It’s weird to think that one year ago today Barack Obama was still the president. Michelle Obama was decorating the White House with happy snowmen and gingerbread dogs instead of transforming the East Colonnade into a hell-bound gullet of witch fingers, apparently our new tradition, and the president of the United States somehow made it through the entire week without insulting a single 90-year-old Native American war hero.

Many of us were angry and terrified but still energized about things like vote audits and faithless electors. We hoped the system might have a fail-safe to protect us from our worst selves — a flash-frozen grown-up to defrost in case of emergencies. Now, a year wiser and few thousand older, in too many ways we are still waiting. It hasn’t clicked with the necessary urgency that we are the grown-ups. We are still frozen.

Every year, Dictionary.com chooses one word, “a symbol of the year’s most meaningful events and lookup trends,” to be the Word of the Year. The past few picks seem to follow a chilling but logical evolution. In 2015 the Word of the Year was broad and neutral — “identity” — issues of racial and gender injustice having finally come closer to becoming national priorities and weathered a ghastly but predictable (and still developing) backlash. Two thousand fifteen was a difficult year, but it was a year of progress.

By the end of 2016, as Trumpism seized the wheel, our national conversation on identity sharpened to a sinister specificity: that year’s word was “xenophobia.” Two thousand sixteen was a year of us versus them, of villains making their plans clear, of straight, white, Christian identity politics moving to supplant everyone else.