Schrödinger’s Government

There exists a state, a donut hole of existence, where law exists and doesn't exist at the same time.

I think we are watching something in Minneapolis that is amazing and terrifying at the same time.

It appears to me that a strange new form of governance is emerging in modern democracies, especially in America where the strongest protection of individual liberty exists. It is a governing system that exists in a state of perpetual contradiction and it has spread to Washington where Democrats recognize there are actual immigration laws they don’t like, but instead of attacking them and changing them, they want to defund the agency charged with the enforcement of the laws and the removal of those who broke them to stop the law from being enforced. They want to play another round of “Defund the Police” with national security and sovereignty in the balance.

So, law exists but it doesn’t exist because it can’t be enforced.

In this new system, the fundamental legitimacy of democratic processes, elections, legislation, and judicial rulings becomes conditional, subject to acceptance by those affected. If you (and an extreme minority composed of other chaos agents) disagree with an electoral outcome or dislike any passed law (whether newly passed or settled), you can simply declare it invalid, at least for yourself. The social contract that binds citizens to respect democratically enacted rules, even those they oppose, becomes entirely situational and voluntary.

This rejection of authority operates parasitically within the very system it denounces. Those who refuse to accept certain laws simultaneously invoke other laws and constitutional protections as absolute shields. They weaponize rights to assembly, speech, and due process—protections they claim are inviolable—while coordinating sustained campaigns of civil disruption designed to make governance impossible.

The asymmetry is deliberate: the system must respect procedural limits and individual rights even as those same individuals work to paralyze it. You can even use the system against itself, tying it in knots by using its own processes to delay judicial outcomes for weeks, months, and in some cases—years.

The result is a kind of legal donut hole, a void where law simultaneously exists and doesn’t exist. Authorities face an impossible dilemma. To enforce laws against coordinated, prolonged disruption, they must often employ measures—curfews, dispersal orders, mass arrests, deployment of the National Guard—that themselves test constitutional boundaries. The chaos is calibrated precisely to this threshold: intense enough to demand response, but conducted under enough legal cover that any forceful reaction can be framed as “fascism” or tyranny.

The protesters/activists/chaos agents become simultaneously lawbreaker and victim, revolutionary and rights-bearer in a scenario where they always carry the presumption of innocence and the stewards of the law always bear the presumption of guilt.

This creates what might be called Schrödinger’s government—a system hovering between legitimacy and illegitimacy, authority and impotence, depending on who’s observing and from what angle. To its defenders, it remains a functioning democracy upholding civil liberties even under pressure. To its detractors, it has lost all moral authority and deserves only resistance. Both states coexist, neither fully collapsing into the other.

What makes this situation particularly unstable is its self-reinforcing nature. When one faction successfully employs this strategy—rejecting laws while exploiting legal protections—it establishes a template others will follow. Each iteration further erodes the shared assumption that democratic processes, however imperfect, produce outcomes all must provisionally accept. The notion of loyal opposition, of respecting institutional legitimacy even when wielded by opponents, gives way to permanent contestation.

This isn’t simple civil disobedience in the traditional sense, where protesters accept legal consequences to dramatize injustice. Nor is it revolutionary politics that openly seeks to overthrow existing structures. Instead, it occupies an ambiguous middle ground: using the system’s own rules and protections to create ungovernable situations, then claiming persecution when authorities respond. The quantum superposition of lawfulness and lawlessness persists until someone observes it—and even then, what they see depends entirely on where they stand.

Maybe it’s not that new. Seems to me that we already fought a national Civil War over this governing concept. The difference is this iteration proposes constant mini-civil wars all over America any time a group decides federal law doesn’t apply to them or their situation.

No matter how the battle inside the donut hole ebbs and flows, the people on the ring of the donut are the ones who pay for the coffee because it is their liberty at risk, not due to who wins or loses, but because the donut hole exists at all.