The word “commissar” evokes an image of a zealot, a hardliner hell-bent on ensuring complete ideological conformity within an organization of any size. Those of us familiar with Soviet Communism know that комиссáр served as the eyes and ears of the Communist Party throughout civil, military, and cultural institutions across the Soviet empire. Political commissars originated in the Soviet Union, where the early Bolshevik leaders struggled to take control of the Russian military after the 1917 Revolution. Many in the leadership of the newly formed Red Army had served as loyal officers within the Tsarist military and oftentimes had openly fought against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War. Upon the Bolsheviks’ victory, the Soviet Union inherited a military with questionable loyalties and the ability to slow-walk and thwart orders, or even overthrow their regime given the right opportunity.

The Soviet Union lacked a lot of things, but a loyal class of regime apparatchiks was not one of them. Today, career federal bureaucrats in agencies ranging from the FBI to the Secret Service to the Department of Education occupy the same position that Soviet commissars did towards the collapse of the USSR: defending and promoting a system that the majority of Americans know is simply not working. Americans see with their own eyes that the government will enforce morality. Chris Rufo has documented the American commissars that ensure ideological conformity and that DEI initiatives are carried out across corporations, government agencies, and nonprofits in America. Much like their Soviet predecessors, DEI bureaucrats ensure that taxpayer resources are flow towards their patrons in the Democratic Party, perpetuate their ideology with mandatory classes to brainwash undergraduates, and implement a racial quota system to ensure adherence to a specific left-wing orthodoxy. Those that oppose DEI and stand for color-blind meritocracy are cast out of the institution or browbeaten into conformity.

What can the Right do about this? Here’s my view. The Right can’t simply do away with America’s captured institutions. We must supplant the Left’s commissars with our own. This is the only way to ensure we win the war, rather than continuing fighting a series of local battles when, ultimately, the war is already lost.

I listened firsthand to Russ Vought give a talk about the challenges of actually executing policy within the Trump Administration, specifically within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). He described bureaucrats that would intentionally turn in shoddy assignments, delay projects endlessly, and consult with Obama appointees about avenues to resist implementing the President’s agenda (as confirmed by The Washington Post).

Putting aside the inherent evil of communism surrounding the commissars’ exploits during World War II, the fact that hundreds of young men were tasked with ensuring a new regime could execute basic governing functions should not be ignored.

Young men from across the Soviet Union were appointed to positions within the Soviet military due to their ideological reliability and loyalty to the Party, unlike their military commanders. Commissars were tasked with ensuring the Party’s will was carried out. This took the form of commissars having to cosign a commander’s orders before those orders could be carried out by inferiors. This was done to prevent conspiracies from forming within the armed forces, assist in carrying out military operations, and free up commanders to focus on purely military decision-making, while the commissar was responsible for interfacing with the Party and other political affairs. What position could be more appealing to a young man?

A new cadre of American commissars would be united in a brotherhood devoted to the “full responsibility for the fulfillment of all military tasks by the fighting unit…a military commissar is a moral leader of his unit; the prime defender of its material and spiritual interests.” The commissars of the USSR were made up of those young party men who carried out this mission with discipline, courage, and a relentlessness that allowed the Red Army to defeat the Nazis and conquer half of Europe. The United States needs these same men to restore our federal government.

I am not going to make another unoriginal argument that the United States’ federal government is thoroughly Sovietized, in terms of government incompetence, lack of accountability, and enforcing ideological conformity to gay race communism. This ideological conformity and DEI resource drain only occurs because ideologically-aligned commissars ensure that “workers…perform their work conscientiously and energetically, that monetary resources are expended economically and under the strictest monitoring [emphasis mine], and that the military property of the [Soviet Republic] is scrupulously maintained.” The Left has always done a superb job of exercising power and defending those who exercise it.

I also don’t need to exhaustively list the reasons why the current arrangement of the federal government is completely untrustworthy, let alone why it does not fulfill any sort of representative government. A few glances at the first Trump Administration provide plenty of examples of where a small and effective group of commissars could have swung things differently. A commissar would’ve prevented the campaign of #Resistance during the Trump Administration, where Miles Taylor and other anti-democratic bureaucrats leaked information designed to paint the President as erratic and a dangerous national security threat. A commissioner would’ve held accountable the career staff in five departments that maintained close contacts with Obama officials on how to handle Trump Administration directives they considered “illegal or improper.” A commissar would’ve stopped the cataloging of reports that were handed over to Left allies outside the government in the last days of Obama’s presidency.

Fani Willis’ and Jack Smith’s naked exercising of political power against President Trump, with the complete support of the political establishment, gives a glimpse of the tangible type of power that these commissars would possess. Both Willis and Smith will be protected by the Left’s welfare network of organizations like the ACLU and National Lawyers Guild after they exit the regime. This will allow the Left to not only have their knowledge and expertise at their beck and call, but also enhance their reputations and finances in case of a conservative counterattack. Commissars in the USSR were not paper-shuffling bureaucrats and the Left’s DEI commissars certainly aren’t today. They are ruthlessly disciplined operators that put carrying out the regime’s will above all else. President Trump’s big, beautiful wall on the southern border would have been built had the administration had ruthless executors of regime policy like Jack Smith and Fani Willis.  Trump commissars would be instrumental in making sure the federal government’s workers actually did their jobs, rather than engaging in partisan fighting or actively stonewalling a President chosen by the American people.

As Communism’s hypocrisies and backwardness became ever harder to hide in the Soviet Union, political commissars found themselves defending and promoting an ideology that fundamentally did not work. That is the current status of American democracy. Elections are held, the people choose the victor, then the victor enters into public office to implement their agenda. That is, of course, the run of the show for candidates that aren’t conservatives. The Right having its own vanguard in the mold of the Left’s DEI commissars would help real leaders within the Right to exercise power across government and maintain unity against neoliberalism and indiscipline within the Right’s ranks.

The creation of conservative commissioners to maintain discipline (i.e. ensuring representative government functions) within the federal government would show Americans that their elected President can deliver action on their campaign promises. These commissars may even fulfill the original intent of the U.S. Senate as a “necessary fence against the fickleness and passion” that influences the average member of the general public that works in the federal government. The Founders envisioned a deliberative body that was supposed to check the passions of the hordes of native and illegal bugmen. That was supposed to be the Senate. Commissars could embody and grow the “patriotic consciousness” of the Right.

Can you think of any group of young men whose role in government or society is specifically deliberative and whose task is maintaining discipline and adherence to conservative principles? The closest cadre that fits this description is on the Left; just look at how successful they’ve been! Better, disciplined leadership that implements conservatism and ensures those working in an administration do not stray from the principal’s vision would help the next conservative President actually reform the government. The Left’s commissar class has control of numerous institutions because of their unity, discipline, and willingness to maintain ideological purity. Universities now operate under “political correctness”, a term originated in the Soviet Union under Lenin and ruthlessly enforced by commissars. The DEI officer’s goals are to build the capacity and culture within institutions to support, recruit, and integrate DEI principles within the institution’s principle functions. This DEI culture then perpetuates across different institutions as personnel cycle in and out to other roles. The Right has had no answer for this system except to attempt to show how hideous this enforced orthodoxy is. There is no courageous Aleksei Yeryomenko willing to lead his men to counterattack this woke orthodoxy, seize control of the enforcement apparatus, enforce our own values, and direct resources to perpetuate those values.

Enforced conservatism is the main sticking point that the traditionally “small government” Right recoils at. Unfortunately, it is the only way to actually destroy the corrupt gay race communism that currently infects the federal government. The Right should heed F.A. Hayek’s words in Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Volume 2: The Mirage of Social Justice, when he writes of “the new rights that could not be enforced by law without…destroying that liberal order at which the old civil rights aim.”

The incentive structure in America today tells us to abide by the DEI commissars and their diktats. Hayek saw the world we live in today too: “Once the rewards the individual can expect are no longer an appropriate indication of how to direct their efforts to where they are most needed, because these rewards correspond not to the value which their services have for their fellows, but to the moral merit or desert the persons are deemed to have earned, they lose the guiding function they have in the market order and would have to be replaced by the commands of the directing authority.” Unless the Right can seize control of this incentive structure and be just as ruthless in their exercising of power, then America is surely screwed. A vanguard of commissars tasked with being just as ruthless, disciplined, and principled in carrying out the next Trump Administration’s agenda would ensure that the federal government actually carries out an elected leader’s agenda and provide an exciting new avenue for young men to help save their country.

Tail Gunner Joe (TGJ) is a Writer based in the Washington, D.C. area. TGJ has written for The American Mind and The American Postliberal.