When I mentioned to a young congressional staffer that the process for passing the Big Beautiful Bill would have been unthinkable in 2006, she looked genuinely confused. “This is how policy gets done,” she said. And based on her own experience in the 2020s, she was right.
But I had played these games before. I first arrived in Congress in 2006 as a science fellow, and returned in 2024, working during the Biden and Trump administrations. What I recognized the second time around wasn’t just political polarization, but a wholesale shift in what Gen Z staffers and citizens perceive as normal in American democracy.
This isn’t nostalgia for some imagined golden age of bipartisan cooperation, but an observation based on my background in ecology.
“Shifting baselines” is a term scientists use to describe how each generation views the environment of their youth as normal, regardless of how degraded the system may be compared with the past. For example, a young scuba diver visits a pale, sparse reef and marvels at its beauty, having no personal memory of the vibrant ecosystem that existed decades before. To them, this is thriving. Generation after generation, the baseline for what’s healthy and acceptable continually erodes.
When this happens in a democracy, we lose the ability to see how far we’ve drifted from functional governance. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is a case in point. This massive package combined health care, tax, immigration and energy policy into a single piece of legislation that passed overnight. Members voted on thousands of pages they had received hours earlier, with no hearings or floor amendments. In the past, this would have required months of committee work and debate, because it affected so many aspects of American life.
Legislative process is only part of the story. Shifting baselines extend to how we fund government itself.
Consider government shutdowns. Before 1995, funding gaps were mostly technical lapses, rarely lasting more than a few days. Then Newt Gingrich weaponized a shutdown as political leverage, forcing a major, prolonged standoff that was treated as a constitutional crisis. The public was outraged because shutdowns were viewed as a break-glass-in-emergency last resort.
Today, these events seem fairly perfunctory, with the pace accelerating dramatically in recent years. We now have infrastructure built around this dysfunction, including protocols for furloughs, designations for “essential” versus “non-essential” personnel, and contingency plans that allow us to manage the crisis rather than prevent it. Each shutdown demonstrates that we’ll eventually move on, which lowers the threshold for triggering the next one. To anyone under 30, shutdowns aren’t failures of governance but a predictable bump in the road.
The phenomenon also reaches far beyond Capitol Hill. For young Americans coming of age in the 2020s, a constant state of political combat has been normalized. Within just a few years, they have witnessed the Capitol breach of Jan. 6, 2021, protests sweeping through cities nationwide, encampments and clashes on college campuses, and ICE raids in residential neighborhoods. Graphic images of unrest in the U.S. swiftly circulate on social media, resembling what we once associated with countries in crisis elsewhere.
This isn’t to say political tension didn’t exist before. Of course it did. But the frequency and intensity of this moment represent a fundamental change. A shifting baseline. For Gen Z, this heightened level of domestic turmoil has become a constant burden they must carry.
Young staffers and young citizens broadly operate in a political system they inherited, with no lived memory of how it ever functioned differently. Each generation accepts a more eroded version of governance, making the next step away from democracy harder to recognize and easier to justify. Over time, we risk losing the capacity to see the need for course-correction.
The consequences can be irreversible. As a marine biologist, I watched regulators set fishing quotas based on already-overfished populations because they had no data showing what healthy numbers once looked like. They managed decline, not restoration, because they had lost the baseline for what restoration would even mean. The fishery I studied collapsed within a few years and has never recovered. Now I feel the need to speak up as I see the same dynamic threatening our nation.
When I think back to that early-career staffer who didn’t understand my concern about the Big Beautiful Bill, she was interpreting the moment based on her first-hand experience of how politics works. But it makes me wonder whether future generations will be able to remember the principles upon which American democracy was founded. Will we continue to recognize when it’s necessary to push back if our personal memories are only of political upheaval?
The ecological answer is sobering. If baselines shift too far, restoration may become unimaginable.
