John Keane imagined Havel’s funeral in 1999:
Prague would double in size. As he lay in state in the old Castle of the Bohemian kings above the city, a queue some miles long would spring up. Mourners would wait all day, and all night, to see his body for the last time. The day of the funeral would be a public holiday. Hundreds of thousands of people, dressed in black and clutching flowers, would be seen lining the route taken by the cortège on the way to his final resting place. Huge black banners would fly from every office; his photograph, draped in black, would crowd every shop and news—stand and public place. Shared feelings of embarrassment would hold words back. Half-buried or forgotten anxieties about death would collectively resurface; fantasies of personal immortality would temporarily weaken. Around the graveside a forest of microphones, tripods, cameras, pads and pens would suddenly spring up. Obituaries, many of them written long ago and updated several times already, would appear in all four corners of the earth. Millions of words would he uttered. Many hundreds of different and conflicting points would be made. The words of the dead man (as Auden said) would be modified in the guts of the living. It would be said that he was a good man, a great man, a hero of the century. Harry S. Truman’s remark that a statesman is a dead politician would be confirmed. Loud sounds of grinding axes would also be heard.
In his LRB review of Keane’s book, Žižek writes:
The source of Havel’s tragedy, however, is not the tension between the public figure and the ‘real person’, not even his gradual loss of charisma in recent years. Such things characterise every successful political career (with the exception of those touched by the grace of premature demise). Keane writes that Havel’s life resembles a ‘classical political tragedy’ because it has been ‘clamped by moments of … triumph spoiled by defeat’, and notes that ‘most of the citizens in President Havel’s republic think less of him than they did a year ago.’ The crucial issue, however, is the tension between his two public images: that of heroic dissident who, in the oppressive and cynical universe of Late Socialism, practised and wrote about ‘living in truth’, and that of Post-Modern President who (not unlike Al Gore) indulges in New Age ruminations that aim to legitimise Nato military interventions. How do we get from the lone, fragile dissident with a crumpled jacket and uncompromising ethics, who opposes the all-mighty totalitarian power, to the President who babbles about the anthropic principle and the end of the Cartesian paradigm, reminds us that human rights are conferred on us by the Creator, and is applauded in the US Congress for his defence of Western values? Is this depressing spectacle the necessary outcome, the ‘truth’, of Havel the heroic dissident? To put it in Hegel’s terms: how does the ethically impeccable ‘noble consciousness’ imperceptibly pass into the servile ‘base consciousness’?
Žižek notes that Havel’s support for the NATO campaign is rooted in falsehood masquerading as truth:
The predominant form of today’s ‘politically correct’ moralism, on the other hand, is that of Nietzschean ressentiment and envy: it is the fake gesture of disavowed politics, the assuming of a ‘moral’, depoliticised position in order to make a stronger political case. This is a perverted version of Havel’s ‘power of the powerless’: powerlessness can be manipulated as a stratagem in order to gain more power, in exactly the same way that today, in order for one’s voice to gain authority, one has to legitimise oneself as being some kind of (potential or actual) victim of power.
He concludes:
This, then, is Havel’s tragedy: his authentic ethical stance has become a moralising idiom cynically appropriated by the knaves of capitalism. His heroic insistence on doing the impossible (opposing the seemingly invincible Communist regime) has ended up serving those who ‘realistically’ argue that any real change in today’s world is impossible. This reversal is not a betrayal of his original ethical stance, but is inherent in it. The ultimate lesson of Havel’s tragedy is thus a cruel, but inexorable one: the direct ethical foundation of politics sooner or later turns into its own comic caricature, adopting the very cynicism it originally opposed.
Peter Levine’s post on Havel’s 1992 speech in Poland reminded me that I had planned to do some writing about Havel before he died. The New York Times titled his obituary “A Melding of the Artist’s Politics and the Politician’s Art,” and yet it focuses only on his writing career and offers not a single observation about his practice of “the Politician’s Art.” Given the outpouring of vitriol against Christopher Hitchens, perhaps you’ll excuse me if I spend a moment criticizing rather than praising the Czech Republic’s former president.
The line in Havel’s 1992 “Advent Speech” that has always troubled me is this one:
What was essential was something different: the courage to confront evil together and in solidarity, the will to come to an agreement and to cooperate, the willingness to place the common and general interest over any personal or group interests, the feeling of common responsibility for the world and the willingness personally to stand behind one’s own deeds. Truth and certain elementary values such as respect for human rights, civil society, the indivisibility of freedom, the rule of law these were notions that bound us together and made it worth our while to enter again and again into an unequal struggle with the powers that be.
There’s something poetically seductive about his call to “confront evil together and in solidarity,” to be bound only by “Truth and certain elementary values.” Yet I’ve always thought that his promise that the dissidents would overcome ideological and technological politics was an empty one. I think that Havel’s life gives us some insight into why this promise remained unfulfilled and unfulfillable, “easy to say but difficult to do.” In short: his politics was rooted in the sense that the spiritual dimension that “transcends“ politics, but this really means it runs away from politics.
Indeed, this was the subject of his later book, To the Castle and Back, where he tried to explain how he had approached politics during his presidency:
Politics—as an area of activity that demands general support—requires, more than anything else, that people understand it, that they grasp what the purpose of it is in any given moment, how what follows comes out of what went before, and why everything has the kind tempo that it has. But as I’ve already suggested, politics, by its very nature, resists that kind of understanding. It’s true that here and there a policy may succeed or fail, and everyone recognizes that at once. But for the most part that’s nor how it works. Politics is more of a strange, never-ending process with no clear turning points and no unambiguous and immediately recognizable outcomes. It seems to me particularly important, therefore, that politicians have an elementary dramatic instinct, that is, a sense of how to make distinctions between various acts or events, how to order them, stack them up, give them a meaningful sequence, gradation, or structure.
Just think about what this means: “It’s true that here and there a policy may succeed or fail.” This is a romantic sense of the political world: policies are stage-dressing for the operatic play of great personages in the public sphere. Can you blame the Czech media for deeming Havel a dreamer? He never really succeeded in giving his policies “a meaningful sequence, gradation, or structure.” Certainly we need dreamers in the world, but I’m reminded of Zizek’s line:
There is no ethnic cleansing without poetry. Why? Because we live in an era that perceives itself as post-ideological. Given that great public causes no longer have the force to mobilise people for mass violence, a larger sacred cause is needed, one that makes petty individual concerns about killing seem trivial.
Havel’s poetry never inspired genocide, it’s true. But his spiritual approach failed to prevent ethnic cleansing just when it was needed most: the 1992 dissolution of the political union between Czechs and Slovaks.
As I said, “transcending” politics is really a kind of “flight from politics,” and the “Velvet Divorce” is just one more piece of evidence in favor of that claim. Havel resigned rather than oversee the dissolution, so he certainly stuck to his principles, though I’m not sure this is quite the same thing as “confronting evil.” (It seems more like what Arendt called “inner emigration.”) But the seeds for the dissolution were sown before the fateful election in 1992: dissolution was fueled by heavy nationalism and anti-Semitic rhetoric against pro-federation politicians.
None of this was Havel’s fault, exactly, but this was a moment that called for a poet to “sing the nation-state” rather than a politician to try to lead it. What’s worse: it was the end of transfer payments to Slovakia that allowed the Czech Republic to enjoy a decade of unalloyed growth:
The end of the so-called penezovod (“money pipeline”) — regular transfer of subsidies to Slovakia — meant further fiscal saving amounting to 7 percent of the national budget (25 billion koruna, close to $1 billion).
As a result, while the Czech Republic traded on its highly-educated workforce and Prague tourist attractions, across the newly-minted border, Slovakia was not so lucky:
Unemployment has climbed to 15.1 percent, even though virtually no restructuring or privatization of industry has taken place under the leadership of Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar. Inflation stands at 22 percent and is forecast to grow. The gross domestic product of Slovakia last year declined by 3.5 percent from the 1992 level.
That, I think, is the real legacy of successful dreamers: their dreams always come at someone else’s expense. “Here and there” Havel’s ineffectual policies “succeeded or failed.” But mostly, they failed. When they needed the artist, Czechoslovakia got an artless politican. When they needed the politician, they got the artist’s principles.
As a playwright, Havel certainly had a sense of the dramatic, and I think he was on to something when he insisted that bureaucracy and administrative efficiency threaten to render the political boringly inaccessible:
A basic danger facing politics in the modern world is that it will appear to be hopelessly boring, a gray, dull, daily administrative grind, enlivened occasionally by a scandal or pseudo-scandal that is forgotten as soon as it’s over; in other words, something that has no point, and thus no thinking behind it. Naturally, it’s in the general interest to confront this danger.
But I can’t say that Havel’s failures give me much hope for a new era of dramatic “nonpolitical politics.” Havel got lots of mileage out of paradoxical rhetoric, but I don’t think he got much good policy out of it, precisely because “politics… requires that people understand it, that they grasp what the purpose of it is in any given moment.” Havel’s plays were absurdist dramas that successfully undermined the legitimacy of totalitarianism, but he never learned how to “transcend” irony and absurdity. He never developed a sincere political project that could make this absurd world a little bit more habitable.
If anything, Havel gives us a clue to the lengths we will go to dramatize political events, to identify and reify one great personage to take responsibility for the efforts of millions. I’m sorry he died, but I wish the remembrances were as mixed and honest as they have been for Hitchens: the continuation of these great conversations seems a better memorial than stick-figure heroism.
Apparently, it did!
On Thursday, I produced a graph and some older papers in economics that made the case that there is a pretty clear trend in campaign spending that was completely unaffected by the 2002 BCRA. However, I’m a philosopher, not an econometrician, so I left off the most important part: comparing growth in campaign spending to growth in inflation and GDP. The numbers I used were absolute totals, and there didn’t seem to have been any effect from the BCRA or Citizens United. Today I sat down to expand on the earlier point, and produced the following chart:
This graph tells a different story than the last one: we can see a clear “bend” after 2002, and another after 2008. Thus, it’s plausible to suppose that BCRA did bend the cost curve: we spent less of our GDP on elections while its important provisions were in effect.
My point yesterday was to offer some predictions and beliefs about the effects of BCRA that militated in favor of overturning it. I maintain that norms are engaged in a reflective equilibrium with our beliefs about the facts of the matter, and that sometimes inaccurate predictions can masquerade as principles. I still think this is true, and I’d only expand that claim: visual representations of facts can and do make arguments. Thursday I made a bad graph, and thus a bad argument. Today I retract it.
These new facts must still be interpreted in light of principles: perhaps the effect size is too small to justify the criminalization of partisan political speech. Perhaps the Rent Seeking Model still applies, and politicians were able to extract fewer rents from businesses during the reign of BCRA. (Perhaps, too, we owe it to shareholders to protect them from the unwanted expenditures of the companies they own.) For now I just want to point out that this does give us evidence against the “no effect” hypothesis.
So I’ve just completed grading 55 papers on Citizens United v FEC, and though I’d kind of like to reflect on it a bit, I’m also finding that grading has totally exhausted my interest in the legal questions. (But seriously: the personhood question is a red herring!) Maybe later this week I’ll post the best arguments I culled from the lot. Instead, I’ve been thinking about some of the contested facts that ground our judgments about Citizens United. After reading so much about it, it’s become clear that there are frequently empirically-testable claims underwriting judgments about that case, and that these claims can be converted into predictions that are going to be verified or falsified over the next few years. These aren’t values questions, themselves, but frequently I’ve found that my judgments on the legal questions are in part generated by my differing beliefs about the particular likelihoods behind these predictions. Consider the following hypotheses as predictions that can be tested.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United will…
- …massively increase the amount of spending on elections (Massive Increase Hypothesis)
- …have no effect on the levels of campaign spending on elections (No Effect Hypothesis)
What reasons do we have to believe that “massive increase” predictions are more likely than “no effect” predictions? 2010 was a more expensive election than 2006, but that doesn’t necessarily prove that the decision caused the increase in spending. 2006 was more expensive than 2002, too. Here’s how the total spending trends look (in billions):
The law overturned by Citizens United, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, was passed in 2002 but the limits didn’t effect the 2002 elections. A small piece of it was overturned in 2003 in Wisconsin Right to Life v. the FEC. Citizens United was decided by in January 2010, in time to effect the midterms. Here’s the data… 1998: $1.61 billion, 2000: $3.1 billion, 2002: At least $2.376 billion (source), 2004: $4.14 billion, 2006: $2.85 billion, 2008: $5.3 billion , 2010: $3.7 billion (source), 2012 prediction: $7 billion (source) These numbers are not inflation-adjusted.
Back in 1973, Gordon Tullock argued that the value of campaign contributions did not reflect the potential benefits of regulatory capture. In a recent paper, “Why is there so little money in US politics?” Ansolabehere, Figueiredo, and Snyder argue that campaign spending has tracked GDP for more than a century. So increases in campaign spending over the last decade, both before and after Citizens United, may simply track the economy as a whole.
If that trend continues, then we might want to accept an alternative model:
- Campaign contributions are rents extracted from businesses by politicians, especially incumbents and front-runners. (Rent Seeking Model)
Why should we believe this? Well, the traditional liberal model of political capture assumes that politicians are primarily motivated by the money they can receive from businesses for beneficial regulation. The problem is that on many regulatory questions, there are competing economic interests, and politicians can only preserve the benefits of “selling out” so long as they keep their seats. Thus, it is much more likely that a politician will choose positions amenable to her constituents, especially if there are campaign contributions available for proponents on both sides. (More complicated “lean towards the green” models allow politicians to take up political causes on which their constituents are indifferent, however: for instance, interest groups spent millions of dollars trying to sway votes on debit card swipe fees at the beginning of 2011, while most voters worried about other matters.) What do businesses get for their campaign contributions? Not much it seems:
Overall, PAC contributions show relatively few effects on voting behavior. In three out of four instances, campaign contributions had no statistically significant effects on legislation or had the “wrong” sign—suggesting that more contributions lead to less support. (Ansolabehere 2003, pg. 114)
Even worse, money spent on elections has been shown to be tremendously inefficient: several different analyses of House races have shown that there is less than 1% effect on the vote per $100,000 spent. (Here’s one from Stephen Levitt, which also argues against public financing.) These findings are consistent with normative judgments like the concern that “money buys access” or that these trends undermine “democratic integrity” by their sheer size.
- …reduce the transparency of campaign spending.
- …have no effect on the transparency of campaign spending.
- …increase the transparency of campaign spending.
While it seems tremendously unlikely that anything that the Supreme Court has done will lead to a decrease in domestic investment, legalizing political spending seems like it might make spending more transparent if a lot of previous spending was illegal and thus secretive. The new information on Super PACs is going to be an interesting test of this question.
- …shift campaign spending from direct candidate donations to indirect issue and advocacy advertisements.
Whether or not campaign contributions continue to hug the ratio-to-GDP trend-line, the most likely effect of Citizens United will be to shift funding away from the direct control of candidates advocating for themselves. I think we already saw this in 2010, and the alternative seems less likely.
I’d also like to propose some more general hypotheses for testing:
- Does increased campaign spending increase interest in political campaigns?
- Does increased campaign spending overemphasize a citizens’ role as voter, and in so doing crowd out other kinds of citizenship?
- Does increased campaign spending exacerbate partisanship or increase negative advertising?
