Woke nonsense in competitive debate.
"When in doubt, call your opponent racist" - Verbatim quote from an LD instructor at my camp.
I. Context
For the last 2 weeks, I’ve been at a Lincoln-Douglas debate camp—mainly to learn more about philosophical arguments. The instructors and people there were generally very nice and much more intelligent than me, but the majority of arguments and ideas discussed in the debate space make a caricature out of the traditional stereotype of out-of-touch, far-leftist academics who are able to launder otherwise outlandish ideas because of how disconnected they are with what’s going on within the rest of society.
I had no prior LD experience before going to camp, so I’m likely only acquainted with a fraction of the nonsense that is taken seriously by competitive debaters.
II. Critical theory
The most popular form of argumentation seems to be Kritiks, or critical theory arguments that mainly critique an underlying assumption of the resolution (e.g. the resolution works within a capitalist/colonialist system instead of trying to that system, so people debating the topic are racist/classist/colonialist).
They tend to be overly vague critiques that work for every topic; this is an easy way to know that most Kritiks have horrible epistemics—if every topic chosen is seriously racist and debating just about any topic makes you racist, that must mean there’s something seriously wrong with the organization making the topics!
It seems quite absurd to then work within the racist debate system instead of trying to reform/abolish it. Keep in mind that these topics are voted on by students and coaches alike, making it impossible for me to believe that critical theory debaters believe most of the nonsense they say. Many debaters also claim that fiat (the act of implementing the resolution) is racist because it forces minorities to put themselves in the shoes of the racist policymakers that oppress them.
This claim is batshit insane. You can’t assert that implementing policies is racist—that assumes the policymakers are overall racist—which assumes the policies they implement are racist. A textbook case of circular reasoning! I assumed that critical theory debaters would be better at intuitively applying various logical tests to their extraordinary claims, but apparently that’s too much to ask for.
A constructive negative case usually contains several disadvantages of implementing the topic’s resolution, along with a counterplan of what should actually be done. Kritiks are usually negative and follow a similar structure, having several “links” on why the affirmative case is [racist/colonialist/ableist/sexist/-ist], and an alternative that acts like a counterplan to doing the aff.
Critical debaters also read frameworks that tell the judge to prioritize the “real-world impacts” of their opponent’s blatant racism over anything else in the round, nullifying what the opposing debater has to say about the resolution.
III. Links
Their links to this are usually quite stupid. An example of a genealogical link would be:
All political capital is built on the oppression of indigenous people. [insert evidence from a critical race scholar]
Working with current political capital means you endorse the oppression of indigenous people.
My opponent needs to use political capital to implement their plan.
My opponent is racist so they lose the round.
Critical race theory warrants tend to be overly saturated with buzzwords and critical language (e.g. “onto-epistemological erasure”, “ontological death”), presumably to compensate for their lack of epistemic backing. Looking at premise 1, it’s completely untrue. Just because some political capital has been linked to indigenous oppression doesn’t imply that indigenous oppression is the only way political capital functions, or that all teleological functions of political capital are colonialist. This is analogous to claiming that “Bob saved 5 people from dying but he inadvertently killed a baby while doing so, ergo saving 5 people from dying is bad because it means you endorse baby-killing”.
Premise 3 is usually how critical debaters generate links and offense through any topic possible; your plan takes place within the United States? Colonialist! Does your plan need western involvement to work? Colonialist! Your plan talks about colonizing stuff? You’re obviously a colonialist! A lot of far-leftist discourse involves broad, sweeping categorizations of entities being guilty of perpetuating different -isms, while simultaneously forgetting why those -isms are bad in the first place.
Racism has almost always been bad because it prioritized the interests of certain people while deprioritizing the interests of other groups based on factors like skin color, factors which made no noticeable difference in the outcomes of such decisions. There are clear genetic differences between different “races”, but our classifications for those races are largely inaccurate and abitrary—so making preferences based on those classifications is obviously irrational.
Colonialism has historically been bad because the people doing it were racist fanatics who disregarded the interests of natives already living in the land they colonized. If there actually happen to not be any natives on a bunch of land, you can settle on it without necessitating something harmful! Previous colonizers could’ve used the excuse that “there are no natives” to take land from indigenous groups, but that only implies that they lied when making such claims, not that claiming “there are no natives” in a certain territory means you’re endorsing stealing land from native groups.
Critical theory is often used in debate as a mechanism for genealogically debunking ideas by critiquing how those ideas came into fruition; it’s pretty undeniable that critiquing the formations and foundations of some ideas is a great way of exposing bad ideas. Despite this, even if debaters avoid mistaking inadvertent consequences as logical implications and avoid applying sweeping generalizations of certain -isms to institutions, Kritiks have even more epistemological pitfalls.
When critical theory genealogically “debunks” all capitalist or American institutions, accepting it as true acquires a universal defeater for any proposition that is an inherent product of the illogical institutions; inclusive of the critical theory itself. You can defend the theory by telling people to make “exemptions” based on the epistemological state of the claim itself, but then you have to concede that if something has terrible genealogy but good epistemics, it’s still true; therefore, a theory that attempts to genetically debunk a massive group of claims provides substantially weaker evidence for the claims being false than proving it wrong on a substance level.
A racist could still have a belief tied to his racism that is true—an example of this could be a racist person acknowledging genetic differences between various races—albeit he is acting irrationally by assuming he can discern between different races and extrapolate conclusions based on his own faulty racial classifications.
An example of a rhetorical link would be:
The concept of “empty land” has historically been used to remove indigenous people.
The concept of empty land is therefore racist and colonialist.
My opponent says there is empty land in space.
My opponent is a colonizer so they lose the round.
Rhetorical analysis is always something that irks me when it comes to debating topics. Analyzing rhetoric provides a narrow range of shallow argumentative conclusions, none of which are unique to rhetorical analysis (remember that you can always, always explain why a claim is false with other mechanisms).
Tons of debaters seem to treat verbal slip-ups or inadequacies as chances to throw around -ism allegations, immediately picking up “harmful rhetoric” like sharks smelling blood in the water—except it’s almost always an unsubstantiated claim.
If I make a claim like “all lives matter”, that doesn’t mean I’m a white supremacist! The claim itself is completely impartial and serves a ton of utility when talking about foreign aid or saving lives in places people usually aren’t concerned about. White supremacists have stated that all lives matter before when propagating white genocide conspiracy theories, but it’s completely irrational to isolate that statement, ignore all the anti-racist evidence often read to include minorities, and then claim your opponent is a white supremacist.
In a population of 1,000 people where only 100 people ever say “all lives matter”, including the 1 and only white supremacist, a random person telling you all lives matter only raises the probability that they’re a white supremacist from 0.1% to 1%. Returning to the real world, we can see that even marginal increases in the chance of someone being a white supremacist are not guaranteed. Populations and statements within a country of 340 million people are much more diverse in the way they interact.
Rhetorical indictments are so obviously pointless and undeductive (at least for the vast majority of use cases in debate) that the only explanation of their prevalence in debate is the need to win the ballot. The majority of debate kids don’t give a fuck about campaigning for indigenous people, nor do they ever attempt to implement their outrageous alternatives to ordinary policy suggestions.
There are many other examples of links.
Representational links:
My opponent frames indigenous people as requiring special assistance.
This frames indigenous people as moral ends through a white savior narrative.
My opponent is promoting white supremacy and colonial morality.
My opponent is racist and should lose the round.
Epistemological links:
The opposition backs up their claims with performance charts and statistics.
Those metrics are inherently oppressive and capitalist.
My opponent is reinforcing the system of capitalism and should lose the round.
There are also ontology links, methodology links, etc.
This article would be way too lengthy if I covered them all, but I’m considering going over them in another article.
IV. Conclusion
The primary motivation of doing high school debate is to succeed in getting admitted into a prestigious school, not to rationally ground your ideas and become the next generation of policymakers. It’s now very apparent that a focus on tournament wins and bids has replaced the foundational values of debate. If everybody prefers running arguments that let them pick up easy rounds over preserving what competitive debate was made for, asymmetric arguments easily upset the balance in the debate community.
If your goal is to out-sell your opponent in the marketplace of ideas, you should at least be penalized for promoting epistemologically cheap, low-quality products at outrageous prices! Instead, a community with little to no integrity will experience a universal pivot to selling low-quality products at exuberant prices, because all self-interested shopowners see an opportunity to make a profit.
Ultimately, the shopowners have to judge rounds and apply these ideas somewhere—if they never utilized these ideas, debate would be completely devoid of any utility (education is the only “portable skill” of debate, as the debaters like to say). In this case, the propagators of bad ideas mutually hurt each other and shift the whole market negatively. If bad ideas in the debate space make contact with markets in the rest of society, selling poor ideas at expensive prices isn’t a feasible strategy. Debate is now shifting away from the rest of societal discourse, insulating bad ideas generated there in a far-left echo chamber where they are immunized from better ideas.
Competitive debate will become less of an educational policymaking space and more of a delusional, out-of-touch space where trashy arguments can be given a facade of intellectual rigor—if current trends persist! There are tons of brilliant people in the debate space, people with potential to create the next generation of revolutionary ideas, but nothing said in rounds will come to fruition unless the majority of people start opposing the trend of reading nonsense in rounds to win the ballot.
In a healthy community, you should be able to push back against massive overton shifts without sacrificing much personal gain; LD debate seems to be so far gone to the point where nobody is willing to fix it.
(What’s even worse is the amount of deontology glazing going on in LD! Literally everyone is a deontologist, and when people mention philosophy, it translates to Kant. Lots of people hate utilitarianism because it’s “racist”, and LD “philosophy debaters” seem to agree that the problem of induction completely wipes out consequentialist theories while Kant is a perfectly rational tautology).