What makes a government legitimate?

That’s a giant question, hotly debated over the centuries by philosophers, political theorists, politicians, and revolutionaries. But popular conservative commentator Ben Shapiro thinks he’s discovered the answer. In fact, he claims — and I promise I’m not making this up — that he’s distilled the answer into a precise equation, weighing factors like “responsiveness of authority to input” and “aggressiveness of enforcement” and spitting out the exact degree to which a given regime is legitimate.

Shapiro’s equation is embarrassing nonsense. But it says a lot about how he sees the world.