Comparative Illegitimacy at the Governance Layer

This paper demonstrates that comparative legitimacy at the governance layer is impossible in principle. Once admissibility and standing conservation are enforced, governance outcomes admit only a binary evaluation—legitimate or illegitimate—with no meaningful ordering, grading, or optimization across illegitimate states. Any attempt to compare “better” or “worse” governance failures is shown to rely on illicit importation of metrics, dynamics, or preference structures that are disallowed at the governance boundary. The result is strictly eliminative: it does not propose alternative governance frameworks or evaluative tools, but exhaustively rules out comparative semantics altogether. By closing this space, the paper removes an entire class of policy, optimization, and alignment arguments that presuppose gradations of governance validity where none can exist.