California Officials Respond to Trump’s Comments on Iran and U.S. Cities
War Talk Has a Price, and It Is Not Paid in Nebraska Applause
When a president jokes that foreign powers might “take out” great cities as a small price of safety, he spends the lives of others as if they were loose coin in his own pocket.
A president of a great republic, speaking at a rally far from the coasts, has lately mused that if a foreign enemy should “take out” Los Angeles or San Diego, it would be “a very small price to pay” for keeping the country, and indeed the world, safe. The crowd, we are told, laughed and cheered. When reporters repeated his words, the president dismissed the backlash as a mere “media freakout,” while his official spokesmen insisted he had only meant that such cities would have been threatened had he not already gone to war against that enemy. The words remain; the people on whom they fall remain also; explanations do not erase either.
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments I supposed an impartial spectator, well informed and disinterested, whose sentiments we consult when judging our own conduct. Let us place this speech before such a judge. He hears a chief magistrate, entrusted with the defence of all citizens, set up two great cities as hypothetical sacrifices, and hears the surrounding multitude receive the conceit with mirth. He knows that in those cities dwell merchants and labourers, magistrates and beggars, infants in the cradle and the aged on their beds. To sport with their possible destruction is to ask the spectator to join in a ghastly laughter over an imaginary funeral.
No doubt, the defence of a nation is one of the proper and necessary duties of the sovereign, as I elsewhere maintained when considering the wealth of nations. War may sometimes be unavoidable, and its miseries cannot be wholly prevented. Yet even when force must be used, prudence and justice require that we reckon its cost with the most anxious exactness. Those costs are not paid in the easy coin of rhetoric, but in the blood of soldiers drawn chiefly from the labouring poor, in the terror of families who live near the harbours and arsenals, in the destruction of houses, workshops, and that whole annual produce of the land and labour upon which the subsistence of the people depends.
The president, however, enjoys his safety at the rally; the danger is imagined at a distance. The applause of those to whom the threatened cities are but names is near and certain; the suffering of those who actually inhabit them is distant and contingent. Men commonly value what is near and visible above what is remote and obscure. In political quarrels, therefore, it is always to be feared that rulers will find it easier to purchase the present favour of one province by making a theatrical display of indifference to the supposed fate of another. Benefits and gratifications are loud and concentrated; dangers averted and harms conjectural are silent and scattered.
It is in this light that we should view the conduct of those magistrates in California who have ordered their officers to watch for new dangers which such talk might occasion. They are bound to consider, not the intention which the president now professes, but the manner in which his words may be understood by enemies abroad or fanatics at home. Even an unmeant “invitation,” if so it can be construed, alters the calculation of the rash and the wicked. That a governor should endeavour to guard his people from the possible consequences of such levity is not faction, but a sober fulfilment of the duty of protection.
Some will say that all this is but a dispute of words; that no one believes the ruler truly wishes his own cities destroyed; that he only boasts of having prevented such calamities. But language both springs from and forms the temper of a people. When those in authority accustom their followers to imagine certain districts, certain parties, certain classes of citizens, as so many counters in a game—chips that may be supposed lost to heighten the drama of their own achievements—they cultivate that very disposition I once called the vile maxim of the masters of mankind: all for ourselves, and nothing for other people. To talk often of “small prices” in human lives disposes men at last to pay them.
There is here also something of the man of system, who, gazing upon the great chess-board of human society, imagines that he may move cities and provinces as if they were lifeless pieces, to illustrate the ingenuity of his own design. The people of Los Angeles and San Diego have principles of motion of their own—affections, fears, attachments to their families and neighbourhoods—that cannot be reconciled to being offered up, even in hypothesis, for the glory of another. The impartial spectator, contemplating both the vanity that delights in such flourishes and the real alarm they cause, will judge this manner of speaking not spirited, but rash; not patriotic, but unjust; and entirely unworthy of any ruler who remembers that the first duty of his office is the preservation, not the theatrical endangerment, of those committed to his care.
From the works cited
- The Theory of Moral Sentiments — Judge conduct by the impartial spectator: what would a well-informed, disinterested observer feel about this action?
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — The state has real duties — defence, exact administration of justice, and public works and institutions that profit society but could never repay a private undertaker — and they must be paid for.