When a Ruler Offers Up His Own Cities

At a rally in Nebraska, in the midst of defending a war against Iran as necessary to “keep the world safe,” the American president is reported to have said, “Let them take out L.A., let them take out San Diego,” adding that this was “a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon.” The crowd, we are told, laughed and cheered. The next morning, the governor of California publicly directed his State Threat Assessment Center to monitor whether foreign actors might treat this as an “invitation.” Meanwhile the president’s own officers insisted he meant only that those cities would have been threatened had he not already gone to war.

I am less concerned with the man’s temper than with the office he bears. When I wrote in the Second Treatise that political power is a right to make laws with penalties only for the public good, I had in view precisely this question: what may a magistrate do with the lives of his people? Men are by nature free, equal, and independent, subject only to the law of reason, which teaches that “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” They consent to government so far, and only so far, as it affords them better security in those goods than they would enjoy in the state of nature.

Consider, then, what is signified when the chief magistrate of a great commonwealth speaks of letting a foreign enemy “take out” two of its principal cities, and calls the destruction of their inhabitants a “small price to pay.” If taken in its plain sense, it is an assertion that the lives of those citizens, and indeed of those who dwell in their neighbourhoods and military bases, may rightly be staked, not upon their own consent, but upon strategic calculations made elsewhere. If taken as mere raillery, it is a levity that treats their lives as counters in a game. In either sense, it ill suits a ruler who holds power on trust.

Here the law of nature must be our measure. No man, by assuming a public office, acquires a right to expose some part of his people to foreign slaughter for the supposed benefit of the rest, unless those very persons have plainly consented to so unequal a bargain. The old rule that there must be “enough, and as good” left for others applies not only to fields and acorns, but to risk and safety. To say of millions, without their voice, that their being “taken out” is a small price others may pay for world security, is to dispose of their property in the broad sense—lives, liberties, and estates—as if it were his own.

I know the reply: that this was but a way of speaking, meant to magnify a past decision to go to war, and that the media’s alarm is a “freakout.” Here I must recall another principle I have urged elsewhere, that knowledge comes from experience, not from bare authority. The understanding ought to consider what foreign powers hear, not what a press officer afterwards says was intended. California’s governor evidently judged the words dangerous enough to warrant a heightened watch for threats; local leaders protested that their cities were “never a ‘small price to pay’” and demanded to be kept out of such “reckless war talk.” That very need for threat assessment shows that the speech has civil effects, whether or not it was clothed as jest.

In my account of prerogative, I allowed that executives must sometimes act swiftly, even beyond the letter of standing law, for the public good; but I added that such power is held only so long as the people find themselves better preserved by it, and can revoke their trust when they do not. It is one thing for a magistrate, upon evident danger, to rally his people to necessary hazards they can see and judge; it is another for him, in time of his own choosing, to speak as if he might license an enemy to devastate disfavoured cities. When power speaks this way, especially amid a history of describing some cities as “blood-soaked killing fields” and sending in troops against local wishes, men may reasonably begin to suspect a disposition toward arbitrary government.

I do not say that one sentence at a rally dissolves a constitution; a people ought not cast off their governors for every rash word, but only for a long train of abuses pointing one way. Yet words that toy aloud with the destruction of one’s own cities mark a line. They teach subjects how their ruler imagines the balance between their lives and his designs. When that balance is set so that some may be “taken out” at a “small price,” consent is strained, trust is shaken, and the boundary between legitimate government and usurpation grows thin. A people that would remain free must answer such speech, not with outrage alone, but with a steady insistence that no man in office holds their lives at his personal valuation.