Obedience to the Law versus Obedience to the State

Toying with an idea and not yet spending the focused time to consider it.  On the other hand, I don't want to lose the train of thought.

Here is the undeveloped idea.  What if much of what is characterized as polarization and much of what causes civil strife is purely a function of an elision between obedience to the State versus obedience to the Law?

In a functional constitutional federal republic they ought to be pretty close to the same thing.  For various historical reasons, I think the gap has actually widened.  Partly because so much governmental activity occurs through agencies with little oversight or accountability.  Partly because in an era of rapid technological evolution, social norms and regulatory structures fall behind challenges created by new technologies.

If, on average, the time between new technology introduction and market saturation has shrunk to a decade yet the average time for new social norms, legal constructs, and regulatory frameworks takes more like two decades, then you have an accumulating disconnect between the law and civil society.

So Agency autonomy and unaccountability mixed with fast cycle technology evolution are likely to be creating stresses on the governmental system.

If half the population are focused on obeying the Law and half are focused on obeying the State, then you have a real opportunity for strife.

In normal times, or more specifically at more normal rates of change, the evolution of the law, the will of the people, and the will of the State ought to be in close synch and there shouldn't be much issue.

But under our current conditions, the pace is not synchronized.  Using Covid-19 as an example, we already had a set of responses based on science and past experience to be implemented in the event of a pandemic.  These were also, necessarily, in compliance with the Law.

For whatever reasons, our public health agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH, etc. all chose to abandon the pre-established protocols and chose to implement untested policies with neither any evidentiary basis nor any sort of consistency with the law.  The issue was clearest wherever the public health agencies pursued their goals through mandates.

These were clearly transgressive of science, empirical evidence and the established law.  People who saw their duty as compliance with the State were of course happy to comply.  From their perspective, anyone not complying with the mandates was persona non grata, even evil.  

Likewise, for the other half of the population most concerned about complying with the Law, there was an obvious disconnect.  What the public health authorities were seeking to do contravened both the law and our political norms not to speak of civil rights as articulated in the Constitution.

The two factions stare at one another across a gulf of incomprehension.  The "obedience to the State" people view the "obedience to the Law" people as ignorant heretics.  And vice versa.

Pick any other polarizing issue and I will bet the same dichotomy arises.  People who want to obey the State versus those who want to obey the Law.  

If this perspective has merit, it points to a resolution.  The challenge is not more information, or more education, or better communication.  The resolution lies in resolving the gap between the Law and the State.  There will always be some small gap between the two.  That is why the democratic process should always be in process, resolving open questions through free speech and ultimately consent of the governed reflected in laws that are passed.  

But closing the gap is the challenge, not resolving differences between those committed to the State and those committed to the Law.