, six teams won more than 50 games.) The median age in the United States is about 39 years old, meaning most Americans have never existed at the same time as a relevant Washington basketball team.

For my first five years as a season-ticket owner, the Wizards weren’t great, but they were at least competitive, with some exciting young talent. They even made it to 49 wins once! Back then, the arena was loud and the city was paying attention. Now they’re one of the very worst teams in the league, and the seats are empty. The beautiful thing about sports, though, is that winning cures everything. Improving the vibes would seem straightforward: Build a better team. Instead, the owner, Ted Leonsis—who, through his company, Monumental Sports and Entertainment, also owns the NHL’s Washington Capitals and the WNBA’s Washington Mystics—would rather put a $2.2 billion cart before the horse. Maybe building a flashy new arena with the help of Virginia taxpayers is a way to sidestep the “winning basketball games” thing. (Laurene Powell Jobs, a minority owner of Monumental Sports, is the founder of Emerson Collective, which is the majority owner of The Atlantic.)

[Prashant Rao: Why it’s good that Americans don’t dominate in basketball]

The new complex will be only about six miles from the Wizards’ current Chinatown digs, but emotionally the team might as well be moving to Alexandria, Egypt. Capital One Arena is easily accessible from nearly anywhere in the region, walking distance from every subway line, and close to bars, restaurants, and museums. The new location is slotted between the Potomac River, a big Target, and acres of current and upcoming construction just south of the still-in-progress Amazon HQ2. In addition to the arena for basketball and hockey, the site plans envision a performing-arts venue, a TV studio, corporate offices, and a “fan plaza,” which is developer-speak for “a big sidewalk.”

The complex that Leonsis wants to build is the dream of sports owners and developers everywhere: a city without the city. It’s a big, walkable, transit-accessible area full of tall buildings and bright lights without any of the annoyances that arise from crowded civilization. There’s no loud music blasting, except what the company pumps through the speakers. There’s no vice, except for the company-owned bars and gambling parlors. There’s no theft, except for the likely extortionate price of everything inside.

Having the Washington Wizards play in the heart of Washington, D.C., isn’t just convenient; it weaves the team into the city’s culture, making every win and loss a matter of civic pride or civic shame. When I reached out for comment, Monumental Sports officials stressed to me that they weren’t abandoning D.C. Under the proposed plan, the WNBA’s Mystics would move to the Wizards’ old arena in Chinatown, and Monumental would put money into improvements that would allow it to host more college sports, concerts, conferences, and other events. But the company just built a partially publicly funded arena for the Mystics and the Wizards’ minor-league team that only opened in 2018 and was supposed to spur redevelopment in the economically depressed, predominantly Black neighborhood of Congress Heights. Now, only five years later, it’s supposedly overcrowded and outdated.

At the new arena’s rollout event, Leonsis gestured to the airport that sits about a mile from the proposed site. “It’s no secret that this great airport here was considered Washington National, and yet it’s in Virginia,” he said. It was an inadvertently apt comparison. An annoying trip out to a sterile complex where everything costs more than it should? Future Wizards games already sound like trips to the airport.

The surprise Alexandria announcement came after Leonsis unsuccessfully asked the city of Washington for $600 million to renovate Capital One Arena, which was built with minimal public investment and opened in 1997. The new arena still isn’t a done deal. It needs approval from local and state representatives, and many who live in Alexandria and nearby aren’t happy with the idea of an “entertainment district” bringing even more traffic through their city. Leonsis’s agreement with Virginia is nonbinding, and he’s still allowed to negotiate with D.C. going forward. Meanwhile, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser prepared a last-ditch plan that would keep the Wizards and Capitals in Chinatown in exchange for $500 million in public funding.

As a longtime fan and D.C. resident, I should be rooting for the Virginia deal to fall through. But what if that option feels just as bad? A “win” for D.C. would cost half a billion dollars that could be spent on, well, anything other than fixing up a billionaire’s property. It’s nearly as much as the city plans to “invest in affordable housing, support community redevelopment, and provide shelter” over the next five years, according to its fiscal-year-2024 budget. Worried about the state of Chinatown after the Wizards and Capitals leave? Maybe the city could put some of that money toward supplementing the $70 million earmarked to “support the District’s economic recovery and growth.” If Monumental takes Bowser’s deal, stays put, and has me back in my usual seat at a renovated Capital One Arena, I can’t imagine looking around the stadium and seeing anything but better uses for my city’s tax dollars. Sure, the schools need new computers, but have you seen the size of the new Jumbotron?

The argument for spending the money is that an arena brings people downtown, and those people in turn spend money, providing tax revenue. But crediting arenas with all that revenue means assuming that those people wouldn’t go out and spend their money anywhere in the city unless they visited the arena—and that the city couldn’t get better results by investing the money directly into neighborhoods. Monumental Sports officials say that all public spending on the new arena complex will be offset by future tax revenue from it—$1.35 billion in funding from Virginia, potentially the largest arena subsidy in American history, would actually be free. But among economists, who disagree on nearly everything, there is broad consensus that sports stadiums don’t contribute much to the local economy. These projects tend to do a better job of obfuscating cost than preventing it, says Nate Jensen, a University of Texas professor who researches government economic-development strategies. He has found that public-school budgets tend to be hit hard, due to their reliance on the sort of property taxes that are often waived to fund new arenas. “It’s probably one of the worst bets you can make in terms of economic development,” he told me. “The economic impact of most stadiums is about the same as a Target store.” (That’s bad news for Alexandria, where developers are considering knocking down the Target next door to make room for more stadium-adjacent development.)

[Read: Sports stadiums are a bad deal for cities]

In economic terms, moving the Wizards to Virginia would actually be a big win for me as a D.C. resident. My subway ride to games would be longer, but the billion dollars in funding, the traffic issues, and the potential legal battles would be Virginia’s problem—with apologies to my friends who teach at Alexandria City High School. I would be a free rider, which, economically speaking, is the best thing to be. But that doesn’t feel like a win either. If I operated from a place of pure, cold logic, I wouldn’t be a Wizards fan.

I can think of one more option, though—one that no one has discussed, because, I presume, it is utterly unprecedented in its civic genius. The city of Washington, D.C., should seize the Washington Wizards through eminent domain. The city code outlines the right to acquire private property for condemnation or other reasons in the public interest after paying a satisfactory price to the current owner. If you’re willing to pay half a billion dollars to fix up the arena, why not kick in another couple billion and just take the franchise? The case could certainly be made that the current Wizards team is a form of urban decay.

Government ownership of a sports franchise might sound bizarre and un-American. But consider that, earlier this year, the Qatari sovereign-wealth fund bought a 5 percent stake in Monumental Sports. Why should a foreign nation get to own part of the Wizards while the city they play in gets nothing? Mayor Bowser and the D.C. city council should declare the team a public utility, pump the NBA’s massive TV revenue back into the city, and make the front office run for reelection every four years. I’ll leave it to the lawyers to figure out whether any of this is actually legal. I’m more interested in the principle. D.C. residents infamously don’t get to vote for representation in Congress. At least let us vote for our basketball team.

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.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Over the past few years, I’ve reminded you of the best Christmas specials and talked about some classic Christmas music. This year, it’s time to clear the field for the greatest adaptation of the greatest Christmas story.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The Colorado Supreme Court just gave Republicans a chance to save themselves. The Colorado ruling calls the originalists’ bluff. Trump insists he hasn’t read Mein Kampf.

The holidays are a time to look back on a long year, but also to look forward to the new one. Give an Atlantic subscription to someone close to you and they’ll get a year of the best coverage on the most important stories—to stay informed and inspired as we enter the new year.

An Actual Ghost Story

Christmas, no matter what your religious beliefs, is a wonderful time to cherish our friends and family but also, in the season’s spirit of reconciliation, to recognize and embrace our common humanity with people everywhere. In the approaching depths of winter, we can recommit to kindness, peace, and joy. That’s why I would like to take this opportunity, right before the holiday, to make you all mad one more time with one of my cultural takes.

There are some good adaptations of the Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol, and many bad ones, but only one truly great version, and it is the 1984 made-for-television movie starring George C. Scott.

Wait. Hear me out.

I know that many people are intensely loyal to the 1951 version (titled A Christmas Carol in the United States, and released in the U.K. as Scrooge), starring Alastair Sim. I understand why. It’s charming, in its way, but it is also enduring because so many of us grew up with it. For a time, it was like It’s a Wonderful Life, the black-and-white wallpaper always there in the background after Thanksgiving. And Sim is wonderful: He was only 50 when he filmed Scrooge but he looks much older; his Scrooge is so deformed by sin that his transformation later in the story is almost a physical change, wondrous and giddy.

But for me, too much of Scrooge is formal and stagey. And let’s not even talk about the other versions from the 1930s, or the Muppets, or Bill Murray, or the cartoons, or the more arty takes. Some of them are truly awful. (I’m looking at you, Guy Pearce.)

When I first saw the Scott version, however, I loved the tighter connection to the book, and especially the attention to detail and atmosphere. No, it doesn’t really snow that much in London, but the 1984 version is so evocative that you can almost smell Scrooge’s musty bedroom, the happy stink of the open-air butchers and fishmongers, and the scrawny goose roasting in Mrs. Cratchit’s tiny kitchen.

Most important, just as Sim carried Scrooge, this version is Scott’s movie, despite the outstanding actors around him. Scott was an American, and his British accent slips now and then—I always wince when he tries to get his tongue around “I wonder you don’t go into Parl-ya-ment”—but years of hard living gave him a face, a voice, and a stare that no other Scrooge could match.

And yes, he was fat. Scrooge, in most other iterations, is a scrawny geezer who doesn’t eat much or drink or “make merry” at Christmas. But Scott’s Scrooge is a barrel-chested bully, an imposing and nasty piece of work. He’s not particularly disciplined or monkish; he’s just a corpulent old bastard who can’t remember that he was once a human being.

Then there are the ghosts. They’re deeply unsettling apparitions, which makes Scott’s version a bit more PG-13 than most of the other adaptations.

Frank Finlay’s Marley, in particular, is not some old pal coming to issue a friendly warning. Marley is a damned soul, wailing and doomed. He’s a rotting corpse, for crying out loud. Angela Pleasence is a radiant and annoying Ghost of Christmas Past. At first, I found her off-putting, and then I realized: She’s supposed to be annoying. She’s not guiding Scrooge on a nostalgia tour of his youth; she’s taking acidic delight in showing Scrooge what a jerk he’s become. Every Scrooge loses his temper at these “pictures from the past,” but Scott’s anger seems especially justified as Pleasence smirks at him.

Edward Woodward, however, steals every scene he’s in as the Ghost of Christmas Present. Instead of some phantasmic simp gently reminding Scrooge of the need for Christian charity, Woodward is a striding giant, a knight of Christmas whose mirth barely conceals his moral rage. When observing Bob Cratchit’s family doting on Tiny Tim, he snarls to Scrooge: “It may well be that, in the sight of heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child!” Woodward delivers it not as a rebuke but as a threat, and that moment still sends a chill through me.

I also have a very personal reason for loving Scott’s version more than any other.

My father was, if not a Scrooge, something of a Grinch, as my mother called him every year. He growled about how Christmas was a giant, expensive pain in the ass. But my dad was a churchgoing Christian, and he harbored a secret love for the holiday. Despite his bah-humbug approach, he insisted on a real tree every year, leaving the decorating to me and my mother. He wrapped his own presents, if you can count “rolling them through paper and tape” as “wrapping.” He and I would go to Christmas Eve services (in Greek Orthodox churches, they’re usually in the late afternoon or early evening) every year while my mother prepared dinner.

But my father was also a very difficult man, and my parents had an extremely volatile marriage. Like many men, my father carried his share of sins and secrets. And like most men of his generation, he did not often speak of them. Some, I know, weighed on him to the very end of his life.

So I was surprised when, one night in the mid-1980s, he joined us to watch A Christmas Carol. We sat in our dark living room with a small fire and no light but the blinking tree. He was chatty and seemed to enjoy it, but he became very quiet toward the end, when Scrooge realizes that at a not-so-distant future Christmas, he is dead and no one cares. Alone in the darkness and the snow, Scott pleads for mercy not like some accomplished thespian in the scene of his life but like an old man at the edge of the abyss, one who now fully understands how his own actions brought him to a desolate end.

I looked over at my parents. My mom was holding my father’s hand. And my father, quiet in the dark, had tears on his cheeks.

Until that moment, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen my father cry, including at his mother’s funeral—and certainly never at a movie. Scott got to him, perhaps because Scott’s Scrooge was a man my father could understand: loud, tough, and full of anger and regret, rather than the effete, pinched-face slip of a fellow played by Sim and others.

In later life, I sometimes feel the same tears welling in my eyes when Scott pleads for one more chance. These tears are not only for my father, who struggled with his own burdens to the end of his life, but for myself as well. It’s easy to hate Scrooge when you’re young and think you have plenty of time to straighten yourself out. When you’re older, you start to wonder how much time you’ve let get by you, and whether you and the elderly miser have more in common than you might like to admit.

Scott’s A Christmas Carol isn’t perfect; it has some especially cringeworthy and twee moments with Tiny Tim. But this isn’t Tim’s story. It’s about looking into the grave and realizing that on Christmas—or any day, really—it is always within our power to change our heart and to become, like Scrooge, “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old city knew.”

To borrow another line from Dickens: May that be truly said of all of us.

Merry Christmas. See you next week.

Related:

We need a little Christmas (music). The most beloved Christmas specials are (almost) all terrible.

Today’s News

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh arrived in Egypt for talks with Egyptian officials about a possible new cease-fire in Gaza and hostage swaps. After three years of negotiations, the European Union reached a provisional agreement to overhaul its asylum and migration laws. Pending ratification, the pact aims to make it easier to limit the entry of migrants while still protecting the right to asylum, according to EU officials. The World Health Organization designated the new JN.1 coronavirus strain as a “variant of interest” yesterday because of its “rapidly increasing” spread.

Evening Read

Pablo Delcan

My Father, My Faith, and Donald Trump

By Tim Alberta

It was July 29, 2019—the worst day of my life, though I didn’t know that quite yet.

The traffic in downtown Washington, D.C., was inching along. The mid-Atlantic humidity was sweating through the windows of my chauffeured car. I was running late and fighting to stay awake. For two weeks, I’d been sprinting between television and radio studios up and down the East Coast, promoting my new book on the collapse of the post–George W. Bush Republican Party and the ascent of Donald Trump. Now I had one final interview for the day …

All in a blur, the producers took my cellphone, mic’d me up, and shoved me onto the set with the news anchor John Jessup. Camera rolling, Jessup skipped past the small talk. He was keen to know, given his audience, what I had learned about the president’s alliance with America’s white evangelicals … Polling showed that born-again Christian conservatives, once the president’s softest backers, were now his most unflinching advocates. Jessup had the same question as millions of other Americans: Why?

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The hypocrisy underlying the campus-speech controversy Xi Jinping is fighting a culture war at home. Why the U.S. is pumping more oil than any country in history Our forests need more fire, not less.

Culture Break

Apple TV+

Watch. Slow Horses (streaming on Apple TV+) features an island of misfit spies with a subversive worldview.

Read. These seven books actually capture what sickness is like, by avoiding simple narratives and exploring the textures of human life.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.