I had an interesting, if somewhat b-Czar exchange with Lisa on my Keloland site. She objected to my reflections on Czar proliferation in the incoming Administration.
Oh, a new definition. Replacing brain-dead dolts with a few living cells is creating czars? Long live Sarah Palin.
I pointed out that "Czar" was a very common term used today for "an official whose job is to coordinate different departments and agencies dealing with some key issue." Lisa would have none of it.
Don't patronize an old broad. The word czar comes from the Russian tsar which in turn was derived from the Latin Caesar. It means an emperor or autocrat. When used in relation to American government it is used sardonically to suggest that someone is given authority inconsistent with a democracy.
Well, anyone who reads the online newspapers knows that I am right. I had the strong impression that the term "Czar" for policy coordinator dates back to the Nixon Administration, and I thought that the first "Czar" was Nixon's "Energy Czar." I was half right about that.
But Lisa isn't off her nut here. "Czar" was once a grave insult in American politics. Fortunately, there is a piece in Slate by Ben Zimmer that helps to clear all this up. Zimmer begins by observing the phenomenon that I observed: Czar proliferation.
Already Tom Daschle has been tapped for "health czar" and Carol Browner for "climate czar." Adolfo Carrión is expected to be the "urban affairs czar." There's also been talk of a "technology czar" and a "copyright czar." Plans for a "car czar" recently fell apart on Capitol Hill, but Obama and the incoming Congress will try, try again in the new year.
Here is a wealth of examples of appointed Czars and proposed Czars, all of them from news site headlines, and all of them used in a non-derogatory sense.
Zimmer gives a pretty good summary of the history of the term. Apparently "Czar" was an insult in American political language up until the Russian Revolution killed off the last real Tsar. Before that, Czarism was the big bad that American democracy rescued us from. Afterwards, well, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
But I am guessing that the increased frequency of the term has a very simple explanation. In most of the examples cited in the paragraph above, the term "Czar" appears in the headline, and is replaced by a more prosaic title, like "coordinator of energy and climate policy," in the body of the article. Suddenly the scales fall from our eyes. Headline writers like the term because it is four letters long. Writing headlines is a game of squeezing information into small spaces. I suspect that this is the real reason for the persistence of the term.
There is a real problem at the heart of all this. Czars don't work much better here than they did in the Russian regime. See Laura Meckler's piece in the Wall Street Journal:
The problem is that "czars" are meant to be all-powerful people who can rise above the problems that plague the federal agencies, he said, but in the end, they can't. "We only create them because departments don't work or don't talk to each other," Mr. Light said, adding that creation of a White House post doesn't usually change that. "It's a symbolic gesture of the priority assigned to an issue, and I emphasize the word symbolic. When in doubt, create a czar."
The creation of a policy Czar is a result of recognizing a problem in bureaucratic organizations, but it does nothing to solve the problem. So it's worth nothing that Obama is creating Czars a lot faster than the Romanoffs ever did. This is worth watching. I expect that Obama will go all Bolshevik on his Czars in pretty short order.
Ps. Nixon's first policy Czar was his Drug Czar. The Energy Czar was his second.
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