This morning on the Morning Joe, I heard speculation that a car czar is needed to oversee the Big 3 bail-out. For further news, you can check here or the diary entry by willysnout suggesting Mitt Romney fill that position here. Apparently, people in Washington think we need yet another "czar." But why does Washington have such a fascination with medieval figures of authority?
Although there were czars in Bulgaria and Serbia(apparently), the most famous line of czars ruled in Russia. I'll grant you a Peter the Great, known for dragging his country into the 'modern' age, and a Catherine the Great, as examples of good czars. But the term must be regarded in its more recent usage - in regard to the Romanov dynasty. The Romanov's - the dynasty so terrible against its people that it managed to starve its people while putting them on the killing fields of World War I, hopelessly over-matched against the Czar's cousin the Kaiser - so terribly incompetent that they fell to a short-lived democratic revolution - and above all, so terribly autocratic into the 20th century that they are a symbol of autocracy today.
Flash forward to 1982. A news story by the UPI described how the Senate has created a "drug czar." (Details here). The term, amazingly, sticks. Apparently the drug war is so successful that Washington decides, let's create more czars! So we have a terrorism czar, a cyber-security czar, and as President Bush abdicated commander-in-chief authority, a war czar.
But in fact, of course, the drug czar was NOT a huge success. The war on drugs, as has been documented many times, has been a huge failure. I don't know if the war on drugs has succeeded on any metric since the creation of the post in 1982. Furthermore, the use of a czar by Americans has a further irony.
America has a proud tradition as a republican state. An autocracy, and its traditions, should be anathema to republicans. Look at how the Founding Fathers treated them. Czar comes from the Roman term, Caesar, itself a title to denote the emperor(named after Julius, the man who destroyed the Roman Republic and created the Empire). The Founding Fathers hated Caesar. Samuel Adams compared George III to Caesar - John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were prone to using Caesar as a negative reference too. (source). The motto of the commonwealth of Virginia is even "Sic semper tyrannis!", the words allegedly spoken by Brutus as he stabbed Caesar to death.
In this great Republic of America, I ask of you - should we honor Caesar, or Brutus? Tyranny, or freedom? If someone asks you if we should appoint a czar, Nancy Reagan has some simple advice - Just Say No.