The designation of officials in the United States as “czars” has a long history — and not always a glorious one. Former President Barack Obama appointed a “car czar” after the auto bailouts: the financier and Democratic megadonor Steven Rattner, who ended up pleading guilty to bribery and securities fraud with the Security and Exchange Commission. But he’s hardly the only czar to turn out to have abused power. It’s practically the definition of a czar.
The first U.S. czar was unofficially given the title. In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson put Bernard Baruch in charge of the War Industries Board that mobilized the country’s total war effort, and the public dubbed Baruch the “czar of American industry.” Starting under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, czars became more official. He had various czars oversee his extraconstitutional programs, enshrining the word as the title for a position that is not subject to ordinary oversight, such as a Cabinet role. It went out of style in U.S. administrations after that until President Richard Nixon, who filled czar positions for energy and for the “war on drugs.” Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, pere et fils, used “czars,” and by Obama’s presidency, widespread czardoms in politics with unclear mandates were normal.
Of course, the word “czar” dates further back and has a much more ignominious history. In 1918, the last Russian czar, Nicholas II, was shot down, along with his family, in a palace basement and then stabbed for good measure. A new and regrettable period in Russian history had been inaugurated, but it had only replaced a previous brutality. Russia’s czars had nearly always been repressive. By the last half-century of the rule of the czars, Alexander III was shoring up his absolute autarky by bloody means, such as passing the infamous May Laws that set off hundreds of pogroms against the Russian empire’s Jews.
Czar is just another word for “Caesar,” and that’s why Russians used them for rulers. Russians thought of themselves as the inheritors of the tradition of the Roman Empire, a third Rome after the original and Byzantium. And in that empire, Julius Caesar was the model leader. To use “czar” for “leader” is to agree. And what kind of man was Caesar? In the Gallic Wars that Caesar led before crossing the Rubicon and ending the Republic, one of Caesar’s final battles was at Uxellodunum. When he won, Caesar decided he wouldn’t just kill or sell off the survivors of the losing army as was custom. He had all their hands chopped off so they’d disperse across Gaul as a warning about what happens when you oppose the czar.
That’s why it bugs some people to see that John Kerry has been named the “climate czar.” But at least Kerry’s title is just symbolism. Then there is the New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose, who has an idea for “how the Biden administration can help solve our reality crisis.” Roose, a Vesuvius of euphemism like all enthusiasts of authoritarianism, writes: “Several experts I spoke with recommended that the Biden administration put together a cross-agency task force to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism, which would be led by something like a ‘reality czar.’ It sounds a little dystopian, I’ll grant. But let’s hear them out.” Roose excitedly suggests that such a position could designate “exemptions” to privacy rights protected by law.
A “czar” in the U.S. is bad enough because words for autocrats have no place in a free people’s government. Leave that in Russia or, better yet, nowhere at all. But a “reality czar” authorized to suspend the Fourth Amendment on an ad hoc basis is more than a bad civic style. That’s appointing a Caesar.
—By Nicholas Clairmont
