Dan Braganca

The success of “self-help books” for the publishing industry might only be matched by the genre’s failure to provide innovative and beneficial advice. I just started Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America; I eagerly await her to fully confirm what I’ve already assumed by my anecdotal exposure to the success-is-guaranteed-by-a-successful-attitude cult of thought. Yet just because the genre is defined by its failures doesn’t mean it can’t ever have a success. Andreas Kluth, the West Coast correspondent for The Economist and my blogging buddy, has produced a real tonic of a book to counter the success-is-simple snake oil. Readers will know something is different right away: It’s certainly no “self-help book.” Kluth’s Hannibal and Me: What History’s Greatest Military Strategist Can Teach Us About Success and Failure is about how Success and Failure are both “impostors,” as Kipling wrote. The stories in the book aren’t a guide to success but a historical survey and ironic examination of it. Kluth populates his mediation on success and failure with many of humanity’s important characters and archetypes – an Avengers of world history.

The author’s fascination with the one-eyed Carthaginian general pervades (invades?) Hannibal’s story and that excitement carries Kluth’s narrative and provides his most detailed example. By using archetypal figures from history, we’re supposed to see how their successes and failures map onto our own in unique ways, so I felt like I was cheating a bit when I kept thinking of how Hannibal’s military campaigns clarified our modern military campaigns.

After three years of high drama and adrenaline – of Alpine peaks, Etruscan swamps, and three of the bloodiest battles in human history – there now followed thirteen excruciatingly long years of limbo.

[...]

Both Hannibal and Fabius understood that the invincible invader of Italy was now, paradoxically, captive in Italy, as though it were a shrinking prison of success. The fact that Hannibal was still officially successful made it impossible for him to escape this captivity. If he suffered a military disaster of some sort, Hannibal would have had to evacuate Italy. It would have been humiliating, but he would have started over, with a different strategy, and the overall war might have gone in a new direction. But Hannibal was still victorious, and victors don’t flee.

Replace a few names and Kluth might be writing about America’s War on Terror. For approximately 12 years our armed forces have gone from battle to battle without suffering a military defeat and it’s certainly racked up some stunning successes. After all, we have the greatest military the world has ever known! But just as Hannibal’s strategy never led to the Fall of Rome, our endlessly successful wars won’t lead to the End of Terrorism. Our official successes continue to cost us more in treasure, blood, and liberties as we go from victory to victory abroad.

Not all of Kluth’s cast are as compelling as Hannibal. His credulous retelling of the power of an aikido master undermines his wider project of grounding his lessons in history. For generations aikido promoters have sold stories of making enemies “fly through the air without ever being touched” and beating “thirty people” with hardly any martial aggression from this so-called martial art. Evidence for these abilities is as invisible as the ki they use against their opponents. It’s still a good story, but the counter-evidence of the art’s efficacy is concussive. That said, Kluth’s point about using the intentions of your opponents against them is worthwhile. Using the instability of attackers is better exhibited by BJJ, Judo, and wrestling; I’m sure there is an interesting figure somewhere in their histories.

Two characters had me pondering my own career and life trajectory. Instead of examining the art of Picasso and Cezanne, Kluth draws the arcs of their lives and probably has younger readers asking, “which one am I!?” Right now, I feel a bit like the “wanderer” – Paul Cezanne didn’t know what job he’d end up with and often felt pessimistic about his future. With a poor economy and without a specific and set career goal to strategize toward, Cezanne’s biography offers support. Most days I just hope I’m climbing up the arc as Cezanne ended up doing.

Of course, maybe focusing so exclusively on a career is a bit like focusing only on tactics and forgetting strategy. A balance is probably necessary to “fulfill my human potential” and “self-actualize.” But extremely few people ever become totally comfortable with one’s own personality and life despite the obviousness of the objective. One of the book’s better examples of this success is Albert Einstein.

Try to tell me that man isn’t transcendently comfortable. Kluth isn’t a hagiographer for any of his subjects; instead, he spotlights their faults. I was surprised to discover Einstein’s personality defects and professional failures that met him after his glory years. Part of being successful, as we learn, is being able to see the world as it is, “flowing” with disasters, and “not dwelling on flaws.”

Andreas Kluth’s profile of success and failure isn’t perfect. The book ends with conventional catalogue of lessons that he basically apologizes for before listing (although, wisely, they’re actually pretty good summaries of themes laced with new insights rather than just simplified bullet-point regurgitations). Even if you finish without adopting any of the book’s themes or lessons, the history and quality of storytelling make Kluth worth reading. Hannibal and Me may not be perfect from tactic to tactic but it takes risks and transcends the failed genre.

On my weekend off I read Mark Twain’s “What is Man?” The obscure essay is so full of wonderful passages, it’s difficult to choose what to excerpt. Twain’s imagined dialogue between an Old Man and a Young Man opens a sinkhole underneath the concept of free will and the existence of a totally altruistic motive. Yet one segment seemed the most fitting. This blog’s motivation is an honest and enduring quest for truth. In the interest of that enterprise, here’s the Old Man calling me out:

We are always hearing of people who are around SEEKING AFTER TRUTH. I have never seen a (permanent) speciman. I think he had never lived. But I have seen several entirely sincere people who THOUGHT they were (permanent) Seekers after Truth. They sought diligently, persistently, carefully, cautiously, profoundly, with perfect honesty and nicely adjusted judgment – until they believed that without doubt or question they had found the Truth. THAT WAS THE END OF THE SEARCH. The man spent the rest of his life hunting up shingles wherewith to protect his Truth from the weather. If he was seeking after political Truth he found it in one or another of the hundred political gospels which govern men in the earth; if he was seeking after the Only True Religion he found it in one or another of the three thousand that are on the market. In any case, when he found the Truth HE SOUGHT NO FURTHER; but from that day forth, with his soldering-iron in one hand and his bludgeon in the other he tinkered its leaks and reasoned with objectors.

Ouch. Let this blog live on seeking after truth as frequently as my temperament allows. I encourage others to claw the roofing nails out of my insulating shelters whenever possible.

Trampled By Turtles bluegrass cover of Arcade Fire’s ”Rebellion (Lies)”

The political battles surrounding the anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden reveal an important truth about our political and media class. After the Obama campaign released an ad celebrating the president’s decision and questioning how Romney might have acted, Republicans started hyperventilating and the media started asking if it’s appropriate for Obama to “politicize” this.

I think politicizing it and trying to draw a distinction between himself and myself was an inappropriate use of the very important event that brought America together -Mitt Romney

[Obama has] managed to turn it into a divisive, partisan political attack -Ed Gillespie

Politics of bin Laden: ‘Fair game’ vs. ‘divisive’ -CNN

GOP says Obama playing politics with bin Laden anniversary -CNN

Is the president politicizing the bin Laden mission? -Fox News

You can find virtually endless debates about whether or not it’s ok for Obama to have politicized his decision.

That, in a word, tells you all you need to know. Politicians of all stripes and the media apparently believe that political discourse necessarily trivializes issues. It’s a game to them. If it wasn’t why would national security be off-limits for politics, as is often argued?  Foreign policy and the decisions stemming from executive power are exactly the type of issues we should be divisively clarifying for the electorate.

It’s quite reasonable to believe that Mitt Romney was correct that it’s “wrong for a person running for president of the United States to get on TV and say we’re going to go into your country unilaterally” as he argued in 2007. Or you could criticize the raid and the selective leaking of details from the Left as Glenn Greenwald has on numerous occasions. And it’s perfectly acceptable that Obama tout his decisions as successes and to criticize his opponent.

As I said at the time, I think the world is better off because of the decision Obama made. People can disagree with that conclusion, people can disagree with the specifics of the operation and aftermath. These are issues that should be politicized because politics is the arena where we publicly discuss public policy and government action. Anytime anyone decries politicization you know they don’t take politics seriously. Of course, since politicians seem to think it’s just a cynical team sport, I often wonder how seriously anyone should take politics.

What kind of journalism student can’t tolerate listening to dissenting viewpoints?

The right-wing is super-seriously concerned about voter fraud this year. After Republicans took control of a number of state legislatures, they made sure to enact strict new voter identification laws to ensure that legions of imposters aren’t stealing elections. If historically disenfranchised minority groups are disproportionately affected by the new laws, that’s a small price to uphold the integrity of the electoral process. Remember, it’s just a coincidence that voting blocs that tend to vote for Democrats – the young, blacks, hispanics, the poor, urbanites – are much less likely to have the type of photo ID that the new laws require. Concealed Handgun License = totally permitted; Student I.D./social security card = completely unacceptable.

Listening to the excessive rhetoric, you might start believing the world’s greatest constitutional republic could never have had a legitimate election in its history. Washington, Lincoln, Reagan! all elected without the safeguard of GOP-approved photo IDs. So should Americans just acknowledge our history as a banana republic, asterisk our first 44 presidencies as invalid, and from this day forward commit every available resource to obliterate the scourge of in-person voter fraud?

Fortunately, for the sake of our national psyche, it turns out that voter impersonation is basically a figment of conservative paranoia. The Brennan Center For Justice conducted the largest study to date and found that individual voter fraud is virtually nonexistent. Not a single person was prosecuted for in-person voter fraud after a 2002 to 2007 probe by the Justice Department came up empty handed. And as Rolling Stone reports, “A much-hyped investigation in Wisconsin, meanwhile, led to the prosecution of only .0007 percent of the local electorate for alleged voter fraud.” In other words, the problem is not actually a problem. But that hasn’t stopped the Republican Party from finding solutions that just happen to disenfranchise eligible voters.

If you live in a place where most people drive, it’s easy to assume that almost everyone has a government-issued photo ID. The reality is that around 11% (21+million) of US citizens don’t have one, 18% of people 65+ don’t, and close to 1-in-4 African Americans lack that type of ID.

Can’t they just get one?

It’s not always as easy as you think. Many older citizens born before the 1970s were born out a hospital and lack the proper birth certificate. Older black citizens born into the Jim Crow south were frequently born out of hospitals to midwives and often have misspelled names on their birth certificates. As many as 32 million voting-age women may lack citizenship documents with their current name (usually the result of marriage). Students that moved out-of-state also face higher hurdles to vote.

After Wisconsin passed their voter ID requirement, they helpfully closed 10 DMVs that coincidentally were in Democratic districts. In Texas, one third of the counties don’t have a licensing office, while “a little less than a quarter of driver’s license offices have extended hours, which would make it tough for many working voters to find a place and time to acquire the IDs.”

Couldn’t the government make it easier to get IDs?

It could, but often doesn’t. Back in Texas, the voter ID law cut the amendments that would have extended licensing office hours and helped pay for travel expenses. Voter ID laws still cost millions of dollars to put in place, and states are reluctant to commit the resources to ensure every eligible citizen can get an ID. For poor citizens without ready access to citizenship documents or inaccurate birth certificates it can be a true financial burden to get the necessary documents and ID.

How much will voter ID laws suppress turnout?

It’s difficult to estimate. One study found that around 5 million eligible voters will find it “significantly harder” to cast a ballot. A study in the Harvard Law and Policy Review determined that voter ID laws “disenfranchised between 3 and 4.5 million voters in 2006″ even before many of the stricter laws were put in place. Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post argues that voter ID laws suppressing turnout is false or exaggerated, writing, “the states with the strictest photo ID laws (Georgia and Indiana) had higher minority turnout than those with no photo ID requirements.”

For the sake of argument let’s assume that the effect is minor. You still have to answer, how many citizens are you willing to disenfranchise to solve a problem that doesn’t exist?

Voting isn’t a privilege, it’s a right. In a nation with an ugly history of disenfranchising American minorities, we should be extra vigilant to ensure every citizen’s constitutional right is secure. All the evidence suggests that voter impersonation is extraordinarily rare. Even James O’Keefe’s made-up examples don’t prove what advocates of voter ID laws think it does. Kevin Drum:

Nobody in his right mind deliberately casts an illegal ballot. You’re risking a felony rap over one vote. Hell, O’Keefe’s guy wasn’t willing to risk it even though that was the whole point of the stunt, and even though, according to Shapiro, the odds of getting caught were “almost zero.” That’s because O’Keefe’s stooge isn’t clinically insane, which is about what you’d have to be to take a chance like that for essentially no gain at all.

Presidential elections only tend to turn out just over 50% of the voting age population; it seems improbable that any significant number of imposters are risking felony charges when getting actual voters to the polls poses such logistical difficulties for political campaigns. A small number frauds wouldn’t swing an election, and even if in the best case scenario that voter disenfranchisement doesn’t effect the outcome of the election, it’s still too high a price to pay. Any individual’s vote is statistically unlikely to alter an election, but voting has psychological, social, and civic benefits. The bar for depriving any amount of citizens their constitutional rights needs to be a whole lot higher than the mere potential for some fraud.

The small-government, liberty-loving, bureaucracy-hating, Constitution-worshipping, low-tax-champion Tea Partyers passed a solution to a non-problem  that gives the government and bureaucrats more power, makes it harder for citizens to practice their constitutional rights, and costs the taxpayers more money. Yet somehow, it’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me.

I recently laid out my argument for the constitutionality of the individual mandate. Conceding that I’m not a constitutional lawyer, it’s entirely plausible that I’m influenced by the consequences of the policy. I think Obamacare is better than not having Obamacare. I think the individual mandate reasonably solves adverse selection in insurance and the free-rider problem. In contrast, people who think Obamacare is bad policy also just happen to think it’s unconstitutional.

As Jonathan Bernstein says:

[T]here are vanishingly few people who believe that the Affordable Care Act was a terrific piece of legislation except that it is unfortunately unconstitutional. Nor are there more than a handful who believe that the ACA is certainly permitted by the Constitution, but is otherwise a terrible idea.

So let’s put everyone to the test – not just with healthcare but with every policy.

Can you name any policy you favor but think is unconstitutional? 

On a recent episode of Up with Chris Hayes the panel discussed atheism in America. Richard Dawkins provocatively suggested that there isn’t too much discussion of religious beliefs in the public square, but too little. Dawkins believes that private religious beliefs should be subjected to the same scrutiny as any other belief candidates may hold.

Hayes, an atheist, strongly disagrees and emphasizes that private and public beliefs are separate because “no one is legislating on transubstantiation.” I don’t need to check the legislative calendar to know he’s right, but I’m not sure that means we should “respect a distinction between beliefs on public matters and public policy and private beliefs.” Superficially, the distinction makes some sense, but practically we run into difficulties.

We don’t treat other private beliefs that way

Candidates get asked questions about their families and other non-public matters all the time. Off the top of my head:

• Romney’s dog or is Romney an emotionless robot
• Dennis Kucinich’s UFO
• The sexual lives of countless politicians

Now, maybe Chris Hayes himself has never brought up any private issues. That’s a respectable position, but the media as a whole doesn’t seem to honor that distinction. “Character issues” either matter or they don’t. Sheltering religious beliefs from criticism is purely convention and cowardliness. Arguably, all the “private” issues that the media currently discuss are far less consequential than a candidate’s faith.

We don’t know in advance what issues will be public

Let’s take a look a few innocuous private religious beliefs:

• The 2nd Commandment prohibition on images of God’s likeness

Turns out that really caring about drawing heavenly images is why we see deadly riots after Danish cartoons. How strongly you feel about the second commandment will probably affect your response such controversies.

• Life begins at conception

It wasn’t that long ago that no one ever talked about stem-cell research. But again and again as technology progresses, a naive little conviction that life begins at conception affects public policy. Abortion>In vitro fertilisation>stem cell research>?

• The Noah’s Ark Myth

We all know that creationist style beliefs about the age of the earth lead to politicians promoting nonsense in science classes. But what if a politician takes a short passage in Genesis 8:21-22 seriously? It’s exactly those words that lead Rep. John Shimkus, a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, to dismiss global warming as problem. That’s what God told Noah, apparently.

So, should the press assume that evidence-free beliefs will never become a matter of public concern because no one is legislating on them right now?

The Way We Think

Subjecting public figures’ style of thinking to skepticism and examination should not be taboo. If someone credulously accepts nonsense that’s important to know. The media should expect to be loathed. Politeness is never an excuse for the Fourth Estate. We’ll never know every issue that will confront us before we elect our representatives, which is exactly why appraising how they think is so crucial to voters.

What is so extreme about the individual mandate? Somehow huge mandatory government interventions like medicare and social security survive most conservatives’ “literal” reading of the constitution, but an unenforceable fine for not buying health insurance establishes an unfathomable expansion of government authority. It’s clear that this seasonal crop of literalists are just constitutionalists of convenience – they don’t like Obamacare ipso facto it’s unconstitutional.

Who knows, I’m not a lawyer either so I’m probably practicing a little motivated reasoning myself. But the case for constitutionality seems so simple to me that unless your committed to an absurdly strict reading, you should accept that Obamacare should stand.

Where in the Constitution…?

Anyone asking a version of the above question and looking for precise written permission for a Congressional power is arguing about the wrong document. The Articles of Confederation limited Congress to the powers it “expressly delegated,” but when the Founders drafted the new Constitution the Anti-Federalists lost. The new document dropped the rigid wording and allowed Congress to pass laws that flow reasonably from the listed powers. More exactly, Congress may enact regulations that are “necessary and proper” to execute the Constitutional powers such as regulating commerce.

Is the healthcare market commerce?

To ask the question is to answer it. The healthcare market for insurance is obviously commerce. I’m not sure how that is even in dispute. Congress recognized that many citizens who want to buy insurance can’t, so made a regulation that forces insurance providers to cover people with pre-existing conditions. Most of the opponents of the individual mandate accept the premise that Congress can and should pass a regulation that prohibits pre-existing condition exclusions in insurance plans.

Is the individual mandate “necessary and proper?”

If you accept that Congress can regulate the insurance and can make it illegal for healthcare companies to deny coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, than mandating that people should buy health insurance or pay a penalty is a “necessary and proper” regulation to execute the goal of coverage. Without the mandate, insurance companies could not reasonably cover enrollees with pre-existing conditions because of adverse selection and free-riders who would just jump into insurance once they got sick. Without the healthier people in the risk pool, insurance doesn’t work. Imagine if you could buy car insurance after you got in an accident.

In Massachusetts, only once Mitt Romney’s individual mandate went into effect did the healthier citizens broaden the risk pool.

As you can see, when the mandate became “fully operational” [the 2nd dotted line] the “not chronically ill” enrollees (i.e. healthier people) joined the ranks of the insured en mass.

The individual mandate is necessary and proper to address the market failure inherent in the insurance market for healthcare.

Technicalities shouldn’t matter

As I stated earlier, I’m not a constitutional lawyer so it’s possible that the individual mandate will be struck down because of some legal technicality of, say, Congress not designing the mandate as an explicit tax, which has the exact same consequences economically. Maybe a majority of justices will find some quasi-theological distinction between activity and inactivity, but the Roman Fabius and the Taoist Laozi both teach us that non-doing is a form of doing.

Opponents might not think that the policy tool is perfect, but Congress has the Constitutional power to address a market failure. The Supreme Court should uphold the mandate and give Congress reasonable scope to regulate commerce. If Obamacare is bad policy, elections can be the remedy.