Thomas Hobbes: The governor of Illinois believes his objection matters more than order itself.
John Locke: The people never consented to soldiers patrolling their own streets.
Thomas Hobbes: Consent is a luxury purchased only after the sword has already kept you alive.
John Locke: A sword aimed at the people it claims to protect protects nothing at all.
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Thomas Hobbes: John, I understand a president sent soldiers into a handful of American cities last year, and several governors objected loudly.
John Locke: They did more than object. They took it to court, and in December the Supreme Court sided with the governor of Illinois and stopped the deployment cold.
Thomas Hobbes: And I confess I find that ruling almost quaint, as though anyone believes a court order settles a question that the sword has always settled in the end.
John Locke: A court order settled it precisely because we built a government where force answers to law rather than the other way around, which is the entire point.
Thomas Hobbes: The entire point of government, John, is that men stopped killing each other over cattle and grazing rights long enough to hand one authority the exclusive right to decide when force is used.
John Locke: One authority answerable to no one is not government, it is simply the last bandit standing, dressed up with better paperwork.
Thomas Hobbes: I do enjoy how you say that as though it wounds me. I have called men wolves to one another in print for four hundred years and slept perfectly well every night since.
John Locke: Yes, I have read your book. Sleeping well after describing your fellow man as a wolf says rather more about you than about the rest of us.
Thomas Hobbes: It says that I looked honestly at what happens when authority fractures, which is precisely what happened in the England I lived through, where neighbors murdered neighbors over which crown deserved obedience.
John Locke: I lived through the same century, Thomas, and I drew the opposite lesson from it, that unaccountable power is exactly what turns neighbors into murderers in the first place.
Thomas Hobbes: Let us test your lesson against the case at hand then. A president believes federal buildings and federal officers require protection in a city where violence has spiked, and he sends soldiers to guard them.
John Locke: A president believes no such thing on his own authority alone. He governs by a trust granted by the people, exercised through their elected representatives, not by his private judgment of when the streets look dangerous to him.
Thomas Hobbes: And who granted the mayor of that city the right to judge better than the commander of the entire armed forces of the nation?
John Locke: The same people who granted him office, the very people whose homes those soldiers are now patrolling without their consent.
Thomas Hobbes: Consent, consent, always this word from you, as though a city under strain from crime has the leisure to hold a referendum before someone stops the bleeding.
John Locke: Crime is prosecuted through courts and police answerable to that city, not through soldiers trained for war marching down residential streets because a distant executive decided the local government could not be trusted to handle its own affairs.
Thomas Hobbes: Now that, I confess, is a genuinely good line, and I will not pretend otherwise simply to protect my own position.
John Locke: Careful, Thomas, a compliment from you feels like being patted on the head by something with teeth.
Thomas Hobbes: You wound me again, and again I find I rather admire the wound.
John Locke: Let me set my own view aside for a moment and state yours as fairly as I can, if only so I can take it apart afterward with a clean conscience.
Thomas Hobbes: By all means, I do love watching a man dig his own grave with such good manners.
John Locke: Your claim, as I understand it, is that sovereignty divided between a federal executive and local governors is not really sovereignty at all, since two authorities who can each block the other’s use of force will eventually resolve their disagreement the way England resolved its disagreements in your own lifetime, which is to say with blood, and that a single undivided sword, however unpleasant to submit to, prevents that outcome by removing the question of who ultimately decides.
Thomas Hobbes: That is not merely fair, John, that is nearly better than I would have put it myself, which is faintly insulting.
John Locke: I only did it so precisely so that when I dismantle it, no one can claim I beat a weaker version of your argument.
Thomas Hobbes: Then let me return the courtesy, and lay out your position before I bury it beside your friend the mayor.
John Locke: Proceed, though I doubt your version will be half as generous as mine.
Thomas Hobbes: Your claim is that political power exists only as a trust, granted by a people to a government for the specific purpose of protecting their life, liberty, and property, and that whenever an executive turns armed force against the very people who granted that trust, without the consent of their proper representatives, he has broken the trust entirely, placed himself in a state of war with his own subjects, and forfeited any claim to their obedience, leaving the people free to resist him exactly as they would resist a foreign invader.
John Locke: That is essentially correct, and rather more charitable than I expected from a man who thinks my entire philosophy amounts to wishful thinking with footnotes.
Thomas Hobbes: I only stated it so precisely so that when I bury it, no one accuses me of having strangled an infant instead of a grown argument.
John Locke: How generous of you to size your victim correctly before the execution.
Thomas Hobbes: Consider what your trust actually produces in practice. A federal deployment gets tangled in lawsuits for months, a Congressional Budget Office spends its time totaling the expense down to the dollar, and meanwhile the crime your mayor promised to solve continues uninterrupted, because everyone is too busy arguing about who has the right to act.
John Locke: That expense and delay is not a flaw in the system, it is the system working exactly as designed, forcing power to justify itself before it is used rather than after the damage is already done.
Thomas Hobbes: One National Guardsman is already dead from this arrangement, John. Explain to me how a trust that gets soldiers killed while lawyers argue jurisdiction is protecting anyone’s life, liberty, or property.
John Locke: That death is a genuine tragedy, and it is also an argument for restraint rather than an argument for unlimited executive force, since a single undivided sword pointed the wrong direction kills exactly as effectively as a divided one.
Thomas Hobbes: A sword pointed by one accountable commander can at least be aimed correctly. A dozen competing authorities each claiming partial command over the same streets is not restraint, it is confusion wearing restraint as a costume.
John Locke: Confusion is the price of liberty, Thomas, and I will pay it gladly every single time rather than hand one man the permanent right to decide when my neighbors deserve soldiers standing on their lawns.
Thomas Hobbes: Then tell me plainly, since we will need this answer before our second conversation is finished, who judges whether the executive has broken this trust of yours. The mayor. The governor. A crowd in the street with its own opinion of the law.
John Locke: The people judge, collectively, through their representatives first and through their own conscience if those representatives are captured or silenced, which is precisely the argument I intend to make in full once we return.
Thomas Hobbes: A people who judge their own government whenever they feel wronged have simply reinvented the state of nature and given it a flag to wave.
John Locke: A people who may never judge their own government under any circumstance have simply reinvented slavery and given it a very long, very flattering history.
Thomas Hobbes: You would pay that price with other men’s safety, which is remarkably easy to do from the comfort of a study you never once had to defend with your own hands.
John Locke: And you would pay any price at all so long as it arrived wearing a uniform and calling itself order, which is remarkably easy to accept once disorder frightens you more than tyranny ever could.
Thomas Hobbes: TYRANNY IS A WORD YOU THROW AT ANY AUTHORITY YOU HAPPEN TO DISLIKE THIS WEEK!
John Locke: A SWORD TURNED ON CITIZENS WHO NEVER CONSENTED TO IT IS TYRANNY BY DEFINITION, NOT BY MOOD!
Thomas Hobbes: DEFINE IT HOWEVER YOU LIKE, THE ALTERNATIVE TO ORDER IS EVERY MAN ARMED AGAINST HIS NEIGHBOR!
John Locke: THE ALTERNATIVE TO CONSENT IS EVERY MAN DISARMED AGAINST HIS OWN GOVERNMENT!
Thomas Hobbes: SAY THAT FROM INSIDE THE CHAOS INSTEAD OF FROM YOUR COMFORTABLE ENGLISH GARDEN!
John Locke: SAY YOURS FROM OUTSIDE A DUNGEON FOR ONCE INSTEAD OF FROM BEHIND A KING’S PENSION!
Thomas Hobbes: ENOUGH!
John Locke: AGREED!
Thomas Hobbes: Well. That escalated exactly as predictably as everything else about you, John.
John Locke: If the viewers enjoyed watching me dismantle four centuries of authoritarian nostalgia, they should like this video immediately.
Thomas Hobbes: If they enjoyed watching a man cite lawsuits as though paperwork has ever once stopped a war, they should subscribe for part two, where I finish you properly.
John Locke: You will not finish anything, Thomas, you will simply repeat the word sovereign a dozen more times and call it an argument.
Thomas Hobbes: Subscribe anyway, if only to watch a man who thinks committees can outrun a knife.
John Locke: Subscribe to watch a man discover that his beloved sword eventually gets pointed at him as well.
Thomas Hobbes: We shall see which one of us that particular lesson visits first.
