What to Expect When You’re Expecting the End of the World

by Merrilee Montgomery, Policy & Data Analyst at Louisiana Progress

In the last decade, the American public has experienced escalating climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, a deepening housing affordability crisis, rising costs of groceries, and claims that the presidential election was rigged. As a young person who has financially, politically, and intellectually come of age during this decade, I have noticed that my peers and I value financial and intellectual independence as protection from this instability. 

For many of my peers, that independence or, better yet, freedom, looks like “simply” being able to financially survive the next catastrophe and, hopefully, maybe being able to retire someday. But that feels impossible, even on $15 an hour–twice the current minimum wage–so we work multiple jobs with side hustles that range from online businesses to freelancing to selling PDF courses on Instagram. We want to exist separate from a system that has proven itself to be unreliable, at best, and that we often see as being directly exploitative.

Of course, while the modern political system seems especially unstable, the system itself has never been perfect. Even regular voters admit they just choose the “lesser of two evils.” However, I now have friends who do not vote as a way of rejecting what they see as a corrupt political system. 

We live in a hyper-partisan era, where the veracity of a presidential election can be challenged alongside central Supreme Court rulings like Roe v Wade. Self-aware, we know that we are subject to polarized media and politics decided outside the public eye, from the private wallet. As a result, 63 percent of U.S. adults express little or no confidence at all in the future of the U.S. political system. A growing number of U.S. voters are registered independent, despite consistently voting for one party or the other, showing hesitance to associate with either of the two major U.S. ideologies, for understandable reasons. People who directly identify with one of the two main political parties consistently assume that the views of people who identify with the other party to be more extreme than they are, partially due to a highly polarized media environment. 

In this era of distrust and dread, my generation’s disenfranchisement has manifested itself as nihilistic apoliticism. Nihilistic apoliticism is the logical, self-soothing numbness to an overwhelming sense of doom for the future of our nation, and even our world. It is the “flight” response of the “fight or flight” options for responding to the catastrophes of the last decade or two. Assuming that the political system is rigged gives people permission not to participate at all. And apolitical nihilism could be the death of our democracy–freedom flown into the sun. Apolitical nihilism is the burnout from a constant stream of only semi-trustworthy 24-hour news, and the unending list of social and political issues that we’re supposed to have to care about. With apolitical nihilism you get to feel politically independent enough to emotionally survive the total crumbling of our political institutions.

The problem with this philosophy is that true political independence is not achieved through apolitical nihilism. Whether we like it or not, we cannot exist separate from the political system, because it determines the allocation of resources that we use every day. When the disenfranchised portion of the population leaves the political sphere, they leave politics in the hands of people who are not discouraged by the political and economic state of the world because a) the suffering of the majority of people is not sufficiently distressing to them, b) they have simply rejected nihilistic apoliticism out of some sort of practical concern, however terrifying impending catastrophe may be, and/or c) they directly benefit from the current political and economic state of the world and want it to continue in the same fashion. As a young person, I experience this strong sense of impending doom. But, to fully assume the failure of democracy, I would have to ignore the progress and complexity I have witnessed in my time working in Louisiana politics.

In my three years working for Louisiana Progress, I’ve seen real victories: Louisiana outlawed debtors' prisons; permitted the Office of Motor Vehicles to lower fines and fees for for insurance lapses, which can be a financial barrier to purchasing insurance at all; improved criminal justice data collection relating to traffic stops; mandated funding disclosures in digital political ads; and required better reporting of fines and fees revenue, which lays the groundwork for building a more stable and equitable criminal justice system.

But over those same three years, I’ve also seen the rollback of previous victories. Mugshots, which are taken before a person is proven guilty, drastically damage a person’s publicly available record for years to come. A law passed in 2022 that limited what mugshots could be released was repealed in 2024. In a steamroller special crime session in early 2024, much of the progress achieved during the 2017 Justice Reinvestment Initiative was lost, while even more stringent limitations were placed on probation, parole, and “good-time,” which are credits people can earn to reduce their sentence through good behavior and pursuing education and job training while incarcerated. 

At its core, politics is driven by people, and people are complex. I joined Louisiana Progress in the summer of 2021 after my first year at Tulane University, where I studied homeland security, international relations, and computer science, with the intention of working in federal law enforcement. While working for Louisiana Progress, I focused on criminal justice issues, for which the legislature struggled to craft black-and-white, hard-and-fast policy when crimes can involve extreme actions, strong emotions, and complicated situations. I went on to intern with the Orleans Public Defenders investigations unit, where I became even more certain that people are complex. 

The human complexity that criminal justice policy must accommodate is the same human complexity that makes politics worth engaging in–our future is only as doomed as our perspectives are rigid. It has been three years since I joined Louisiana Progress. I have graduated and am still pursuing a position in federal law enforcement. Working for Louisiana Progress has provided me with insight into human complexity that I hope will make me an effective and compassionate agent. 

I am not telling you to stand firm against nihilism and hopelessness. This is not a derailment of centrism. This is simply a reminder that people are complex; their beliefs and values can change. And all forms of power and politics–marching, lobbying, researching, writing, visualizing, the bills and beliefs, on everything from criminal justice to critical race theory to campaign finance–are only ever the product of people.