quite a way to put it! but yes, with the caveat that catholics keep their rich liturgy and intensive communions, but take on a more complicated relationship with hierarchy. not the protestant (evangelical) personal relationship with God, but also not the top-down hierarchy of rome. 1/

contingent hierarchies, elevated from beneath, neither slave to grass-roots passions nor insulated from accountability to members. (if that sounds like plain Madisonianism, sure, but maybe that's more tractable among self-selecting communities of interest than a mass public.) /fin

makes it particularly remarkable that they were willing to take on a pretty big cohort of students at Florida-state-school salaries. sometimes people do do the right thing, even when it costs them.

* tuitions...

it's almost nobody's preference, revealed or otherwise, to prefer their own unemployment to inflation. 1/

when you say "people" here, you are describing an artifact of a particular procedure for aggregating preferences. 2/

as we currently aggregate preferences electorally, the near-universality of the dispreference for even a moderate inflation overrides a much more intense dispreference for own-unemployment or unemployment risk that is concentrated over a small share of the public. 3/

a social welfare function more consistent with your and my moral intuitions would prefer a moderate inflation to devastating the lives of a sizable minority of the population. 4/

there's nothing wrong with "people" or "the people" in this. people are supposed to vote their values and interests, not be philosopher kings who've given complex policy abstractions deep thought. 5/

most people can't adjudicate the policy tradeoffs between inflation and unemployment risk, whether policy is calibrated to trade-off those risks in a way that accords with their moral values. they can perceive their own pain. 6/

our problem, in most things, is that our electoral system basically doesn't allow people to vote non-cartoonish values. neither D or R can make a "trust me, we'll devote policy competence to adjudicating this moral dilemma in a manner consistent with your values and respectful of your interests." 7/

so each of us votes our own pain (or pleasure), regardless of the intensity of others' pain and pleasure, and the social-welfare-function that gets maximized prefers, in an arithmetically obvious way, concentrated pain over shared burden. /fin

i think it has to do with the timing of our disappointment. things fell apart after we had fully internalized unipolar-moment optimism. the world is getting better and better and you're a loser if things aren't working out for you. 1/

the millennials had solidarity in collapse, everyone knew everything was broken by the time they reached early adulthood, and they collectively complained and complained and complained in cacophony about it. 2/

we were already atomized into adulthood, fundamentally alone, and our intuitions had been formed during an earlier era. many of us are living lives far less grand than what we'd expected would come easily. that merges easily into a fascist-adjacent narrative, somebody stole your birthright. /fin