> Is your issue with universalism, then? That the policies fail to discriminate between different groups for different reasons? Would it be more proper to bring in communitarianism?

Universalism is wrong, granted, but that's not even the crux of it; the issue is that the "groups" you're likely referring to are also, in most cases, arbitrary logical constructs. The appropriate function of law - as distinct from policy - is to mediate disputes among actual individuals, not presumptive categories of people, according to the expectations, implicit and explicit, that give structure to the relationships among those particular people. (And the proper role of policy is to govern the activities of the state itself, as a particular institution, and not to insert itself uninvited into people's social arrangements, overriding their manifest preferences).

> Except that this has been true for all of history, and it's by systematizing it that we gain some measure of control over it. Instead of conducting warfare every time people disagree, we have means for communicating and compromising as a first resort.

This is simply incorrect; for the vast majority of history, law was generated via bottom-up emergent processes, that attempted to map the boundaries of the natural law inherent in each particular dispute. We've had a functional system of common law and equity operating this way for over 800 years.

The notion that law is something that people design, a priori, and apply to society as a whole from the top down, is a novelty that's been dominant only for about a century. I find it bizarrely perplexing that you seem to regard legislation as the only viable form of law.

> You keep straw-manning me by implying that I'm proposing a dictatorship masquerading as a democracy

This is a meta-straw-man, considering I said nothing of the sort. I'm arguing against the "state equals society" formula, which I entirely acknowledge is a form of democracy - no masquerade - but which is also clearly a form of totalitarianism. In this post, you seem to be articulating a model that diverges from this formula: you're re-purposing the term "state" to describe not an organized institution established for the purpose of exercising power, but to any structure that emerges within any social context. I don't think that's the way we were using the terminology when we began the conversation, and I'll point out that you began by objecting to distinguishing government from society, not state (however defined) from society.

> I simply do not find nations to be a useful social construct.

I agree that nations are far too broad and coarse to be considered substantive social contexts, but - and this is an assumption, so correct me if I'm wrong - I have a feeling that you would articulate merely smaller versions of nations as the appropriate scope within which to equate the state with society.

What I'm trying to point out is that every particular grouping of individual human beings is a society unto itself, and is in a sense sovereign unto itself: democracy isn't about people being arbitrarily shoehorned into classes or categories or purely abstract "communities", which then "express" themselves in the form of a system of law. Democracy is about people creating substantive social contexts - families, friendships, businesses, romantic relationships, weekly D&D groups, religious congregations - and manifesting law particular to that social context through their mutually-sustained interactions.

What we think of as the institutions of law - judicial institutions, not legislative ones - are merely a failsafe mechanism to be appealed to when disputes and controversies are not sufficiently contained and addressed within their originating social context, and threaten to escalate and spill over into other people's lives.

There's no room here for some legislative body, composed of strangers who you haven't met, to aggregate everyone's distinct circumstances, abstract them into a conceptual model, and then make prescriptive rules, again in the abstract, on the basis of that model. And when people talk about "the state" and "government" in the sense that began this thread, they're talking about this form of legislative state, not using those terms to describe the bottom-up patterns that formalize the mechanisms of concrete and particular social contexts.

You say "they aren't third parties", but it's absurd to suggest that any actual government operating on that legislative-state model can be regarded as anything other than a particular institution administered by particular people, not one of whom, odds are, is you.