As part of a 30-day tariff deferral, Canada agreed to appoint a “Fentanyl Czar”. Why am I bothered by what is obviously a fig leaf to allow Trump to justify deferring his tariffs on Canadian products?
Well because there is a real crisis of democracy and it’s caused by a pattern of authoritarian solutions to pretend crises. The word “czar” is both symptomatic and a sly argument.
The argument for an authoritarian by the authoritarians is:
There is a crisis (ideally fictional because fiction is malleable but with an element of truth because half truths are twice as powerful as whole truths),
Democratic institutions are incapable of dealing with it,
Only one person (insert your name here) can deal with it,
Laws and norms are bureaucratic obstacles and must be overcome (i.e. move fast and break things).
Czars are required because bureacratic silos need to be broken down. Excelsior!
The unspoken coda is, break the silos and you are left with haystacks. And, of course, an unbounded czar. They don’t go away willingly.
Starlink Czarlink
I just met a wonderful new man. He's fictional but you can't have everything.
That’s Cecilia explaining to her friend that she’s fallen for Tom Baxter, the hero of the movie within the movie, The Purple Rose of Cairo. If you haven’t seen, it’s set in the porous border of reality and fiction.
We are living in the remake.
We face a grave new crisis. It’s fictional so I can do anything and have everything. - Elon Musk
Of course Elon didn’t say that - reptiles aren’t that self aware - it’s just an example of lax security on the border between reality and fiction. But it feels true and explains what is happening. And that’s what matters to those among us who get things done! And what better thing to break, if you are a billionaire, than the government?
Popular culture has us primed for Musk’s assault on government. Name one movie or TV show - other than the West Wing - of the last 40 years involving a government in which the higher ups aren’t either devilishly evil, bumblingly stupid, or both (although it hardly seems possible to be both). I don’t know if it’s chicken or egg since Viet Nam and Watergate but I do know that trust in democracy has eroded to the point where there are people who are ready to finish it off in the name of efficiency. (Of which more in a later post.)
In this dry grass all the authoritarians need is a crisis that only a superman can deal with.
The problem with authoritarians is they each think they know what’s right and what’s wrong. In the end they couldn’t agree on one crisis so they compromised on migrants, the Deep State, transgender domination of sports and politics, and the price of eggs.
Enter the czars, stage right.
Revenge of the nerd
First, I have to say a fentanyl czar is a lot better than Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s suggestion that Canada appoint a “’border czar’, ideally a former general.”1 - an idea former general Rick Hillier supports, saying a border czar would “send the right message”.
Drugs are one thing but borders literally define nations. So we need to watch our language, especially American imports, when we talk about borders.
I don’t want to put words in General Hillier’s mouth but I think Smith’s message is that the situation on the “artificial line” formerly known as the world’s longest undefended border is such that only a military dictator can handle it.
This “border crisis” reminded me that years ago, when I shaved with an electric razor, I looked down one morning to see my then three year old son rubbing his little fist around his chin and making a buzzing sound. He explained that he too was shaving. I asked him if he’d like to try my razor and he said no, “because you only need a pretend razor if you only have a pretend beard.”
It remains the wisest thing anyone ever said to me.
As in Ghostbusters so in life, crossing the streams between the real and pretend is dangerous. When pretend problems are used to justify real actions bad stuff happens.
But, the horse is already out of the barn on fentanyl. If we are to have an autocrat let’s at least get the job title right.
Et too brute?
Czar wouldn’t be my choice for either the border or the fentanyl job. If I had my way, (And, when some things I’m working on come through I will, so start getting used to it.) I’d go for Kaiser.
Kaiser has the right connotation for these extreme right wing times and kaisers have proven to be much more durable than czars.
Etymologically it’s a tomato/tomahto thing. Czar and kaiser are cognate, both derive from Caesar, a prominent assasinee. The Russians ought to have taken note of that.
“Czar” got off to a bad start and came to a bad end. It was first adopted by Ivan the Terrible and the last Czar, Nicholas II, was murdered, together with his family, by the Bolsheviks in July of 1918. That was not uncommon. “Murdered Russian Monarchs” justifies its own a category in Wikipedia2. (Incidentally, there’s a curious note on the Wiki page that may be of interest to the current Russian boss, “This list may not reflect recent changes.”)
Kaisers, on the other hand, managed to not get assassinated. The most likely candidate for assassination, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was allowed to flee to Holland following the German defeat in 1918. He is the last kaiser so far and died there in 1941, having lived long enough to see the inauguration of the 1000-year Reich. It’s bright future must have been of comfort to him.
So, Fentanyl Kaiser it is. What’s the Fentanyl crisis and why can’t existing institutions deal with it?
The opioid of the masses
If we accept that a Kaiser/Czar is our only hope in a crisis - a dubious proposition given they caused a disproportionate share of the 20th century’s crises - motor vehicles is a better candidate than fentanyl.
In the first half of 2024 there was an average of 21 deaths per day from opioids in Canada, of which Fentanyl accounted for 73%.3 That’s a lot and each death is a tragedy, but the number is down by 11% from 2023 suggesting we have the means to respond to this without resort to autocracy.
Motor vehicles are another matter. According to the latest numbers I could find there were 1,931 deaths (6/day) in 2022, up 110 from 2021, and a whopping 89,787 (246/day) personal injuries. More worrying is the reversal this represents. There were 1,711 and 78,388 respectively in 2020.4 If present trends continue, motor vehicles will kill us all.
While I do not normally support anti-democratic measures, if we can call the appointee “The Autocrat” I’m in. I would even settle for Car Czar.
Bordering on the rediculous
If I recall rightly, there’s a line in the 1960s movie The Green Berets in which John Wayne explains "We had to destroy the village to save it.” If I’m wrong it doesn’t matter. It’ explains Musk’s approach to government efficiency.
Only Musk can make the government efficient and the way to do that is destroy it, leaving Kash Patel and Pam Bondi to make what’s left compliant.
Accepting for the moment inefficiency in the US government is a crisis, are democratic institutions the cause; incapable of addressing it; the obstacle to addressing it; and does Musk have the solution?
In its November 17, 2024 edition the Economist suggests otherwise5 :
None of the small-government revolutionaries at The Economist has applied for a job at DOGE, as far as we know. We do, though, have a few suggestions. One point is that time matters. Whereas cutting $2trn in a year is absurd—it would leave public offices incapable of performing basic functions, and most likely involve slashing the defence budget—achieving those sorts of savings over the course of a decade is eminently doable. Moreover, DOGE would not be starting from scratch. There are already plenty of well-researched blueprints for sorting out America’s finances. It is useful to break them into four categories: conventional spending cuts; tweaks to entitlement eligibility; changes to health-care spending; and tax reform.
Across-the-board spending cuts appear to be what Messrs Musk and Ramaswamy mainly have in mind when they rail against government waste. This raises an obvious problem. Consider the $6.8trn spent by the federal government in the last fiscal year. After excluding interest on existing debt as well as mandatory allocations to pensions and health insurance, just 25% or so—around $1.8trn—remains. These are the discretionary funds at the heart of the annual budget process. Almost half goes to defence, which Mr Trump is loth to cut. So that leaves roughly $900bn allocated annually by the federal government to transport, education, science, national parks and law enforcement.
Nevertheless, paring back discretionary spending ought to be part of the solution. It has grown by nearly a third since 2019, propelled by big increases during the covid-19 pandemic. Rather than making outright cuts, DOGE could call for strict caps on future discretionary allocations, a simple budgeting technique used on and off since the 1990s.
In other words, democracy, has worked, does work, and could work. Trump and his cronies would rather it didn’t.
This is from the February 5th New York Times newsletter:
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency intends to slash $1 trillion in federal spending and bring Silicon Valley productivity to the federal work force. Only then, the thinking goes, can the government move swiftly enough to implement Trump’s ambitious policy agenda.
Musk is acting quickly and noisily. He has dispatched a phalanx of Silicon Valley acolytes to access computer and accounting systems controlled by civil servants. In explaining his actions, he has vilified government agencies, calling USAID a “criminal organization” without evidence. (“Time for it to die,” he added.) …autonomy may be the true target. Trump believes a group of federal employees, which he calls the “deep state,” stifled his first-term agenda.”
And, the ever-lucid Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, February 4, 20256
Musk is single-handedly slashing through the government Americans have built over the past 90 years.
Democracies are three-layer cakes of order that is just and democratic. They are delicate. They can't protect themselves from their central premise of “for the people by the people” unless the people buy in. Whether they do or don’t is the question and everything is on the table.
The inevitable Hitler reference
Authoritarians take power through elections. Hitler came to power through constitutional means. The Nazis received slightly less than 38% of the popular vote in the July 1932 election and suffered a slight reduction in the popular vote in the November elections but it enough to remain the largest party in the Reichstag and propel Hitler to the Chancellorship in January 1933. But at least the Germans had dire circumstances that were real. Not the pretend kind.
“…for at least the last 30 years, the threats to democracy have evolved. Today, democracy more often dies gradually, as the institutional, legal, and political constraints on authoritarian leaders are chipped away, one by one. This has happened, or is happening, in countries including Russia, Venezuela, Hungary, the Philippines, Poland, Nicaragua, India, Turkey — and the United States.” The Authoritarian Playbook7
America has a remarkable ability to turn on a dime. Admittedly offering that as hope for tomorrow’s solution is to acknowledge that in November it created today’s problem. But it keeps hope alive. Trump has four years. MAGA republican majorities have two and maybe less. And Trump may yet get impeached and convicted.
This matters.
America’s problems are our problems because it’s big and right next door.
Canadians are not MAGA immune. We have our first czar.
For an explanation of the the second point you may find my series beginning here useful:
Trumped: democracy in the Ideas Era Part 1
With the re-election of Donald Trump the adage, “Once bitten, twice shy” was convincingly vanquished by “There’s a sucker born every minute” in a cage match. While the pundits discuss the match, this post is about the arena. In a couple of days, I’ll post about the cage.
https://health-infobase.canada.ca/substance-related-harms/opioids-stimulants/#a4
https://tc.canada.ca/en/road-transportation/statistics-data/canadian-motor-vehicle-traffic-collision-statistics-2022
https://protectdemocracy.org/work/the-authoritarian-playbook/
Food for thought! Clarifies and focuses on concepts often quoted and referenced but not understood. Thank you. Bob