Framework Makes the Game Work
Notes
You are always right, do not let anyone change your mind (I.E. Sean Hilzendeger)
Do not let people scare you away from going for it in the 2NR (I.E. Sean Hilzendeger)
More definitions are in the T file
You have to make your own blocks
The people who defend the Game: Jake Lee, Will Bledsoe, Henry Ferolie (AKA Bobby), Jaime
Romero
1NC
1NC
Interpretation/Violation-- The affirmative has presented a plan text /
advocacy statement that doesn’t advocate United States federal government
action.
Resolved means to express by formal vote
Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1998 (dictionary.com)
Resolved:
5. To express, as an opinion or determination, by resolution and vote; to declare or decide by a
formal vote; -- followed by a clause; as, the house resolved (or, it was resolved by the house) that no money should be
apropriated (or, to appropriate no money).
“United States should” proscribes both a stable agent and mechanism
Ericson 3—Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et al., “The Debater’s Guide, Third
Edition” 2003 http://hs.stdoms.org/ourpages/auto/2009/10/28/44705084/debaterguide.pdf p. 4)
The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each
topic contains certain key elements,
although they have slightly different functions from the comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1. An agent to do the
acting—“The United States” in “The United States should adopt a policy of free trade.” Like
the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is usually the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb should—the first part of a
verb phrase that urges an action. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should
adopt here means to put a program or policy into action through governmental means. 4. A
specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would,
for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy
deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred. The
entire debate is about whether something ought to
occur. What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an
audience to perform the future action that you propose.
Prefer our Interpretation
First—Switch-side debate is good—it is the only way to foster tolerance—
turns their claims of inclusion
Muir 93—Star A, communication studies at George Mason University (“A Defense of the Ethics of Contemporary Debate” 1993
pg. 287-289 http://www.jstor.org/stable/40237780?seq=7#page_scan_tab_contents)//JLee
The first response to the charge of relativism is that switch-side debate respects the existence of divergent beliefs, but focuses attention on
assessing the validity of opposing belief systems. Scriven argues that the “confusion of pluralism, of the proper tolerance for diversity of ideas, with
relativism – the doctrine that there are no right and wrong answers in ethics or religion – is perhaps the most serious ideological barrier to the
implementation of moral education today.” The process of ethical inquiry is central to such moral education, but the allowance of just any position
is not. Here is where cognitive-development diverges from the formal aims of values clarification. Where clarification ostensibly allows any value
position, cognitive-development progresses from individualism to social conformity to social contract theory to universal ethical principles. A
pluralistic pedagogy does not imply that all views are acceptable: It is morally and pedagogically correct to teach about ethics, and the skills of
moral analysis rather than doctrine, and to set out the arguments for and against tolerance and pluralism. All of this is undone if you also imply
that all the various incompatible views about abortion or pornography or war are equally right, or likely to be right, or deserving of respect.
Pluralism requires respecting the right to hold divergent beliefs; it implies neither tolerance of actions based on those beliefs nor respecting the
content of the beliefs. The role of switch-side
debate is especially important in the oral defense of
arguments that foster tolerance without accruing the moral complications of acting on such beliefs. The forum is
therefore unique in providing debaters with attitudes of tolerance without committing them to active moral
irresponsibility. As Freeley notes, debaters are indeed exposed to a multivalued world, both within and
between the sides of a given topic. Yet this exposure hardly commits them to such "mistaken" values. In
this view, the divorce of the game from the "real world" can be seen as a means of gaining
perspective without obligating students to validate their hypothetical value structure through immoral actions. Values clarification,
Stewart is correct in pointing out, does not mean that no values are developed. Two very important values—tolerance and fairness—inhere to a
significant degree in the ethics of switch-side debate. A second point about the charge of relativism is that tolerance is related to the development
of reasoned moral viewpoints. The willingness
to recognize the existence of other views, and to grant
alternative positions a degree of credibility,
is a value fostered by switch-side debate: Alternately
debating both sides of the same question ... inculcates a deep-seated attitude of tolerance toward differing points
of view. To be forced to debate only one side leads to an ego-identification with that side. .
. . The other side in contrast is seen only as something to be discredited. Arguing as persuasively as one can for completely opposing views is one
way of giving recognition to the idea that a strong case can generally be made for the views of earnest and intelligent men, however such views may
clash with one's own.... Promoting this kind of tolerance is perhaps one of the greatest benefits debating both sides has to offer. The activity should
encourage debating both sides of a topic, reasons Thompson, because debaters are "more likely to realize that propositions are bilateral. It is
those who fail to recognize this fact who become intolerant, dogmatic, and bigoted."40
While Theodore Roosevelt can hardly be said to be advocating bigotry, his efforts to turn out advocates convinced of their rightness is not a
position imbued with tolerance. At a societal level, the value of tolerance is more conducive to a fair and open assessment of competing ideas. John
Stuart Mill eloquently states the case this way: Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion is the very condition which justifies us
in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right....
the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race. . . . If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the
opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of the
truth, produced by its collision with error. At an individual level, tolerance is related to moral identity via empathic and critical assessments of
differing perspectives. Paul posits a strong relationship between tolerance, empathy, and critical thought. Discussing the function of argument in
everyday life, he observes that in order to overcome natural tendencies to reason egocentrically and sociocentrically, individuals
must gain the capacity to engage in self-reflective questioning, to reason dialogically and dialectically, and to
"reconstruct alien and opposing belief systems empathically. Our system of beliefs is, by definition,
irrational when we are incapable of abandoning a belief for rational reasons; that is, when we egocentrically associate our beliefs with our own
integrity. Paul describes an intimate relationship between private inferential habits, moral practices, and the nature of argumentation. Critical
thought and moral identity, he urges, must be predicated on discovering the insights of opposing views and the weaknesses of our own beliefs.
Role playing, he reasons, is a central element of any effort to gain such insight.
Second—Limits are key to a productive agonistic discussion
Dryzek 6—Australian National University Professor of Social and Political Theory (John, Reconciling Pluralism and Consensus
as Political Ideals, American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 50, No. 3, July 2006; JRom)
Mouffe is a radical pluralist: "By pluralism I mean the end of a substantive idea of the good life" (1996, 246). But neither Mouffe nor
Young want to abolish communication in the name of pluralism and difference; much of their work advocates sustained attention to
communication. Mouffe also cautions against uncritical celebration of difference, for some differences imply "subordination and
should therefore be challenged by a radical democratic politics" (1996, 247). Mouffe raises the question of the terms in which
engagement across difference might proceed. Participants
should ideally accept that the positions of
others are legitimate, though not as a result of being persuaded in argument.
Instead, it is a matter of being open to conversion due to adoption of a particular
kind of democratic attitude that converts antagonism into agonism, fighting into critical
engagement, enemies into adversaries who are treated with respect. Respect here is not just (liberal)
toleration, but positive validation of the position of others. For Young, a communicative
democracy would be composed of people showing "equal respect," under "procedural rules of fair discussion and decisionmaking"
(1996, 126). Schlosberg speaks of "agonistic respect" as "a critical pluralist ethos" (1999, 70). Mouffe and Young both want pluralism
to be regulated by a particular kind of attitude, be it respectful, agonistic, or even in Young's (2000, 16-51) case reasonable. Thus
neither proposes unregulated pluralism as an alternative to (deliberative)
consensus. This regulation cannot be just procedural, for that would imply "anything goes" in terms of the substance of
positions. Recall that Mouffe rejects differences that imply subordination. Agonistic ideals demand judgments
about what is worthy of respect and what is not. Connolly (1991, 211) worries about dogmatic assertions
and denials of identity that fuel existential resentments that would have to be changed to make agonism possible. Young seeks
"transformation of private, self-regarding desires into public appeals to justice" (2000, 51). Thus for Mouffe, Connolly, and Young
alike, regulative
principles for democratic communication are not just attitudinal or procedural; they
to the substance of the kinds of claims that are worthy of respect . These authors
would not want to legislate substance and are suspicious of the content of any alleged consensus. But in retreating from
"anything goes" relativism, they need principles to regulate the substance of what
rightfully belongs in democratic debate.
also refer
Third—Decision-Making—A limited topic of discussion that provides for
equitable ground is key to productive inculcation of decision-making and
advocacy skills in every and all facets of life---even if their position is
contestable that’s distinct from it being valuably debatable---this still
provides room for flexibility, creativity, and innovation, but targets the
discussion to avoid mere statements of fact
Steinberg & Freeley 8—Austin is a Boston based attorney who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights law,
and David L. is a Lecturer of Communication Studies @ U Miami (“Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned
Decision Making” 2008
http://staff.uny.ac.id/sites/default/files/pendidikan/Rachmat%20Nurcahyo,%20SS,%20M.A./__Argumentation_and_Debate__C
ritical_Thinking_for_Reasoned_Decision_Making.pdf Pg.43-450)
Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a difference of opinion or a
conflict of interest before there can be a debate . If everyone is in agreement on a fact or value or
there is no need for debate ; the matter can be settled by unanimous consent. Thus, for example, it
would be pointless to attempt to debate “Resolved: That two plus two equals four,”
because there is simply no controversy about this statement. Controversy is an essential prerequisite of
debate. Where there is no clash of ideas, proposals, interests, or expressed positions on
policy,
issues, there is no debate. In addition, debate cannot produce effective decisions
without clear identification of a question or questions to be answered. For example, general
argument may occur about the broad topic of illegal immigration. How many illegal
immigrants are in the United States? What is the impact of illegal immigration and immigrants on our economy? What is their
impact on our communities? Do they commit crimes? Do
they take jobs from American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do
it the responsibility of
employers to discourage illegal immigration by not hiring undocumented
workers? Should they have the opportunity to gain citizenship? Does illegal immigration pose a security threat to our country?
they require social services? Is it a problem that some do not speak English? Is
Do illegal immigrants do work that American workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights as workers and as human beings at risk
due to their status? Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and businesses? How are their families impacted by
their status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state to maintain its borders? Should
we build a
wall on the Mexican border, establish a national identification card, or enforce existing laws against employers?
Should we invite immigrants to become U.S. citizens? Surely you can think of many more concerns to
be addressed by a conversation about the topic area of illegal immigration.
Participation in this “debate” is likely to be emotional and intense. However , i t is
not likely to be productive or useful without focus on a particular question and
identification of a line demarcating sides in the controversy. To be discussed and resolved
effectively, controversies must be stated clearly. Vague understanding results in
unfocused deliberation and poor decisions, frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the failure of the
United States Congress to make progress on the immigration debate during the
summer of 2007. Someone disturbed by the problem of a growing underclass of
poorly educated, socially disenfranchised youths might observe, “Public schools are doing a terrible job! They are
overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little
more than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms.” That same concerned
citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at an unhelpful decision, such as
“We ought to do something about this” or, worse, “It’s too complicated a problem to deal with.” Groups of concerned
citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to express
their frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a
focus for their discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state of education without finding points of clarity
or potential solutions. A
gripe session would follow. But if a precise question is posed—
such as “What can be done to improve public education?”—then a more profitable
area of discussion is opened up simply by placing a focus on the search for a
concrete solution step. One or more judgments can be phrased in the form of debate
propositions, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for legislative assemblies.
The statements “Resolved: That the federal government should implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities” and
“Resolved: That the state of Florida should adopt a school voucher program” more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with
educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate. They
provide specific policies to be
investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference. To have a
productive debate, which facilitates effective decision making by directing and p lacing
limits on the decision to be made, the basis for argument should be clearly defined . If
we merely talk about “homelessness” or “abortion” or “crime” or “global
warming” we are likely to have an interesting discussion but not to establish
profitable basis for argument. For example, the statement “Resolved: That the pen is
mightier than the sword” is debatable, yet fails to provide much basis for clear
argumentation.
If we take this statement to mean that the written word is more effective than physical force for some
purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose.
Although we now have a general subject, we have not yet stated a problem. It is still too broad, too
loosely worded to promote well-organized argument. What sort of writing are we concerned with—poems,
novels, government documents, website development, advertising, or what? What does “effectiveness” mean in
this context? What kind of physical force is being compared—fists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A
more specific question might be, “Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring Laurania of our
support in a certain crisis?” The
basis for argument could be phrased in a debate proposition
such as “Resolved: That the United States should enter into a mutual defense treaty with Laurania.” Negative advocates might
This is not to say that debates
should completely avoid creative interpretation of the controversy by advocates, or
that good debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the controversy;
in fact, these sorts of debates may be very engaging. The point is that debate is best
facilitated by the guidance provided by focus on a particular point of difference,
which will be outlined in the following discussion.
oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better solution.
Fourth—Deliberative democracy increases the ability to solve for global
issues
Dryzek, Professor of Political Science, 15 (John, “Deliberative Democracy and Climate Change”, Center for Humans and
Nature, http://www.humansandnature.org/democracy---john-dryzek-response-55.php)//WB
Contemporary political systems fail to address climate change effectively to the degree that they
lack deliberative capacity. Deliberative capacity can be defined as the degree to
which a system hosts authentic, inclusive, and consequential deliberation.
Deliberation, in turn, means communication that is non-coercive, capable of
inducing reflection, connects expression of particular interests to more general
principles, and involves the making of arguments and telling of stories in terms
that make sense to others who do not share one’s particular framework. Systems
that lack deliberative capacity tend to do badly on climate change. In particular, the climate issue clearly reveals the
pathologies of adversarial democracies such as the United States and Australia, where all issues are processed in terms of partisan advantage. Over the
past two years, Australia has witnessed a struggle over the introduction of a very modest carbon tax. The leader of the conservative opposition saw an
opportunity to use the issue to beat up the government (while still paying lip service to the need to do something to reduce greenhouse gas emissions).
Labeling the carbon tax “a great big tax on everything,” his campaign was successful in damaging the government’s public standing. The government,
for its part, continued to push the tax only because of its parliamentary dependence on Green Party support, itself conditional on the tax going through.
The carbon tax is now in operation—though in highly compromised form, full of exemptions and compensation packages for big and powerful polluters.
Why might a more deliberative democracy do better? There are a number of theoretical claims that can be
made on behalf of deliberative democracy when it comes to intractable social-ecological issues like climate change. It can generate
coherence across the perspectives of actors concerned with different facets of
complex issues. It can organize feedback on the condition of social-ecological
systems into politics. It can lead to the prioritization of public goods (such as
ecosystem integrity) and general interests over material self-interest. It may even
expand the thinking of its participants to better encompass the interests of future
generations, distant others, and non-human nature. These theoretical claims find
empirical support, especially in citizen forums designed to deliberate climate
change (and other environmental issues). The biggest such exercise to date took place on September
26, 2009, in 38 countries following a common model coordinated by the Danish Board of Technology.
This “World Wide Views” process yielded recommendations that, in just about
every country, favored stronger action on climate change than the national
government in question was at the time prepared to support. The results were presented at the
December 2009 Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen (to little effect). Other
sorts of deliberative forums involving partisans from different sides on environmental issues can also yield
positive results, though there is little evidence from partisan forums on climate change per se. Evidence from citizen forums goes only so
far because they, for the most part, lack any link to actual governance. But there are other sorts of evidence. If we look at the comparative performance
of different countries when it comes to tackling pollution, in general, and climate change, in particular, we find that consensual democracies of the sort
found in Northern Europe do better than adversarial ones (with the important exception of the United Kingdom, which, for a few years, seemed to have
broken the mould by showing that an adversarial democracy could generate a relatively effective response to climate change until, more recently,
climate skeptics gained the upper hand in the Cameron government). Consensual democracies also feature somewhat higher deliberative quality than
adversarial ones, at least in their legislatures. All this is relative: no consensual democracy has yet turned in a performance on reducing greenhouse-gas
emissions that can be regarded as adequate. In addition, there may be a problem inherent to consensual democracies. They are good at incorporating
moderate versions of environmentalism and acting accordingly. They are not so good when it comes to generating and accepting more radical critique,
which consequently has to be generated elsewhere. There
is a subtle dynamic in operation here that points
to the need for both moments of consensus and moments of contestation, which
can be joined in the idea of a “deliberative system.” Moments of consensus may be appropriate in the formal
institutions of government—while moments of contestation should be cultivated in the broader public sphere. This deliberative
system idea can also be applied beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. Climate
change is, of course, in large part a global issue, requiring coordinated global action. Electoral democracy is a non-starter in the global system. But we
can think of the global governance of climate change as a potentially deliberative system—however far it might currently be from deliberative ideals.
That system as a whole can then be analyzed in terms of its deliberative capacity—
and how it might be enhanced. The result would be collective outcomes with higher legitimacy, and so greater likelihood of
getting compliance from states, corporations, and others. Equally important, outcomes could be much more effective
than those currently generated in the global governance of climate change, whose
performance over two decades is dismal. That effectiveness depends, of course, on the degree to
which the environmental promise of deliberative democracy could be redeemed at
the global level (where it has never seriously been tried). What would such a global deliberative
system look like? It would have room for multiple forms of governance beyond the
multilateral negotiations of the UNFCCC. Many such forms—networks to organize clean technology transfer, emissions trading, or the sharing of
information and commitment, for example—are emerging, though in practice they are not very deliberative. Currently, the global public sphere on
climate issues is lively and contestatory—but its activity tends to have minimal connection to governance, especially when it comes to these new forms.
Both transmission of concerns generated in this public sphere and accountability
to global civil society can be strengthened. There are numerous reform proposals for global governance now on the
agenda, and all could benefit from a deliberative aspect.
Fifth—Roleplaying allows us to more effectively influence state policy AND
is key to agency – studies prove—access better internal link to education
Eijkman 12 [Henk, visiting fellow at the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy and is
Visiting Professor of Academic Development, Annasaheb Dange College of Engineering and Technology in India, has taught at
various institutions in the social sciences and his work as an adult learning specialist has taken him to South Africa, Malaysia,
Palestine, and India, “The role of simulations in the authentic learning for national security policy development: Implications for
Practice,” http://nsc.anu.edu.au/test/documents/Sims_in_authentic_learning_report.pdf]
However, whether as an approach to learning, innovation, persuasion or culture shift, policy
simulations derive their
power from two central features: their combination of simulation and gaming (Geurts et al. 2007). 1. The
simulation element: the unique combination of simulation with role-playing . The unique
simulation/role-play mix
enables participants to create possible futures relevant to the topic
being studied. This is diametrically opposed to the more traditional, teacher-centric approaches in
which a future is produced for them. In policy simulations, possible futures are much more than
an object of tabletop discussion and verbal speculation. ‘ No other technique allows a group of
participants to engage in collective action in a safe environment to create and analyse the futures
they want to explore’ (Geurts et al. 2007: 536). 2. The game element: the interactive and tailor-made modelling
and design of the policy game. The actual run of the policy simulation is only one step, though a most important and visible one, in a
collective process of investigation, communication, and evaluation of performance. In the context of a post-graduate course in public
policy development, for example, a
policy simulation is a dedicated game constructed in collaboration
with practitioners to achieve a high level of proficiency in relevant aspects of the policy development
policy development simulations —as forms of interactive or
participatory modelling— are particularly effective in developing participant knowledge and skills in the five
key areas of the policy development process (and success criteria), namely: Complexity, Communication, Creativity,
Consensus, and Commitment to action (‘the five Cs’). The capacity to provide effective learning support in these
five categories has proved to be particularly helpful in strategic decision-making (Geurts et al.
process. To drill down to a level of finer detail,
2007). Annexure 2.5 contains a detailed description, in table format, of the synopsis below.
Offense
Switch-Side Debate
SSD Good—General
The purpose of debate should be determined by the unique role this forum
can play—instrumental switch side debate generates unique critical
thinking benefits—err neg because the benefits of their advocacy could be
achieved in alternate forums
Muir 93—Star A, communication studies at George Mason University (“A Defense of the Ethics of Contemporary Debate” 1993
pg. 291-292 http://www.jstor.org/stable/40237780?seq=7#page_scan_tab_contents)//JLee
Firm moral commitment to a value System, however, along with a sense of moral identity, is founded in reflexive assessments of
multiple perspectives. Switch-side
debate is not simply a matter of speaking persuasively or
organizing ideas clearly (although it does involve these), but of understanding and mobilizing
arguments to make an effective case. Proponents of debating both sides observe that the debaters
should prepare the best possible case they can, given the facts and information
available to them.52 This process, at its core, involves critical assessment and
evaluation of arguments; it is a process of critical thinking not available with many
traditional teaching methods.53 We must progressively learn to recognize how often the concepts of others are
discredited by the concepts we use to justify ourselves to ourselves. We must come to see how often our claims are compelling only
when expressed in our own egocentric view. We can do this if we learn the art of using concepts without living in them. This
is
possible only when the intellectual act of stepping outside of our own Systems of
belief has become second nature, a routine and ordinary responsibility of everyday
living. Neither academic schooling nor socialization has yet addressed this moral
responsibility,54 but switch-side debating fosters this type of role playing and
generates reasoned moral positions based in part on values of tolerance and
fairness.
Switch Side Debate—allows us to be critical thinkers and is key to
deliberative democracy
Koehle 10—Joe is the Director of Debate and Communications Director at Kansas State University (“Reuniting Old Friends:
The Sophists and Academic Debate- Joe Koehle” December 20, 2010 http://www.k-state.edu/actr/2010/12/20/reuniting-oldfriends-the-sophists-and-academic-debate-joe-koehle/default.htm)//JLee
Debate serves as a form of broad social critique and moreover, that debate can
inform theories of argumentation in terms of argument fields, analysis of social structure, political
implications of policy choices, questions of value and special knowledge (455). Contemporary policy debate
fundamentally justifies itself as a pedagogical activity. Although it is competitive in
nature, it brings in zero revenue to academic institutions that sponsor it. The major benefit
of the activity is that it claims to produce critical thinkers who are capable of
responding to the problems of the world around them. In this way, it is very similar to sophistic training because it claims to
produce no specialized techne, but rather a capstone that helps to synthesize training in the liberal arts itself into a useful product. In the face of
charges of modern-day sophistry, it would be wise for defenders of debate to emphasize the 2500 year legacy of training that this sophistic activity has
provided and the tangible benefits of seeing education through a polyvocal lens. This
is especially true in an
environment where the academy is under attack from outsiders because of its
commitment to open communication of ideas. The presence of debate is the mark of mature and healthy
institutions, and will continue to be an essential component of teaching for as long as teaching will exist (Stannard). The rhetorical
pedagogy of debate cannot exist in a vacuum, however. It presumably should be
directed at some end and, much like the sophists‟, that end should be in a broad concept of the political. Not
just in the halls of Congress and other mega-institutions, but in the day-to-day deliberations that shape
collective human action. Darrin Hicks sums it up best when he wrote that: “Rhetorical theory was
responsible for disclosing the ideals, values, methods and procedures animating
the public use of reason within democratic debate and discussion” (222). The lesson
of the sophists is that language can shape reality and as much as we would like to assume a
universal truth or system of value that is out there somewhere, we would likely not be able to ever
know it or communicate it. We are stuck with the messiness of different opinions, and need a way to negotiate them. Far too often both
the sophists and academic debaters have been portrayed as hopeless relativists
because of their attention to these details, but this stance towards understanding and negotiating the
inevitability of disagreement is the main political insight that both groups can claim. The
sophistic practices of antilogic teach us that dissoi logoi is the unavoidable outcome of any
group discussion. There will always be difference of opinion, but the sophistic understanding of democratic politics
is that it is more useful to discover how we come to settle upon a truth rather than
forcing the world to fit into one neat framework via some nonnegotiable single truth within phenomena.
Embodied by switch side debate, this view of how truths are negotiated is critical to
overcoming one of the foremost barriers to effective deliberation, which is the stigmatization of disagreement and
confrontation. Effective deliberative democracy relies upon removing the stigma from
disagreement and confrontation, brining these issues into the open where they can be negotiated
instead of abolished by force (Stannard). All theories of communication attempt to
produce some benefit for humanity. The increasing complexity of the world‟s problems only proves that the
sophists were correct in establishing that existence is governed not by unity and
perfection, but rather the inescapability of dissoi logoi. As such, it is essential to cling to pedagogical
practices that not only recognize the inevitability of disagreement but teach us how to negotiate and live in a world full of difference.
Despite attempts to marginalize the relevance of switch side debate, it is the most
effective mechanism for resisting simplifications that cover over subtleties and exploit the
complexity of the world in the pursuit of greater explanatory power. It may have its faults, but without switch side
debate, rhetorical scholarship would not only lose an important connection to the
world at large, but also sacrifice a useful tool in making it a better place.
Switch-side debate is good—key to better debates
Harrigan 8—Casey is the Director of Debate at the Michigan State University, Previously Director of debate at Wake Forest
University and University of Georgia (“AGAINST DOGMATISM: A CONTINUED DEFENSE OF SWITCH SIDE DEBATE” 2008
http://www.cedadebate.org/files/2008CAD.pdf#page=47 pg.37)//JLee
Switching sides is a method that is integral to the success of debate as a deliberative and
reflexive activity. No other component process than switch side debate contributes more
greatly to the cultivation of a healthy ethic of tolerance and pluralism, generates
the reasoned reflection necessary for critical thinking, or instills responsible and critical skepticism
toward dominant systems of belief. The purpose of this essay is to mount a defense of the
validity of switchside debating in light of modern criticisms, drawing upon the
existing body of literature related to the theory to build a case for its continued
practice.
SSD Good—K2 Education
Switch-Side Debate key to education—demands critical thinking, and to
learn multiple issues on both sides of the debate
Zwarensteyn 12—Ellen C. is the director of Debate and a teacher of communications at East Kentwood High School (“High
School Policy Debate as an Enduring Pathway to Political Education: Evaluating Possibilities for Political Learning” August 2012
http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1034&context=theses)//JLee
As referenced above, the resolution provides a basis for research and discussion. Using the
resolution as a starting
point, students will debate the same resolution dozens or hundreds of times each year on both the affirmative and negative. This
practice, called switch-side debate, establishes the expectation that a student will defend
and answer multiple sides of similar arguments throughout a debate season. As a result, this practice
increases one’s intellectual flexibility and understanding of multiple sides of
hundreds of issues. Galloway (2007), Harrigan (2008), and Mitchell (2010) add to this discussion.
Galloway (2007) theorizes the benefits to communication through switch-side debate. In
part due to the rules requiring both sides be heard for equal amounts of time combined with the etiquette of listening, flowing, and
answering all of an opponent’s argument, debate
forces structured dialogue. In such, demands for
fairness surface. Galloway advances how demanding dialogical fairness “…takes
the form of a demand for equality of voice. Far from being a banal request for links to a disadvantage,
fairness is a demand for respect, a demand to be heard, a demand that a voice backed by literally months upon
months of preparation, research, and critical thinking not be silenced” (Galloway, 2007, p. 6). Underlying strategic
calls for fairness, fairness of equitable debatable ground in switch-side debate
demands recognizing a basic humanity in all persons involved. Viewing the first affirmative speech as the
invitation to the rest of the debate, Galloway (2007) continues to articulate the
academic benefits to switching sides. Theorizing the benefits of taking multiple sides of
an issue, even sides of an issue someone does not agree with, Galloway concludes how debate
encourages critical thought, meaningful exchange of ideas, and a better defense of
one’s own thought since ideas
need defending against opposing argumentation. After surveying literature dating
back to the policy debate controversies of the 1950s and 1960s, Harrigan (2008) weighs
the arguments for
switch-side debate against the potential shortcomings associating with losing a
sense of one’s own personal convictions and/or the loss of intellectual certitude.
Harrigan (2008) fuses these two concerns together in his answer. Submitting arguments for a debate surmounts to their dissection –
exposing
arguments to their assumptions, representations, framing, inferences,
and consequences is the ultimate intellectual rigor of any given argument.
“Switching sides grounds belief in reasonable reflexive thinking; it teaches that
decisions should not be rendered until all positions and possible consequences have been considered in a reasoned manner”
(Harrigan, 2008, p. 47). While debaters do not speak from a personal standpoint, they air arguments
for critical consumption which may impact later personal advocacy. A paradox emerges; it is this distance
from the argument that lays the foundation for personal advocacy. “…[S]ound convictions can only be truly generated by the
reflexive thinking spurred by debating both sides” (Harrigan, 2008, p. 46). Furthermore,
promoting
argumentative pluralism offers hope for developing empathy, acceptance, and understanding.
Acknowledging possible truths from a variety of perspectives lends credibility to
belief in individual reason and the kernels of truth rooted in many perspectives. “[A]rgumentative pluralism holds great promise for
a politics based on understanding and accommodation that runs contrary to the
dominant forces of economic, political, and social exclusion. Pluralism requires that individuals
acknowledge opposing beliefs and arguments by forcing an understanding that personal convictions are not universal… [I]nstead of
being personally invested in the truth and general acceptance of a position, debaters use arguments instrumentally, as tools, and as a
switch-side debating at
its best holds immense potential not only for argumentative critical thinking but also
for the creation of critical personal advocacies and social forces encouraging social inclusion and
pedagogical devices in the search for larger truths” (Harrigan, 2008, p. 51-52). Taken together,
democracy. Switch-side debating has been taken to heart by many in the debate
community as well as attracting attention at the top levels of government. The ‘real-world’, a world conceived as being
occupied by persons no longer engaged in debating contests, appears to be paying close attention to the benefits to switch-side
debates. Mitchell
(2010) conjures the up the ancient work of Protagoras and what he
“…called dissoi logoi – the practice of airing multiple sides of vexing questions for the
purpose of stimulating critical thinking” (Mitchell, 2010, p. 97-98). The US Intelligence Community and the
Environmental Protection Agency are two real-world examples of organizations attempting to thwart the dangers of
group-think. By encouraging switch-side debate within their organization, their goal is
“…to untangle disparate threads of knotty technoscientific issues, in part by integrating
structured debating exercises into institutional decision-making processes” (Mitchell,
2010, p. 95). By training persons within their organization in switch-side debate or by bringing in trained policy debaters
to debate for their organization, multiple issues are aired which might not otherwise be given
space for consideration. Switch-side debate “…requires more than the sheer
information processing power; it demands forms of communicative dexterity that enable translation of ideas
across differences and facilitate cooperative work by interlocutors from heterogeneous backgrounds” (Mitchell, 2010, p. 100).
This deliberation often checks against dangerous institutional groupthink and counters
traditional formulaic decision-making process. Switch-side debating offers a forum for the relatively
safe exploration of a variety of issues and invites arguments from multiple sources
of authority. This practice may prove to be a bulwark against insular and isolated institutional or partisan practices. Citing
Munksgaard and Pfister, Mitchell demonstrates the unique perspective debaters may bring to the table. ‘Having a public debater
argue against their convictions, or confess their indecision on a subject and subsequent embrace of argument as a way to seek clarity,
could shake up the prevailing view of debate as a war of words. Public
uptake of the possibility of
switchside debate may help lessen the polarization of issues inherent in prevailing debate
formats because students are no longer seen as wedded to their arguments. This could transform public debate from a tussle
between advocates, with each public debater trying to convince the audience in a Manichean struggle about the truth of their side,
to a more inviting exchange focused on the content of the other’s argumentation
and the process of deliberative exchange’ (Mitchell citing Munksgaard and Pfister, 2010, p. 110). Basing
debates on a predictable resolution invites discussion centered on argument and permits continuously adapting
multiple perspectives in and out of a student’s world-view.
Solves Extinction
Switch-Side creates critical thinking—that is key to solve threats
Harrigan 8—Casey is the Director of Debate at the Michigan State University, Previously Director of debate at Wake Forest
University and University of Georgia (“AGAINST DOGMATISM: A CONTINUED DEFENSE OF SWITCH SIDE DEBATE” 2008
http://www.cedadebate.org/files/2008CAD.pdf#page=47 pg.37)//JLee
Along these lines, the
greatest benefit of switching sides, which goes to the heart of contemporary debate, is
its inducement of critical thinking. Defined as “reasonable reflective thinking that is
focused on deciding what to believe or do” (Ennis, 1987, p. 10), critical thinking learned
through debate teaches students not just how advocate and argue, but how to decide as well. Each and
every student, whether in debate or (more likely) at some later point in life, will be placed in the
position of the decision-maker. Faced with competing options whose costs and
benefits are initially unclear, critical thinking is necessary to assess all the possible
outcomes of each choice, compare their relative merits, and arrive at some final decision about which is preferable.
In some instances, such as choosing whether to eat Chinese or Indian food for dinner,
the importance of making the correct decision is minor. For many other decisions, however, the implications of choosing an
imprudent course of action are potentially grave. As Robert Crawford
notes, there are “issues of
unsurpassed importance in the daily lives of millions upon millions of
people…being decided to a considerable extent by the power of public speaking”
(2003). Although the days of the Cold War are over, and the risk that “the next Pearl Harbor could be
‘compounded by hydrogen’” (Ehninger and Brockriede, 1978, p. 3) is greatly reduced, the manipulation of public
support before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 points to the continuing necessity of training a well-informed and critically-aware public
(Zarefsky, 2007). In the
absence of debate-trained critical thinking, ignorant but
ambitious politicians and persuasive but nefarious leaders would be much more
likely to draw the country, and possibly the world, into conflicts with incalculable losses in terms of
human well-being. Given the myriad threats of global proportions that will require
incisive solutions, including global warming, the spread of pandemic diseases,
and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction , cultivating a robust and
effective society of critical decision-makers is essential. As Louis Rene Beres writes, “with such
learning, we Americans could prepare…not as immobilized objects of false contentment, but as authentic citizens of an endangered
Thus, it is not surprising that critical thinking has been called “the
highest educational goal of the activity” (Parcher, 1998). While arguing from conviction
can foster limited critical thinking skills, the element of switching sides is necessary to sharpen
debate’s critical edge and ensure that decisions are made in a reasoned manner instead of being driven by ideology.
Debaters trained in SSD are more likely to evaluate both sides of an argument
before arriving at a conclusion and are less likely to dismiss potential arguments based on his or her prior beliefs
(Muir 1993). In addition, debating both sides teaches “conceptual flexibility,” where decision-makers are more
likely to reflect upon the beliefs that are held before coming to a final opinion (Muir,
1993, p. 290). Exposed to many arguments on each side of an issue, debaters learn that public policy
is characterized by extraordinary complexity that requires careful consideration before action. Finally, these
arguments are confirmed by the preponderance of empirical research
demonstrating a link between competitive SSD and critical thinking (Allen, Berkowitz, Hunt
planet” (2003).
and Louden, 1999; Colbert, 2002, p. 82).
AT: Devil’s Advocate
Devil’s Advocacy creates self-reflexivity—promotes tolerance and kills
dogmatism
Koehle 10—Joe is the Director of Debate and Communications Director at Kansas State University (“Reuniting Old Friends:
The Sophists and Academic Debate- Joe Koehle” December 20, 2010 http://www.k-state.edu/actr/2010/12/20/reuniting-oldfriends-the-sophists-and-academic-debate-joe-koehle/default.htm)//JLee
Given the variety of assaults upon switch side debate by both sides of the political spectrum, how
can switch side
debate be justified? Supporters of switch side debate have made many arguments
justifying the value of the practice that are not related to any defense of sophist techniques. I will only briefly
describe them so as to not muddle the issue, but they are worthy of at least a cursory mention. The first defense is the most
pragmatic reason of all: Mandating
people debate both sides of a topic is most fair to
participants because it helps mitigate the potential for a topic that is biased
towards one side. More theoretical justifications are given, however. Supporters of switch side debate
have argued that encouraging students to play the devil‟s advocate creates a sense
of self-reflexivity that is crucial to promoting tolerance and preventing
dogmatism ( Muir 287). Others have attempted to justify switch side debate in educational terms and advocacy
terms, explaining that it is a path to diversifying a student‟s knowledge by encouraging them to seek
out paths they may have avoided otherwise, which in turn creates better public
advocates (Dybvig and Iversen). In fact, contemporary policy debate and its reliance upon
switching sides creates an oasis of argumentation free from the demands of
advocacy, allowing students to test out ideas and become more well-rounded advocates as they leave the classroom and enter
the polis (Coverstone). Finally, debate empowers individuals to become critical thinkers
capable of making sound decisions (Mitchell, “Pedagogical Possibilities”, 41). Despite the power of these claims,
the reality is that these justifications can only do so much to help defend switch side debate. It is necessary for
defenders of the practice to utilize the insights of the sophists to help articulate new
reasons w
Switch-side debate solves for the Devil’s Advocate
Harrigan 8—Casey is the Director of Debate at the Michigan State University, Previously Director of debate at Wake Forest
University and University of Georgia (“AGAINST DOGMATISM: A CONTINUED DEFENSE OF SWITCH SIDE DEBATE” 2008
http://www.cedadebate.org/files/2008CAD.pdf#page=47 pg.37)//JLee
Switch side debate (SSD) is an argumentative model that requires students to
debate both the affirmative and negative sides of the resolution over the course of a
multipleround tournament. In practice, SSD requires that debaters’ arguments are frequently
divorced from personal conviction; in many cases students are required by the topic to take a position and argue
vigorously on behalf of views that they disagree with. Debaters with ideological beliefs are thrust into
the position of the Devil’s Advocate, assuming the side of the opposition and
needing to understand the arguments of the opposing view well enough to argue
on their behalf. Instead of approaching the debate topic from the perspective of personal belief, students often choose
arguments from a strategic and competitive perspective. Because of SSD, the purpose of debate is not to
convince others to accept a certain argument as preferable or “true”, but rather to
choose the strongest and most intellectually rigorous position that has the greatest
chance of prevailing under scrutiny (and thus earning a competitive victory). Policy debate, an
activity with few formal rules and requirements, developed this norm of arguing
both sides of a topic for pragmatic, pedagogical, and social reasons.
Fairness
O/W Education
Fairness outweighs education—if we do not have any clash, we cannot test
them properly—only clash is key to understanding arguments in the debate
Zappen 4—James Philip is a Professor of Communications and Media, Ph.D. University of Missouri (“The Rebirth of Dialogue:
Bakhtin, Socrates, and the Rhetorical Tradition” 2004
https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=EcAoW5mv9GIC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=+Zappen&ots=wOFk3fH2r6&sig=bb_Du
NmNFl0nZuKFKBX73TpIwkg#v=onepage&q=Zappen%20debate&f=false pg. 35-36)//JLee
Finally, Bakhtin describes the Socratic dialogue as a carnivalesque debate
between opposing points of view,
with a ritualistic crownings and decrownings of opponents. I call this Socratic form of debate
a contesting of ideas to capture the double meaning of the Socratic debate as both a mutual testing of
oneself and others and a contesting or challenging of others' ideas and their lives.
Brickhouse and Smith explain that Socrates' testing of ideas and people is a mutual testing not only of others but also of himself:
Socrates claims that he has been commanded by the god to examine himself as well as others; he claims that the
unexamined life is not worth living; and, since he rarely submits to questioning himself, "it must be that in the
process of examining others Socrates regards himself as examining his own life, too." Such a mutual testing of
ideas provides the only claim to knowledge that Socrates can have: since neither
he nor anyone else knows the real definitions of things, he cannot claim to have
any knowledge of his own; since, however, he subjects his beliefs to repeated
testing, he can claim to have that limited human knowledge supported by the
"inductive evidence" of "previous elenctic examinations." This mutual testing of ideas and people
is evident in the Laches and also appears in the Gorgias in Socrates' testing of his own belief that courage is inseparable from the
other virtues and in his willingness to submit his belief and indeed his life to the ultimate test of divine judgment, in what Bakhtin
calls a dialogue on the threshold. The contesting or challenging of others' ideas and their lives and their ritualistic
crowning/decrowning is evident in the Gorgias in Soocrates' successive refutations and humiliations of Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles.
Good
Fairness allows for both sides to participate in the round—they can tell a
story but is has to be under the topical version of the aff
Burch 8—Elizabeth Chamblee is an Assistant Professor at Cumberland School of Law (“CAFA’s Impact on Litigation as a Public
Good” 2008 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1005021 Pg. 2534-2536)//JLee
Fairness arguments are typically
offered as policy reasons to trump pursuit of certain reform proposals and
aggregate social goals; however, I use fairness here (and in assessing CAFA) as a supplemental
constraint rather than a substitute. Employing a deontological conception of
fairness to balance utility aid in, not only distributing procedural costs and correcting
procedural errors, but also in ensuring that the procedural system does not
disproportionately favor or burden plaintiffs or defendants. Put differently, process should
disperse the risk of error and the cost of access as evenly as possible. Neither party should have an
Given this shortcoming, the second procedural justice component if fairness.
advantage. This idea of “fairness” as avoiding lopsided distribution of error can
be likened to the concept of “neutrality.” To be sure, some imparity in distributing risks may be inevitable.
Finally, although analogous to fairness, participation—manifested as adequate representation in the class context—humanizes
process. In its simplest form, participation
necessitates that those who are bound by a
decision have an opportunity to take part (and be heard) in adjudication. Moreover, it
encompasses inherent rights to present evidence, observe the proceedings, cross-examine witnesses, and hear the judge’s decision.
And participation,
even in class litigation, affords litigants dignity by granting them
a forum in which to tell their story. “Storytelling” has been criticized when used to demonstrate
satisfaction with process as a proxy for “justice.” I use the tem here, however, for its cathartic value
only when situated within this larger procedural fairness framework.
A level playing field is required to achieve the most affective policies
(Cecilia, “Justice & Fairness in International Negotiation”,
Cambridge University Press, 2001, p.1-3, ISBN: 9780511157851)//WB
Justice and fairness are not considerations that naturally come to mind when we think of international negotiation. This is, after
all, a political activity driven by the objectives of individual countries and the
prospect of mutual gains. That negotiation is all about the pursuit of narrow self-interests, with the backup of whatever power and
skills can be mustered, is a common notion with well-established roots. Yet issues of justice are a major cause of
con¯ict. Disagreements over justice, like con¯icts of interests, can turn violent and
lead to wars. 2 They all too often undermine the capacity of negotiation to produce acceptable and durable solutions to disputes.
Negotiation is a joint decision-making process in which parties, with initially
opposing positions and con¯icting interests, arrive at a mutually bene®cial and
satisfactory agreement. It normally includes dialogue with problem-solving and
discussion on merits, as well as bargaining and the exchange of concessions with
the use of competitive tactics. 3 More than other tools such as arbitration and
adjudication, this is a ¯exible method of resolving differences which leaves the
parties themselves with considerable control over the process and the outcome. Every
Albin, Professor of Peace and Conflict Research, 1
party usually exercises leverage based on a variety of sources, and at the very least based on its ability to threaten to walk away from the table.
Negotiation can bring on board new and needed parties by virtue of promising them `gains from trade'. It can result in the
creation or identi®cation of new solutions to shared problems, and lend
legitimacy to and facilitate the implementation of them as they have been agreed in
a process of deliberation. Negotiation is used not only to produce agreement on the division or exchange of particular resources or
burdens, but also to establish and reform institutions, regimes and regulations that will help to govern future relations between parties.
Governments have always relied on this activity to manage their relations. In the last three
decades, however, growing interdependence among states and the recognition of a range of
new threats to human survival and well-being have increased dramatically the
signi®cance, scope and complexity of international negotiation. Among the factors which have
driven this expansion are the transborder nature of the threats, the need for voluntary multilateral cooperation and coordinated measures to tackle
them, and the insuf®ciency or ambiguity of existing international regulations. Today negotiation
is the principal means
of collective decision-making, rule-making and dispute settlement in the
management of transboundary issues. More broadly, it is fundamental to all efforts to achieve a measure of stability and
order in the post-Cold War era. Environmental degradation, trade, arms control, economic integration and development, ethnic-sectarian con¯ict, the
break-up and succession of states, and human rights are only some of the questions with which international negotiators now grapple. Issues
of
justice and fairness lie at the heart of problems in every one of these areas. Global climate
change, for example, threatens many countries with devastation primarily due to the actions of other states. Yet negotiations concerned with this
problem keep stumbling over the dilemma of how to distribute the formidable costs of cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Who should have to reduce
their emissions and who should pay for it, given the resource inequalities and sharp differences in past and current emission levels (responsibility for
the problem) between states? How much should emissions be cut and by what time, considering that reductions in the near term are prone to hamper
the economic development of poorer countries? The cooperation of these countries will clearly be required to stabilise rising emission levels. But it is
unlikely to be forthcoming unless industrialised states, as the principal atmospheric polluters to date, address at least some of the requests for justice
advanced by the developing world. 4 Compensatory
justice, expressed through preferential treatment of less developed countries
the form of exemptions and ®nancial and technical assistance, was a
cornerstone of the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, one of the most
successful environmental agreements ever negotiated.
(LDCs) in
The “rules of the game” are key to create beneficial discussion
Risse, Professor of International Relations, 2k (Thomas,
“’Let's Argue!’ Communicative Action in World
Politics”, International Organization, 54, pp 1-39)//WB
A focus on arguing helps to clarify two issues in the rationalist-constructivist
debate. First, it furthers our understanding of how actors develop a common
knowledge concerning both a definition of the situation and an agreement about
the underlying "rules of the game" that enable them to engage in strategic
bargaining in the first place. Thus, arguing constitutes a necessary (though not
sufficient) step in a negotiating process. Arguing is also relevant for problem
solving in the sense of seeking an optimal solution for a commonly perceived
problem and for agreeing on a common normative framework. Seeking a reasoned
consensus helps actors to overcome many collective action problems. I illustrate this point
empirically using the negotiated settlement ending the Cold War in Europe. Second, argumentative rationality appears to be
crucially linked to the constitutive rather than the regulative role of norms and
identities by providing actors with a mode of interaction that enables them to
mutually challenge and explore the validity claims of those norms and identities.
When actors engage in a truth-seeking discourse, they must be prepared to change
their own views of the world, their interests, and sometimes even their identities.
Some of these debates actually take place in the public sphere, which has to be distinguished from the realm of diplomatic negotiations. My empirical example for such a process
concerns public discourses in the human rights area, particularly those between transnational human rights advocacy networks and national governments accused of norm
violation.
AT: Fairness Rigged/Delgado
Our framework solves fairness—it is systemically bias in self-serving
assertion to sidestep clash—all of their reasons to not defend the topic are
stupid—they can be solved with actors with opposite goals
Talisse 5—Robert is a Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt Philosophy & Social Criticism, 31.4, “Deliberativist responses to
activist challenges” http://psc.sagepub.com/content/31/4/423.full.pdf)
My call for a more detailed articulation of the second activist challenge may be met with the radical claim that I have begged the
question. It
may be said that my analysis of the activist’s challenge and my request for a more rigorous argument
presume what the activist denies, namely, that arguments and reasons operate independently of
ideology. Here the activist might begin to think that he made a mistake in agreeing to engage in a discussion with a
deliberativist – his position throughout the debate being that one should decline to engage in argument with one’s opponents! He
may say that of course activism seems lacking to a deliberativist, for the
deliberativist measures the strength of a view according to her own standards. But
the activist rejects those standards, claiming that they are appropriate only for seminar rooms and faculty
meetings, not for real-world politics. Consequently the activist may say that by agreeing to enter into a discussion with the
deliberativist, he had unwittingly abandoned a crucial element of his position. He may conclude that the
consistent
activist avoids arguing altogether, and communicates only with his comrades. Here
the discussion ends. However, the deliberativist has a further consideration to raise as his discursive partner
departs for the next rally or street demonstration. The foregoing debate had presumed that there is but one
kind of activist and but one set of policy objectives that activists may endorse. Yet Young’s activist is
opposed not only by deliberative democrats, but also by persons who also call themselves ‘activists’ and
who are committed to a set of policy objectives quite different from those endorsed by this one activist.
Once these opponents are introduced into the mix, the stance of Young’s activist becomes more
evidently problematic, even by his own standards. To explain: although Young’s discussion associates
the activist always with politically progressive causes, such as the abolition of the World Trade Organization (109), the expansion of
healthcare and welfare programs (113), and certain forms of environmentalism (117), not all activists are progressive in this sense.
Activists on the extreme and racist Right claim also to be fighting for justice, fairness,
and liberation. They contend that existing processes and institutions are
ideologically hegemonic and distorting. Accordingly, they reject the deliberative
ideal on the same grounds as Young’s activist. They advocate a program of political action
that operates outside of prevailing structures, disrupting their operations and
challenging their legitimacy. They claim that such action aims to enlighten, inform, provoke, and excite persons
they see as complacent, naïve, excluded, and ignorant. Of course, these activists vehemently oppose the policies endorsed by Young’s
activist; they argue that justice requires activism that promotes objectives such as national purity, the disenfranchisement of Jews,
racial segregation, and white supremacy. More importantly, they
see Young’s activist’s vocabulary of ‘inclusion’,
‘structural inequality’, ‘institutionalized power’, as fully in line with what they
claim is a hegemonic ideology that currently dominates and systematically distorts our political discourses.21 The
point here is not to imply that Young’s activist is no better than the racist activist. The point rather is that Young’s activist’s
arguments are, in fact, adopted by activists of different stripes and put in the service of a wide range of
policy objectives, each claiming to be just, liberatory, and properly inclusive.22 In light of this, there
is a question the activist must confront. How should he deal with those who share his views about the proper means for bringing
about a more just society, but promote a set of ends that he opposes? It seems that Young’s activist has no way to deal with opposing
activist programs except to fight them or, if fighting is strategically unsound or otherwise problematic, to accept a Hobbesian truce.
This might not seem an unacceptable response in the case of racists; however, the question can be raised in the case of any less
extreme but nonetheless opposed activist program, including different styles of politically progressive activism. Hence
the
deliberativist raises her earlier suspicions that, in practice, activism entails a
politics based upon interestbased power struggles amongst adversarial factions.
AT: Schlag
Normative debate is valuable for its own sake—we can still win because
these are interesting questions to discuss. They link to the impact more by
over-determining what we think is at stake in each round
West 9—Robin is a Frederick J. Haas Professor of Law and Philosophy, Associate Dean for Research and Academic Programs,
Georgetown Law (“A Reply to Pierre” 2009 http://georgetownlawjournal.org/files/pdf/97-3/West.PDF pg.871-873)
Why? What’s wrong with normativity? Pierre has given various answers in his twenty-year critique of normativity, but this new essay suggests yet an
additional argument, which I think is wrong and merits a response. One reason for Pierre’s longstanding opposition to normativity, suggested by this
essay, might be a suspicion—well-grounded—that the kind of normative questions asked, and certainly the answers given by MLS, will be, or are, or
have always been in the past, imitative of the sorts of normative questions judges ask when deciding cases. Just as the truths about the world and the
statements of law in MLS are basically imitative of judicial declarations of truth and law, so too are the political or moral claims about the way the world
should look. And, for the same reasons, the normative questions that judges ask and the answers they give, as well as the empirical and legal questions
they ask in the course of writing judicial opinions, will be—virtually by definition they must be— politically uninteresting, aesthetically unappealing,
and intellectually deadening. And scholars
imitate judges. So, mainstream normative
jurisprudence is likewise politically uninteresting, aesthetically unappealing, and
so on. As such, the problem with mainstream normative legal scholarship—MNLS—is that the normative questions it asks—what should the law be,
what should the world look like, how might law contribute—imitate the normative questions asked by judges. Those latter questions, in turn, will be
“truncated,” to use Unger’s term for the same phenomenon,12 or spam, to revert to Pierre’s. Spam normative questions about what the law and world
should look like will invite spam answers. But if that’s the argument, there’s a pretty obvious problem with it, which Pierre’s essay itself clearly shows.
Here’s the problem. Pierre may be right about the nature of normative questions
posed and answered by judges. As virtually everyone who’s thought about it agrees, both judges and the
scholars that imitate them, when explaining what the law is, have to also explain what the law
should be. If we want to explain “the law” of compensation for injuries caused by
badly manufactured products, we’re going to have to also say what we think “the law”
ought to be, because “what it is” is just not all that clear. So, there’s some “normative” or “political” or
“moral” analysis involved in even the most ordinary legal and adjudicative writing.
Statements of “what the law is” will indeed include, perforce, a tad of “policy analysis,” a dabbling in costs and benefits, some philosophizing over
fundamental values or basic principles, and at least some “weighing” of pros and cons between proffered alternatives. That dabbling will be spam-like,
for the same reasons the judge’s various truth claims and statements of what the law is are such. And this is as true of imitative legal scholarship as it is
My objection
to this Schlagian syllogism is just this: normative legal scholarship does not have
to be so confined, and if anyone pays attention to Pierre’s essay, it won’t be. It
doesn’t have to be imitative. It doesn’t have to be adjudication-lite. Legal scholars could ask, and
I think should ask, normative questions about what the law should be, not so as to get a better grip on what the
of judicial opinion writing itself. The conclusion thus follows: if legal scholarship is spam, then so is its normative component.
law is, and not so as to better imitate the cost-benefit policy analysis or the fundamental values analysis or the basic principles analysis or the prosandcons reasoning that typifies adjudication; not, in brief, so as to
better sway the court toward one possible
legal result over another. Legal scholars could and I think should be asking what the law should be, and what it should not be; what
our social world should look like, and what it should not look like; what of the law we have is an utter disaster, and what of the law we don’t have that
we perhaps should have. And
we could do all of this “normative analysis” not toward the end
of figuring out what the law is—that is indeed what truncates or spamifies
normative analysis13—but solely because these are important questions to ask.
Limits Good
Good
Limits are key to switch-side debate and dialogue
(Ellen, “High School Policy Debate as an Enduring
Pathway to Political Education: Evaluating Possibilities for Political Learning,” published 8-1-12,
accessed 7-6-15,
http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1034&context=theses)//JRom
Galloway (2007) also advances an argument concerning the privileging of the resolution as a
basis for debating. Galloway (2007) cites three pedagogical advantages to seeing the resolution
and the first affirmative constructive as an invitation to dialogue. “First, all teams have equal
access to the resolution. Second, teams spend the entire year preparing approaches for and
against the resolution. Finally, the resolution represents a community consensus of worthwhile
and equitably debatable topics rooted in a collective history and experience of debate” (p. 13).
An important starting point for conversation, the resolution helps frame political conversations
humanely. It preserves basic means for equality of access to base research and argumentation.
Having a year-long stable resolution invites depth of argument and continuously rewards
adaptive research once various topics have surfaced through practice or at debate tournaments.
As referenced above, the resolution provides a basis for research and discussion. Using the
resolution as a starting point, students will debate the same resolution dozens or hundreds of
times each year on both the affirmative and negative. This practice, called switch-side debate,
establishes the expectation that a student will defend and answer multiple sides of similar
arguments throughout a debate season. As a result, this practice increases one’s intellectual
flexibility and understanding of multiple sides of hundreds of issues. Galloway (2007), Harrigan
(2008), and Mitchell (2010) add to this discussion. Galloway (2007) theorizes the benefits to
communication through switch-side debate. In part due to the rules requiring both sides be
heard for equal amounts of time combined with the etiquette of listening, flowing, and
answering all of an opponent’s argument, debate forces structured dialogue. In such, demands
for fairness surface. Galloway advances how demanding dialogical fairness “…takes the form of a
demand for equality of voice. Far from being a banal request for links to a disadvantage, fairness
is a demand for respect, a demand to be heard, a demand that a voice backed by literally months
upon months of preparation, research, and critical thinking not be silenced” (Galloway, 2007, p.
6). Underlying strategic calls for fairness, fairness of equitable debatable ground in switch-side
debate demands recognizing a basic humanity in all persons involved. Viewing the first
affirmative speech as the invitation to the rest of the debate, Galloway (2007) continues to
articulate the academic benefits to switching sides. Theorizing the benefits of taking multiple
sides of an issue, even sides of an issue someone does not agree with, Galloway concludes how
debate encourages critical thought, meaningful exchange of ideas, and a better defense of one’s
own thought since ideas need defending against opposing argumentation.
Zwarensteyn, Masters’ Degree in Communications, in 12
Dialogical constraints are key to a productive discussion
(Elizabeth, “Context Matters: Recognizing the Effects of
Epistemic and Agonistic Contexts in Public Policy Debate,” Issues in Writing Volume 16 Issue 1,
Fall 2005, http://search.proquest.com/docview/208162306?pq-origsite=gscholar)//JRom
Furthermore, the model suggests that epistemic public debate in a representative democracy
may become corrupted when key partisan stakeholders have irreconcilable goals and use
deceitful strategies to support their policy goals and their expression of these goals as public
reasons. In these instances, an epistemic process may be subverted into an agonistic one, where
the context affects the strategies that all stakeholders may adopt and limits resolution of the
policy problem on the societal level. For instance, over time if shared education goals prove
Giddens, Kennesaw State University professor, in 5
unattainable because of a lack of adequate resources, stakeholders may abandon them for
narrower goals designed to help or protect a special interest group rather than the public good.
Similarly, in time or in response to new exigencies, agonistic contexts might become
transformed to permit epistemic problem solving. For instance, the advent of reliable national
and state data about the key causes, effects, transaction costs, and outcomes of civil litigation
might dramatically alter debate in the civil justice arena since they would provide a shared basis
of fact for all stakeholders to reason from and toward, perhaps, shared public reasons and goals.
Anyone involved in such debates, as a participant, stakeholder, or observer, should be aware of
the dynamic nature of argumentation in order to understand the potential of a debate, to assess
the validity of the public reasons participants offer, and to tailor one's own involvement in it to
successfully play one's necessary role. Simply put, writers need to recognize whether a debate is
epistemic or agonistic; if they do not understand the difference, they are likely to misjudge the
strength of others' arguments and to be naive of the purposes underlying their own claims and
evidence. Implications for Teaching Argumentation Although the model is intended to be useful
to professional writers in approaching tasks and to rhetorical critics in analyzing texts and
debates, perhaps it may also help teachers and students of argumentation. Conventional
practice in teaching argumentation is to instruct students about the Toulmin model of
argumentation (including claims, warrants, evidence, qualifiers and rebuttals), the three
classical appeals (logos, ethos, and pathos), and the common logical fallacies (such as ad
hominem, post hoc ergo propter hoc, equivocation, overgeneralization, oversimplification, and
others). In addition, some instructors may introduce their students to the concepts of the
rhetorical situation, stasis (what question needs to be answered), and/or kairos (the principle of
conflict and resolution). But it seems to me that these concepts presuppose an epistemic
macrostructure. In other words, the concepts presume that partisan debate participants want to
move forward in their deliberation of an issue toward some kind of resolution that will be for the
public good and respect the concerns of all stakeholders. In this framework, when participants
violate modes of conduct that would enable progress and resolution, for instance when they
antagonize their opponents through personal attack or misrepresent facts to deceive an
audience, they can be labeled by critics (including teachers and students engaging in classroom
analyses of texts) as bad actors, as misinformed participants, or simply as individuals lacking
character. less concern for those with other perspectives. But students aware of the difference
between agonistic and epistemic argument macrostructures may also realize that the partisan
role does more to rally the troops that enable global resolution. And that realization may lead
students more readily and more reliably to the insight that while nonpartisan participants
exercise a more constrained demeanor in a debate, they may also have more creative roles in
identifying pragmatic solutions to policy problems that affect the public good than do narrowly
partisan participants. This approach might also provide students more insight into the reasons
why some debate participants approach issues agonistically. Instead of teaching a writer's use of
logical fallacies in argument as aberrant behavior, instructors could teach it as partisan behavior
in an agonistic context, and this approach may help students in several ways. First, as partisans
they may engage in writing arguments with more passion and devotion. Also, they may come to
see the range of stances, tones, and roles that are available to them, learning that argumentation
can be an activity involving care, nuance, subtlety, and, above all, choice. Finally, they may learn
that on some occasions accepting the responsibility of the nonpartisan role (which in American
society is often an academic or researcher role) has value and may bring individual satisfaction
as well as meaningful change. This last outcome has value in itself, but it also has value for
students who as junior members of a higher education community are learning about its nature,
its discourse conventions, and its role in society.
State Debate
State can solve Racism, Discrimination, Can lead to
progress, etc.
Policy action has created positive change—solves for Racism, only our
interp accesses this
Minkler 12 [Meredith Minkler, Professor of Health and Social Behavior, University of California-Berkeley, Community
Organizing and Community Building for Health and Welfare, New Brunswick: Rutgers, 2012, http://prospect.org/article/blackamericas-promised-land-why-i-am-still-racial-optimist]//WB
I am hopeful first and foremost because of the predominant trajectory of African
Americans—a history that John Hope Franklin framed with the apt title From Slavery to Freedom. In 1860, four million
African Americans were enslaved while another half-million were free but devoid
of fundamental rights in many of the jurisdictions where they lived. In 1860, the very term “African American” was something of an
oxymoron because the Supreme Court had ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that no black, free or enslaved, could be a citizen of the United States. But
within a decade, the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery, the
Fourteenth Amendment (1868) established birthright citizenship and required all
states to accord all persons due process and equal protection of the laws, and the
Fifteenth Amendment (1870) prohibited states from withholding the right to vote
on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. People who had been sold on the
auction block as youngsters helped to govern their locales as public officials when they were adults. In 1861, Jefferson Davis of
Mississippi resigned from the United States Senate to join the Confederate States
of America, which he led as president. In 1870, Hiram Revels, the first black
member of Congress, occupied the seat that Davis abandoned. The First Reconstruction was
overwhelmed by a devastating white supremacist reaction. But the most fundamental reforms it established
proved resilient, providing the basis for a Second Reconstruction from the 1950s
to the 1970s. During that period, too, the distance traveled by blacks was
astonishing. In 1950, segregation was deemed to be consistent with federal constitutional equal protection. No federal law prevented
proprietors of hotels, restaurants, and other privately owned public accommodations from engaging in racial discrimination. No federal law prohibited
private employers from discriminating on a racial basis against applicants for jobs or current employees. No federal law effectively counteracted racial
disenfranchisement. No federal law outlawed racial discrimination in private housing transactions. In contrast, by
1970 federal
constitutional law thoroughly repudiated the lie of separate but equal. The 1964
Civil Rights Act forbade racial discrimination in privately owned places of public
accommodation and many areas of private employment. The 1965 Voting Rights
Act provided the basis for strong prophylactic action against racial exclusion at the
ballot box. The 1968 Fair Housing Act addressed racial exclusion in a market that
had been zealously insulated against federal regulation. None of these
interventions were wholly successful. All were compromised. All occasioned
backlash. But the racial situation in 1970 and afterwards was dramatically better
than what it had been in 1950 and before. Today, at a moment when progress has
stalled, we need to recall how dramatically and unexpectedly conditions
sometimes change. Until recently who’d-a thunk it possible for the president to be an African American? In the 1980s, I
used to ask law students how long affirmative action programs ought to last.
Champions of such programs, seeking to ensure their longevity, would say that
affirmative action would be needed until the country elected a black president.
That reply would elicit appreciative laughter as listeners supposed that that formula would preserve affirmative
action for at least a century. But then along came Barack Obama and with him the remark that
soon became a cliché: “I never thought that I’d live to see a black president.”
AT: State Bad
Their critiques of the state miss the mark—all of their state bad arguments
do not make sense—they need to discuss why the state should not be
discussed in the debate space
Talisse 5—Robert is a Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt Philosophy & Social Criticism, 31.4, “Deliberativist responses to
activist challenges” http://psc.sagepub.com/content/31/4/423.full.pdf)
These two serious activist challenges may be summarized as follows. First, the
activist has claimed that
political discussion must always take place within the context of existing
institutions that due to structural inequality grant to certain individuals the power to
set discussion agendas and constrain the kinds of options open for consideration prior to any
actual encounter with their deliberative opponents; the deliberative process is in
this sense rigged from the start to favor the status quo and disadvantage the agents of change. Second, the
activist has argued that political discussion must always take place by means of
antecedent ‘discourses’ or vocabularies which establish the conceptual boundaries of the
deliberation and hence may themselves be hegemonic or systematically distorting; the
deliberative process is hence subject to the distorting influence of ideology at the most
fundamental level, and deliberative democrats do not have the resources by which such
distortions can be addressed. As they aim to establish that the deliberativist’s program is inconsistent with her own
democratic objectives, this pair of charges is, as Young claims, serious (118). However, I contend that the
deliberativist has adequate replies to them both.¶ Part of the response to the first challenge is offered
by Young herself. The deliberative democrat does not advocate public political discussion
only at the level of state policy, and so does not advocate a program that must
accept as given existing institutional settings and contexts for public discussion.
Rather, the deliberativist promotes an ideal of democratic politics according to
which deliberation occurs at all levels of social association, including households,
neighborhoods, local organizations, city boards, and the various institutions of civil society. The longrun
aim of the deliberative democrat is to cultivate a more deliberative polity, and the deliberativist claims
that this task must begin at more local levels and apart from the state and its policies. We may say that
deliberativism promotes a ‘decentered’ (Habermas, 1996: 298) view of public deliberation and a ‘pluralistic’ (Benhabib, 2002: 138)
model of the public sphere; in
other words, the deliberative democrat envisions a ‘multiple,
network of many publics and public conversations’ (Benhabib,
1996b: 87). The deliberativist is therefore committed to the creation of ‘an inclusive
deliberative setting in which basic social and economic structures can be
examined’; these settings ‘for the most part must be outside ongoing settings of official policy
discussion’ (115).¶ Although Young characterizes this decentered view of political discourse as requiring that deliberative
democrats ‘withdraw’ (115) from ‘existing structural circumstances’ (118), it is unclear that this follows. There certainly is no
reason why the deliberativist must choose between engaging arguments within
existing deliberative sites and creating new ones that are removed from established
institutions. There is no need to accept Young’s dichotomy; the deliberativist holds that
work must be done both within existing structures and within new contexts. As
Bohman argues,¶ Deliberative politics has no single domain; it includes such diverse activities as
formulating and achieving collective goals, making policy decisions and means and ends, resolving
conflicts of interest and principle, and solving problems as they emerge in ongoing social life .
Public deliberation therefore has to take many forms. (1996: 53)¶ The second challenge requires a detailed response, so let us begin
with a closer look at the proposed argument. The activist has moved quickly from the claim that
discourses can be systematically distorting to the claim that all political discourse
operative in our current contexts is systematically distorting. The conclusion is
anonymous, heterogeneous
that properly democratic objectives cannot be pursued by deliberative means. The first thing to
note is that, as it stands, the conclusion does not follow from the premises; the argument is
enthymematic. What is required is the additional premise that the distorting
features of discussion cannot be corrected by further discussion. That discussion
cannot rehabilitate itself is a crucial principle in the activist’s case, but is nowhere
argued.¶ Moreover, the activist has given no arguments to support the claim that
present modes of discussion are distorting, and has offered no analysis of how one
might detect such distortions and discern their nature.20 Rather than providing a detailed analysis of the
phenomenon of systematic distortion, Young provides (in her own voice) two examples of discourses that she claims are hegemonic.
First she considers discussions of poverty that presume the adequacy of labor market analyses; second she cites discussions of
pollution that presume that modern economies must be based on the burning of fossil-fuels. In neither case does she make explicit
what constitutes the distortion. At
most, her examples show that some debates are framed in ways
that render certain types of proposals ‘out of bounds’. But surely this is the case in any
discussion, and it is not clear that it is in itself always a bad thing or even ‘distorting’. Not
all discursive exclusions are distortions because the term ‘distortion’ implies that something is being
excluded that should be included.¶ Clearly, then, there are some dialectical exclusions that are
entirely appropriate. For example, it is a good thing that current discussions of poverty are often cast in terms that
render white supremacist ‘solutions’ out of bounds; it is also good that pollution discourses tend to exclude fringe-religious appeals
to the cleansing power of mass prayer. This
is not to say that opponents of market analyses of
poverty are on par with white supremacists or that Greens are comparable to fringe-religious fanatics; it
is rather to press for a deeper analysis of the discursive hegemony that the activist
claims undermines deliberative democracy. It is not clear that the requested
analysis, were it provided, would support the claim that systematic distortions
cannot be addressed and remedied within the processes of continuing discourse.
There are good reasons to think that continued discussion among persons who are
aware of the potentially hegemonic features of discourse can correct the distorting
factors that exist and block the generation of new distortions.¶ As Young notes (116), James
Bohman (1996: ch. 3) has proposed a model of deliberation that incorporates concerns about
distorted communication and other forms of deliberative inequality within a general theory of deliberative
democracy; the recent work of Seyla Benhabib (2002) and Robert Goodin (2003: chs 9–11) aims for similar goals. Hence I conclude
that, as it stands, the
activist’s second argument is incomplete, and as such the force of the
difficulty it raises for deliberative democracy is not yet clear. If the objection is to stick, the
activist must first provide a more detailed examination of the hegemonic and distorting properties of discourse; he must then show
both that prominent modes of discussion operative in our democracy are distorting in important ways and that further discourse
cannot remedy these distortions.
Total rejection of the institutional logic of the state fails---calculated
engagement on matters of critical importance – like FW is key
Crenshaw 88 [Kimberle, Law
@ UCLA, “RACE, REFORM, AND RETRENCHMENT:
TRANSFORMATION AND LEGITIMATION IN ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW”, 101 Harv. L.
Rev. 1331, lexis]
Simply critiquing the ideology from without or making demands in language outside the
rights discourse would have accomplished little. Rather, Blacks gained by using a
powerful combination of direct action, mass protest, and individual acts of
resistance, along with appeals to public opinion and the courts couched in the
language of the prevailing legal consciousness. The result was a series of
ideological and political crises . In these crises, civil rights activists and lawyers
induced the federal government to aid Blacks and triggered efforts to legitimate
and reinforce the authority of the law in ways that benefited Blacks. Simply insisting that Blacks be
integrated or speaking in the language of "needs" would have endangered the lives of those who were already taking risks – and with no reasonable chance of success. President
Eisenhower, for example, would not have sent federal troops to Little Rock simply at the behest of protesters demanding that Black schoolchildren receive an equal education.
the successful manipulation of legal rhetoric led to a crisis of federal power
that ultimately benefited Blacks. Some critics of legal reform movements seem to
overlook the fact that state power has made a significant difference – sometimes
Instead,
between life and death – in the efforts of Black people to transform their world .
Attempts to harness the power of the state through the appropriate rhetorical/legal incantations
should be appreciated as intensely powerful and calculated political acts. In the context of
white supremacy, engaging in rights discourse should be seen as an act of self‐ defense. This was particularly true because the state could not assume a position of neutrality
regarding Black people once the movement had mobilized people to challenge the system of oppression; either the coercive mechanism of the state had to be used to support
white supremacy, or it had to be used to dismantle it. We know now, with hindsight, that it did both. Blacks did use rights rhetoric to mobilize state power to their benefit against
symbolic oppression through formal inequality and, to some extent, against material deprivation in the form of private, informal exclusion of the middle class from jobs and
housing. Yet today the same legal reforms play a role in providing an ideological framework that makes the present conditions facing underclass Blacks appear fair and
reasonable. The eradication of barriers has created a new dilemma for those victims of racial oppression who are not in a position to benefit from the move to formal equality.
The race neutrality of the legal system creates the illusion that racism is no longer the primary factor responsible for the condition of the Black underclass; instead, as we have
seen, class disparities appear to be the consequence of individual and group merit within a supposed system of equal opportunity. Moreover, the fact that there are Blacks who
are economically successful gives credence both to the assertion that opportunities exits, and to the backlash attitude that Blacks have "gotten too far". Psychologically, for
Blacks who have not made it, the lace of an explanation for their underclass status may result in self‐blame and other selfdestructive attitudes. Another consequence of the
formal reforms may be the loss of collectivity among Blacks29. The removal of formal barriers created new opportunities for some Blacks that were not shared by various other
classes of African‐Americans. As Blacks moved into different spheres, the experience of being Black in America became fragmented and multifaceted, and the different contexts
presented opportunities to experience racism in different ways. The social, economic and even residential distance between the various classes may complicate efforts to unite
behind issues as a racial group. Although "White Only" signs may have been crude and debilitating, they at least presented a readily discernible target around which to organize.
Now, the targets are obscure and diffuse, and this difference may create doubt among some Blacks whether there is difference may create doubt among some Blacks whether
Formal equality
significantly transformed the Black experience in America. With society's embrace
of formal equality came the eradication of symbolic domination and the
suppression of white supremacy as the norm of society. Future generations of Black Americans would no longer be
explicitly regarded as America's second‐class citizens. Yet the transformation of the oppositional dynamic – achieved through the suppression of
there is enough similarity between their life experiences and those of other Blacks to warrant collective political action.
racial norms and stereotypes, and the recasting of racial inferiority into assumptions of cultural inferiority – creates several difficulties for the civil rights constituency. The
formal barriers, although symbolically significant to all and materially significant to some, will do little to alter the
hierarchical relationship between Blacks and whites until the way in which white race consciousness
removal of
perpetuates norms that legitimate Black subordination is revealed. This is not to say that white norms alone account for the conditions of the Black underclass. It is instead an
acknowledgment that, until the distinct racial nature of class ideology is itself revealed and debunked, nothing can be done about the underlying structural problems that
account for the disparities. The narrow focus of racial exclusion – that is, the belief that racial exclusion is illegitimate only where the "White Only" signs are explicit – coupled
with strong assumptions about equal opportunity, makes it difficult to move the discussion of racism beyond the societal selfsatisfaction engendered by the appearance of
Rights have been important. They may have
legitimated racial inequality, but they have also been the means by which
oppressed groups have secured both entry as formal equals into the dominant
order and the survival of their movement in the face of private and state
repression. The dual role of legal change creates a dilemma for Black reformers. As long as race consciousness thrives, Blacks will often have to rely on rights
neutral norms and formal inclusion. IV. Self‐Conscious Ideological Struggle
rhetoric when it is necessary to protect Black interests. The very reforms brought about by appeals to legal ideology, however, seem to undermine the ability to move forward
toward a broader vision of racial equality. In the quest for racial justice, winning and losing have been part of the same experience. The Critics are correct in observing that
engaging in rights discourse has helped to deradicalize and co‐opt the challenge. Yet they fail to acknowledge the limited range of options presented to Blacks in a context where
they were deemed "other", and the unlikelihood that specific demands for inclusion and equality would be heard if articulated in other terms. The abbreviated list of options is
itself continent upon the ideological power of white race consciousness and the continuing role of Black Americans as "other". Future efforts to address racial domination, as well
as class hierarchy, must consider the continuing ideology of white race consciousness by uncovering the oppositional dynamic and by chipping away at its premises. Central to
this task is revealing the contingency of race and exploring the connection between white race consciousness and the other myths that legitimate both class and race hierarchies.
Critics and others whose agendas include challenging hierarchy and legitimation must
not overlook the importance of revealing the contingency of race. Optimally, the deconstruction of
white race consciousness might lead to a liberated future for both Blacks and whites. Yet, until whites recognize the hegemonic function of racism and turn their efforts toward
African‐American people must develop pragmatic political strategies – self‐
conscious ideological struggle – to minimize the costs of liberal reform while
maximizing its utility. A primary step in engaging in self‐conscious ideological
struggle must be to transcend the oppositional dynamic in which Blacks are cast
simply and solely as whites' subordinate "other".30 The dual role that rights have played makes strategizing a difficult
neutralizing it,
task. Black people can afford neither to resign themselves to, nor to attack frontally, the legitimacy and incoherence of the dominant ideology. The subordinate position of Blacks
in this society makes it unlikely that African‐ Americans will realize gains through the kind of direct challenge to the legitimacy and incoherence of the dominant ideology. The
subordinate position of Blacks in this society makes it unlikely that African‐Americans will realize gains through the kind of direct challenge to the legitimacy of American liberal
ideology that is now being waged by Critical scholars. On the other hand, delegitimating race consciousness would be directly relevant to Black needs, and this strategy will
sometimes require the pragmatic use of liberal ideology. This vision is consistent with the views forwarded by theoreticians such as Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward,
Antonio Gramsci, and Roberto Unger. Piven and Cloward observe that
oppressed people sometimes advance by creating
ideological and political crisis, but that the form of the crisis‐producing challenge
must reflect the institutional logic of the system. The use of rights rhetoric during
the civil rights movement created such a crisis by presenting and manipulating the
dominant ideology in a new and transformative way. Challenges and demands
made from outside the institutional logic would have accomplished little because
Blacks, as the subordinate "other", were already perceived as being outside the
mainstream. The struggle of Blacks, like that of all subordinated groups, is a struggle for inclusion, an attempt to manipulate elements of
the dominant ideology to transform the experience of domination. It is a struggle to create a new status quo through
the ideological and political tools that are available. Gramsci called this struggle a "War of Position" and he regarded it
as the most appropriate strategy for change in Western societies. According to Gramsci, direct challenges to the dominant class accomplish little if ideology plays such a central
role in establishing authority that the legitimacy of the dominant regime is not challenged. Joseph Femia, interpreting Gramsci, states that "the dominant ideology in modern
capitalist societies is highly institutionalized and widely internalized. It follows that a concentration on frontal attack, on direct assault against the bourgeois state ‘war of
the challenge in such societies is to create a
counter‐hegemony by maneuvering within and expanding the dominant ideology
to embrace the potential for change. Gramsci's vision of ideological struggle is echoed in part by Roberto Unger in his vision of
deviationist doctrine. Unger, who represents another strand of the critical approach, argues that, rather than discarding liberal legal
maneuver’ can result only in disappointment and defeat"31 Consequently,
ideology, we should focus and develop its visionary undercurrents: [T]he struggle
over the form of social life, through deviationist doctrine, creates opportunities
for experimental revisions of social life in the direction of the ideals we defend.
An implication of our ideas is that the elements of a formative institutional or
imaginative structure may be replaced piecemeal rather than only all at once .32 Liberal
ideology embraces communal and liberating visions along with the legitimating hegemonic visions. Unger, like Gramsci and Piven and Cloward, seems to suggest that the
strategy toward a meaningful change depends on skillful use of the liberating potential of dominant ideology. E. Conclusion For Blacks, the task at hand is to devise ways to
wage ideological and political struggle while minimizing the costs of engaging in an inherently legitimating discourse. A clearer understanding of the space we occupy in the
American political consciousness is a necessary prerequisite to the development of pragmatic strategies for political and economic survival. In this regard, the most serious
challenge for Blacks is to minimize the political and cultural cost of engaging in an inevitably co‐optive process in order to secure material benefits. Because our present
predicament gives us few options, we must create conditions for the maintenance of a distinct political thought that is informed by the actual conditions of Black people. Unlike
the civil rights vision, this new approach should not be defined and thereby limited by the possibilities of dominant political discourse, but should maintain a distinctly
progressive outlook that focuses on the needs of the African‐ American community.
“State bad” isn't responsive—we just have to defend that discussing the
state is good—their ev has to say the discussion is bad
Talisse 5—Robert is a Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt Philosophy & Social Criticism, 31.4, “Deliberativist responses to
activist challenges” http://psc.sagepub.com/content/31/4/423.full.pdf)
challenges are focused on the failure of existing political institutions and
processes to satisfy the ideals of publicity, accountability, and inclusion (109) that are
The first two
promoted by the deliberative democrat. First, the activist points to the exclusionary character of existing sites of deliberation, citing
the prevalence of structural inequality and power (108). Second, he criticizes recent measures aimed at inclusion for falling ‘far short
of providing opportunities for real voice for those less privileged in the social structures’ (112). Insofar
as the activist’s
criticisms are aimed at the failure of existing institutions to live up to the
deliberative ideal, they implicitly accept that ideal. Thus, as Young points out, the
deliberativist can agree with the activist that current conditions fall short of the
democratic ideal, and can accept the activist’s specific criticisms of the existing order (112). Again, they differ on the issue
of means, not ends: the deliberativist holds that processes of continuing public discourse
can reveal and remedy the shortcomings of existing institutions and practices whereas the activist
doubts that rational discussion can persuade powerful social agents to adopt a more inclusive and democratic mode of politics
(112). The deliberativist may further argue that even if the activist’s suspicions
regarding the efficacy of political deliberation are granted, these suspicions are
not in themselves sufficient grounds for rejecting deliberative democracy. Though
not ideal, deliberation may still be the best option available for democracy.
Law Good
Pragmatic policy-focused legal approach is critical to productive change--K’s abstractions fail
William J. Novak 8, Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago and Research Professor
at the American Bar Foundation, “The Myth of the “Weak” American State”, June,
http://www.history.ucsb.edu/projects/labor/speakers/documents/TheMythoftheWeakAmericanState.pd
f
There is an alternative. In the early twentieth century, amid a first wave of nation- state and economic
consolidation and assertiveness, American social science generated some fresh ways of
looking at power in all its guises—social, economic, political, and legal. Overshadowed to
some extent by exuberant bursts of American exceptionalism that greeted confrontations with
totalitarianism and then terrorism, the pragmatic, critical, and realistic appraisal of American
power is worth recovering. From Lester Frank Ward and John Dewey to Ernst Freund and John
Commons to Morris Cohen and Robert Lee Hale, early American socioeconomic theorists developed a
critique of a thin, private, and individualistic conception of American liberalism and interrogated the
location, organization, and distribution of power in a modernizing United States. All understood
the problem of power in America as complex and multifaceted, not simple or onedimensional, especially as it concerned the relationship of state and civil society. Rather than
spend endless time debating the proper definition of law or the correct empirical measure of
the state, they concentrated instead on detailed investigations of power in action in the
everyday practices and policies that constituted American public life. Rather than confine the
examination of power to the abstract realm of political theory or the official political acts of
elites, electorates, interest groups, or social movements, these analysts instead embraced a
more capacious conception of governance as “an activity which is apt to appear whenever men
are associated together.”35 More significantly, these political and legal realists never forgot, amid
the rhetoric of law and the pious platitudes that routinely flow from American political life, the
very real, concrete consequences of the deployment of legal and political power. They never
forgot the brutal fact that Robert Cover would later state so provocatively at the start of his article
“Violence and the Word” that legal and political interpretation take place “in a field of pain
and death.” 36 The real consequences of American state power are all around us. In a
democratic republic, where force should always be on the side of the governed, writing the history of
that power has never been more urgent.
No alternative to the law/legal system---other ideas bring more inequality
and abuse
Jerold S. Auerbach 83, Professor of History at Wellesley, “Justice Without Law?”, 1983, p. 144-146
As cynicism about the legal system increases, so does enthusiasm for alternative disputesettlement institutions. The search for alternatives accelerates, as Richard Abel has suggested, "when
some fairly powerful interest is threatened by an increase in the number or magnitude of legal
rights.*'6 Alternatives are designed to provide a safety valve, to siphon discontent from courts. With
the danger of political confrontation reduced, the ruling power of legal institutions is preserved, and
the stability of the social system reinforced. Not incidentally, alternatives prevent the use of
courts for redistributive purposes in the interest of equality, by consigning the rights of
disadvantaged citizens to institutions with minimal power to enforce or protect them . It
is, therefore, necessary to beware of the seductive appeal of alternative institutions .
They may deflect energy from political organization by groups of people with common
grievances; or discourage effective litigation strategies that could provide substantial
benefits. They may, in the end, create a two-track justice system that dispenses informal "justice" to
poor people with "small" claims and "minor" disputes, who cannot afford legal services, and who are
denied access to courts. (Bar associations do not recommend that corporate law firms divert their
clients to mediation, or that business deductions for legal expenses—a gigantic government subsidy for
litigation—be eliminated.) Justice according to law will be reserved for the affluent, hardly a
novel development in American history but one that needs little encouragement from the spread of
alternative dispute-settlement institutions.¶ It is social context and political choice that determine
whether courts, or alternative institutions, can render justice more or less accessible—and to whom.
Both can be discretionary, arbitrary, domineering—and unjust. Law can symbolize justice, or conceal
repression. It can reduce exploitation, or facilitate it. It can prohibit the abuse of power, or disguise
abuse in procedural forms. It can promote equality, or sustain inequality. Despite the resiliency
and power of law, it seems unable to eradicate the tension between legality and justice:
even in a society of (legal) equals, some still remain more equal than others. But diversion from
the legal system is likely to accentuate that inequality . Without legal power the
imbalance between aggrieved individuals and corporations, or government agencies,
cannot be redressed . In American society , as Laura Nader has observed, " disputing without
the force of law ... [is| doomed to fail ."7 Instructive examples document the deleterious
effect of coerced informality (even if others demonstrate the creative possibilities of indigenous
experimentation). Freed slaves after the Civil War and factory workers at the turn of the
century, like inner-city poor people now, have all been assigned places in informal
proceedings that offer substantially weaker safeguards than law can provide. Legal
institutions may not provide equal justice under law, but in a society ruled by law it is their
responsibility.¶ It is chimerical to believe that mediation or arbitration can now
accomplish what law seems powerless to achieve . The American deification of
individual rights requires an accessible legal system for their protection. Understandably,
diminished faith in its capacities will encourage the yearning for alternatives. But the rhetoric of
"community" and "justice" should not be permitted to conceal the deterioration of community life and
the unraveling of substantive notions of justice that has accompanied its demise. There is every reason
why the values that historically are associated with informal justice should remain compelling:
especially the preference for trust, harmony, and reciprocity within a communal setting. These are not,
however, the values that American society encourages or sustains; in their absence there is no
effective alternative to legal institutions.¶ The quest for community may indeed be "timeless
and universal."8 In this century, however, the communitarian search for justice without law has
deteriorated beyond recognition into a stunted off-shoot of the legal system. The historical progression
is clear: from community justice without formal legal institutions to the rule of law, all too often
without justice. But injustice without law is an even worse possibility, which misguided
enthusiasm for alternative dispute settlement now seems likely to encourage. Our legal
culture too accurately expresses the individualistic and materialistic values that most Americans
deeply cherish to inspire optimism about the imminent restoration of communitarian purpose. For
law to be less conspicuous Americans would have to moderate their expansive freedom
to compete, to acquire, and to possess, while simultaneously elevating shared
responsibilities above individual rights. That is an unlikely prospect unless Americans
become, in effect, un-American . Until then, the pursuit of justice without law does
incalculable harm to the prospect of equal justice.
Legal reforms restrain the cycle of violence and prevent error replication
Colm O’Cinneide 8, Senior Lecturer in Law at University College London, “Strapped to the Mast: The
Siren Song of Dreadful Necessity, the United Kingdom Human Rights Act and the Terrorist Threat,” Ch 15
in Fresh Perspectives on the ‘War on Terror,’ ed. Miriam Gani and Penelope Mathew,
http://epress.anu.edu.au/war_terror/mobile_devices/ch15s07.html
This ‘symbiotic’ relationship between counter-terrorism measures and political violence, and the
apparently inevitable negative impact of the use of emergency powers upon ‘target’ communities,
would indicate that it makes sense to be very cautious in the use of such powers. However, the impact
on individuals and ‘target’ communities can be too easily disregarded when set against the apparent
demands of the greater good. Justice Jackson’s famous quote in Terminiello v Chicago [111] that the
United States Bill of Rights should not be turned into a ‘suicide pact’ has considerable resonance in
times of crisis, and often is used as a catch-all response to the ‘bleatings’ of civil libertarians.[112] The
structural factors discussed above that appear to drive the response of successive UK
governments to terrorist acts seem to invariably result in a depressing repetition of
mistakes .¶ However, certain legal processes appear to have some capacity to slow down
the excesses of the counter-terrorism cycle. What is becoming apparent in the UK context
since 9/11 is that there are factors at play this time round that were not in play in the early years of the
Northern Irish crisis. A series of parliamentary, judicial and transnational mechanisms are now in
place that appear to have some moderate ‘dampening’ effect on the application of
emergency powers.¶ This phrase ‘dampening’ is borrowed from Campbell and Connolly, who have
recently suggested that law can play a ‘dampening’ role on the progression of the counter-terrorism
cycle before it reaches its end. Legal processes can provide an avenue of political
opportunity and mobilisation in their own right, whereby the ‘relatively autonomous’
framework of a legal system can be used to moderate the impact of the cycle of
repression and backlash. They also suggest that this ‘dampening’ effect can ‘re-frame’
conflicts in a manner that shifts perceptions about the need for the use of violence or
extreme state repression.[113] State responses that have been subject to this dampening
effect may have more legitimacy and generate less repression: the need for mobilisation in
response may therefore also be diluted.
Decision Making
It Outweighs
Decision Making outweighs any of their impacts—it is the key factor to
distinguish what is policy vs critical—it does not matter if we are going to be
policymakers in the future—we know that we have the greatest skill in the
world, decision making—this card WRECKS
Strait and Wallace 7—L.Paul, Ph. D in communications at the University of Southern California, use to teach at George
Mason University, AND Brett was a debater at George Washington University (“The Scope of Negative Fiat and the Logic of Decision
Making” 2007
http://groups.wfu.edu/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/2007/The%20Scope%20of%20Negative%20Fiat%20and%20the%20Logic%
20of%20Decision%20Making.pdf Pg. A2)//JLee
More to the point, debate certainly helps teach a lot of skills, yet we believe that the
way policy debate participation
encourages you to think is the most valuable educational benefit, because how
someone makes decisions determines how they will employ the rest of their
abilities, including the research and communication skills that debate builds. Plenty
of debate theory articles have explained either the value of debate, or the way in which alternate actor strategies are detrimental to
real-world education, but none so far have attempted to tie these concepts together. We
will now explain how
decision-making skill development is the foremost value of policy debate and how this
benefit is the decision-rule to resolving all theoretical discussions about negative fiat. Why debate? Some do it for scholarships, some
do it for social purposes, and many just believe it is fun. These are certainly all relevant considerations when making the decision to
join the debate team, but as debate theorists they aren’t the focus of our concern. Our
concern is finding a
framework for debate that educates the largest quantity of students with the
highest quality of skills, while at the same time preserving competitive equity . The
ability to make decisions deriving from discussions, argumentation or debate, is
the key skill . It is the one thing every single one of us will do every day of our lives besides breathing. Decisionmaking transcends boundaries between categories of learning like “policy
education” and “kritik education,” it makes irrelevant considerations of whether
we will eventually be policymakers, and it transcends questions of what substantive content a debate round
should contain. The implication for this analysis is that the critical thinking and
argumentative skills offered by real-world decision-making are comparatively
greater than any educational disadvantage weighed against them. It is the skills
we learn, not the content of our arguments, that can best improve all of our lives. While policy
comparison skills are going to be learned through debate in one way or another,
those skills are useless if they are not grounded in the kind of logic actually used to
make decisions. The academic studies and research supporting this position are numerous. Richard Fulkerson (1996)
explains that “argumentation…is the chief cognitive activity by which a democracy, a
field of study, a corporation, or a committee functions. . . And it is vitally important that high school
and college students learn both to argue well and to critique the arguments of others” (p. 16). Stuart Yeh (1998) comes to the
conclusion that debate allows even cultural minority students to “identify an issue, consider
different views, form
and defend a viewpoint, and consider and respond to counterarguments…The
ability to write effective arguments influences grades, academic success, and
preparation for college and employment” (p. 49).Certainly, these are all reasons why debate and
argumentation themselves are valuable, so why is real world decision-making critical to argumentative thinking? Although
people might occasionally think about problems from the position of an ideal
decisionmaker (c.f. Ulrich, 1981, quoted in Korcok, 2001), in debate we should be concerned with what type of
argumentative thinking is the most relevant to real-world intelligence and the
decisions that people make every day in their lives, not academic trivialities. It is
precisely because it is rooted inreal-world logic that argumentative thinking has value. Deanna Kuhn’s research in “Thinking as
Argument” explains this by stating that “no
other kind of thinking matters more-or contributes
more to the quality and fulfillment of people’s lives, both individually and
collectively” (p. 156).
Roleplaying
Simulation Good
Simulations are good – less resources but effective learning
Badiee and Kaurman 6/25 (Farnaz Badiee – Instructional Designer at the Center for
Teaching, Learning, and Technology at the University of British Columbia and David Kaufman –
professor at Simon Fraser University. “Design Evaluation of a Simulation for Teacher
Education” – published online 6/25/15. Sage Journals. P.1 Accessed 6/26/15.
http://sgo.sagepub.com/content/5/2/2158244015592454.article-info) dortiz
Simulation techniques have been used as training and feedback tools for many
years in occupations such as medicine, aviation, military training, and large-scale
investment where real-world practice is dangerous, costly, or difficult to organize
(for example, see Drews & Backdash, 2013). In pre-service teacher education, classroom
simulations can help pre-service teachers to translate their theoretical knowledge
into action through repeated trials without harming vulnerable students, and they
can provide more practice time and diversity than limited live practicum sessions
(Carrington, Kervin, & Ferry, 2011; Hixon & So, 2009). One such simulation is simSchool
(www.simschool.org), designed to provide teaching skills practice in a simulated classroom with
a variety of students, each with an individual personality and learning needs. simSchool has
been shown in several studies to have potential as a practice and learning tool for pre-service
teachers (Badiee & Kaufman, 2014; Christensen, Knezek, Tyler-Wood, & Gibson, 2011; Gibson,
2007). Although simSchool has been under development for more than 10 years (Gibson &
Halverson, 2004), very little published research has addressed its design as an instructional
tool. To address this gap, the current study evaluated the design of simSchool (v.1) from the
perspective of its target users, pre-service teachers, providing both quantitative and qualitative
evidence of its strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement.
Simulation is an effective way to learn – mimics real life with no real harms
Badiee and Kaurman 6/25 (Farnaz Badiee – Instructional Designer at the Center for
Teaching, Learning, and Technology at the University of British Columbia and David Kaufman –
professor at Simon Fraser University. “Design Evaluation of a Simulation for Teacher
Education” – published online 6/25/25. Sage Journals. P.1 Accessed 6/26/15.
http://sgo.sagepub.com/content/5/2/2158244015592454.article-info) dortiz
Classroom simulations are starting to offer the possibility of enhancing the practicum by
providing new opportunities for pre-service teachers to practice their skills. A simulation is a
simplified but accurate, valid, and dynamic model of reality implemented as a
system (Sauvé, Renaud, Kaufman, & Marquis, 2007). R. D. Duke (1980), the
founder of simulation and gaming as a scientific discipline, noted that the meaning
of “to simulate” stems from the Latin simulare, “to imitate,” and defined it as “a
conscious endeavor to reproduce the central characteristics of a system in order to
understand, experiment with, and/or predict the behavior of that system” (cited in
Duke & Geurts, 2004, Section 1.5.2). Simulation involves play, exploration, and
discovery, all elements of learning (Huizinga, 1938/1955). It has a long history in adult
education, initially in the form of abstract representations using physical components such as
paper and pencil or playing boards and, more recently, in many types of computer-based virtual
environments (Ramsey, 2000). Simulations are distinguished from games in that they do not
involve explicit competition; instead of trying to “win,” simulation participants take on
roles, try out actions, see the results, and try new actions without causing real-life
harm. Simulations, when paired with reflection, offer the possibility of
experiential learning (Dewey, 1938; Kolb, 1984; Lyons, 2012; Ulrich, 1997). Dieker,
Rodriguez, Lignugaris/ Kraft, Hynes, and Hughes (2014) pointed out that an effective
simulation produces a sense of realism that leads the user to regard the simulated
world as real in some sense: These environments must provide a personalized experience
that each teacher believes is real (i.e., the teacher “suspends his/ her disbelief”). At the same
time, the teacher must feel a sense of personal responsibility for improving his or her practice
grounded in a process of critical self-reflection. (p. 22) Suspension of disbelief and this
sense of personal responsibility work together to engage the learner in the
simulation process so that it becomes a “live” experience; feedback and reflection
complete a cycle so that the learner can conceptualize and ultimately apply the new
learning (Kolb, 1984).
Activism
Our Interp Solves
Our interpretation creates pragmatic political engagement—a focus on
policy is necessary to learn the pragmatic details—debating without this is a
form of spectatorship that makes it impossible to reform institutions—our
framework is key to access activism—solves the aff
McClean 1—David E., Ph. D in Philosophy (“The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope” 2001 http://www.americanphilosophy.org/archives/past_conference_programs/pc2001/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm0//JLee
Or we might take Foucault who, at best, has provided us with what may reasonably be described as a very long and eccentric
footnote to Nietzsche (I have once been accused, by a Foucaltian true believer, of "gelding" Foucault with other similar remarks).
Foucault, who has provided the Left of the late 1960s through the present with such notions as "governmentality," "Limit,"
"archeology," "discourse" "power" and "ethics," creating or redefining their
meanings, has made it over abundantly clear that all of our moralities and
practices are the successors of previous ones which derive from certain
configurations of savoir and connaisance arising from or created by, respectively,
the discourses of the various scientific schools. But I have not yet found in
anything Foucault wrote or said how such observations may be translated into a
political movement or hammered into a political document or theory (let alone
public policies) that can be justified or founded on more than an arbitrary
aesthetic experimentalism. In fact, Foucault would have shuddered if any one ever did, since he thought that
anything as grand as a movement went far beyond what he thought appropriate. This leads me to mildly rehabilitate Habermas, for
at least he has been useful in exposing Foucault's shortcomings in this regard, just as he has been useful in exposing the
shortcomings of others enamored with the abstractions of various Marxian-Freudian social critiques. Yet for some reason, at least
partially explicated in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country, a book that I think is long overdue, leftist critics continue to cite and
refer to the eccentric and often a priori ruminations of people like those just mentioned, and a litany of others including Derrida,
Deleuze, Lyotard, Jameson, and Lacan, who are to me hugely more irrelevant than Habermas in their narrative attempts to suggest
policy prescriptions (when they actually do suggest them) aimed at curing the ills of homelessness, poverty, market greed, national
belligerence and racism. I would like to suggest that it is time for American
social critics who are enamored
with this group, those who actually want to be relevant, to recognize that they have
a disease, and a disease regarding which I myself must remember to stay faithful
to my own twelve step program of recovery. The disease is the need for elaborate
theoretical "remedies" wrapped in neological and multi-syllabic jargon. These elaborate
theoretical remedies are more "interesting," to be sure, than the pragmatically settled questions about what shape democracy should
take in various contexts, or whether private property should be protected by the state, or regarding our basic human nature
(described, if not defined (heaven forbid!), in such statements as "We don't like to starve" and "We like to speak our minds without
fear of death" and "We like to keep our children safe from poverty"). As Rorty puts it, "When one of today's academic leftists says
that some topic has been 'inadequately theorized,' you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of
These futile attempts
to philosophize one's way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens
when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the
problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical
hallucinations"(italics mine).(1) Or as John Dewey put it in his The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, "I believe that
language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. . . .
philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historical cud long since reduced to woody fiber, or an apologetics for lost
causes, . . . . or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless it can somehow bring to consciousness America's own needs and its own
implicit principle of successful action." Those who suffer or have suffered from this disease Rorty refers to as the Cultural Left, which
left is juxtaposed to the Political Left that Rorty prefers and prefers for good reason. Another attribute of the Cultural Left is that its
members fancy themselves pure culture critics who view the successes of America and the West, rather than some of the barbarous
methods for achieving those successes, as mostly evil, and who view anything like national pride as equally evil even when that pride
is tempered with the knowledge and admission of the nation's shortcomings. In other words, the Cultural Left, in this country, too
often dismiss American society as beyond reform and redemption. And Rorty correctly argues that this is a disastrous conclusion,
i.e. disastrous for the Cultural Left. I
think it may also be disastrous for our social hopes, as I
will explain. Leftist American culture critics might put their considerable talents
to better use if they bury some of their cynicism about America's social and
political prospects and help forge public and political possibilities in a spirit of
determination to, indeed, achieve our country - the country of Jefferson and King; the country of John
Dewey and Malcom X; the country of Franklin Roosevelt and Bayard Rustin, and of the later George Wallace and the later Barry
Goldwater. To invoke the words of King, and with reference to the American society, the time is always ripe to seize the opportunity
to help create the "beloved community," one woven with the thread of agape into a conceptually single yet diverse tapestry that
shoots for nothing less than a true intra-American cosmopolitan ethos, one wherein both same sex unions and faith-based initiatives
will be able to be part of the same social reality, one wherein business interests and the university are not seen as belonging to two
separate galaxies but as part of the same answer to the threat of social and ethical nihilism. We who fancy ourselves philosophers
would do well to create from within ourselves and from within our ranks a new kind of public intellectual who has both a hungry
theoretical mind and who is yet capable of seeing the need to move past high theory to other important questions that are less
bedazzling and "interesting" but more important to the prospect of our flourishing - questions such as "How is it possible to develop
a citizenry that cherishes a certain hexis, one which prizes the character of the Samaritan on the road to Jericho almost more than
any other?" or "How can we square the political dogma that undergirds the fantasy of a missile defense system with the need to treat
America as but one member in a community of nations under a "law of peoples?" The new public philosopher might seek to
understand labor law and military and trade theory and doctrine as much as theories of surplus value; the logic of international
markets and trade agreements as much as critiques of commodification, and the politics of complexity as much as the politics of
power (all of which can still be done from our arm chairs.) This
means going down deep into the guts of
our quotidian social institutions, into the grimy pragmatic details where
intellectuals are loathe to dwell but where the officers and bureaucrats of those
institutions take difficult and often unpleasant, imperfect decisions that affect
other peoples' lives, and it means making honest attempts to truly understand how
those institutions actually function in the actual world before howling for their
overthrow commences. This might help keep us from being slapped down in
debates by true policy pros who actually know what they are talking about but who
lack awareness of the dogmatic assumptions from which they proceed, and who
have not yet found a good reason to listen to jargon-riddled lectures from
philosophers and culture critics with their snobish disrespect for the so-called
"managerial class."
Activism Fails
The vast majority of the debate community, including everyone in this room
is aware of the myth—orientation towards a goal without concrete policy
ensures failure
Bryant 12 [Levi, Critique of the Academic Left, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-acritique-of-the-academic-left/]
I must be in a mood today– half irritated, half amused –because I find myself ranting. Of course, that’s not entirely unusual. So this
afternoon I came across a post by a friend quoting something discussing the environmental movement that pushed all the right button. As
the post read,¶ For mainstream environmentalism– conservationism, green consumerism,
and resource management –humans are conceptually separated out of nature and mythically placed in
privileged positions of authority and control over ecological communities and their nonhuman constituents.
What emerges is the fiction of a marketplace of ‘raw materials’ and ‘resources’ through
which human-centered wants, constructed as needs, might be satisfied. The mainstream narratives are replete with
such metaphors [carbon trading!]. Natural complexity,, mutuality, and diversity are rendered virtually meaningless given discursive
parameters that reduce nature to discrete units of exchange measuring extractive capacities. Jeff Shantz, “Green Syndicalism” ¶ While finding
I can’t say that I see many environmentalists treating nature and
culture as distinct or suggesting that we’re sovereigns of nature –I do agree that we conceive much of our
elements this description perplexing–
relationship to the natural world in economic terms (not a surprise that capitalism is today a universal). This, however, is not what bothers me
What I wonder is just what we’re supposed to do even if all
of this is true? What, given existing conditions, are we to do if all of this is right? At least green consumerism,
conservation, resource management, and things like carbon trading are engaging in
activities that are making real differences. From this passage– and maybe the entire text would
about this passage.¶
disabuse me of this conclusion –it
sounds like we are to reject all of these interventions because they
remain tied to a capitalist model of production that the author (and myself) find abhorrent. The idea seems to be
that if we endorse these things we are tainting our hands and would therefore
do well to reject them altogether.¶ The problem as I see it is that this is the worst sort of
abstraction (in the Marxist sense) and wishful thinking. Within a Marxo-Hegelian context, a thought is
abstract when it ignores all of the mediations in which a thing is embedded. For example, I
understand a robust tree abstractly when I attribute its robustness, say, to its genetics alone, ignoring the complex relations to its soil, the air,
sunshine, rainfall, etc., that also allowed it to grow robustly in this way. This
is the sort of critique we’re always
leveling against the neoliberals. They are abstract thinkers. In their doxa that individuals are entirely
responsible for themselves and that they completely make themselves by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps,
neoliberals ignore all the mediations belonging to the social and material context in which human beings develop
that play a role in determining the vectors of their life. They ignore, for example, that George W. Bush grew up in a family that was highly
connected to the world of business and government and that this gave him opportunities that someone living in a remote region of Alaska in a
very different material infrastructure and set of family relations does not have. To
think concretely is to engage in a
cartography of these mediations, a mapping of these networks, from circumstance to circumstance (what I
Unfortunately,
the academic left falls prey to its own form of abstraction. It’s good at
carrying out critiques that denounce various social formations, yet
very poor at proposing any sort of realistic constructions of
alternatives. This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks,
assemblages, structures, or regimes of attraction would have to be remade to create a
workable alternative. Here I’m reminded by the “underpants gnomes” depicted in South Park:¶ The underpants
call an “onto-cartography”). It is to map assemblages, networks, or ecologies in the constitution of entities. ¶
gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like this:¶ Phase 1: Collect Underpants¶
Phase 2: ?¶ Phase 3: Profit!¶ They even have a catchy song to go with their work:¶ Well this is sadly how it often is with the
Our plan seems to be as follows:¶ Phase 1: Ultra-Radical
Critique¶ Phase 2: ?¶ Phase 3: Revolution and complete social
academic left.
transformation!¶ Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without
ever explaining what is to be done at phase 2. Often the critiques articulated at
phase 1 are right, but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques
nonetheless. In order to reach phase 3, we have to produce new collectives. In order for
new collectives to be produced, people need to be able to hear and
understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where
everything begins to fall apart. Even though these critiques are often
right, we express them in ways that only an academic with a PhD in
critical theory and post-structural theory can understand. How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the
world if only PhD’s in the humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We seem to always
ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David
Graebers of the world. To make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only
give our talks at expensive hotels
at academic conferences attended only by other academics. Again, who are these
things for? Is it an accident that so many activists look away from these
things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry
and tenure, than producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and
no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound! Seriously dudes and
dudettes, what are you doing?¶ But finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too
universities can afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and
often act like assholes. We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate them for not
engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they don’t
embrace every bit of the doxa that we endorse. We are every bit as off-putting
and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the
inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party
system and the Stalinist party system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in general?). This type of
is the greatest friend of the reactionary and capitalist
because they do more to drive people into the embrace of reigning
ideology than to undermine reigning ideology. These are the people
that keep Rush Limbaugh in business. Well done!¶ But this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings
lie. Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. We almost
never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be
restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields
need to be produced, and when we do, our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics
“revolutionary”
immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty
secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail. How, I wonder, are we to do anything at
all when we have no concrete proposals? We live on a planet of 6 billion
people. These 6 billion people are dependent on a certain network of
production and distribution to meet the needs of their consumption.
That network of production and distribution does involve the extraction of resources, the
production of food, the maintenance of paths of transit and communication, the disposal
of waste, the building of shelters, the distribution of medicines, etc., etc., etc.¶ What are
your proposals? How will you meet these problems? How will you navigate the existing
mediations or semiotic and material features of infrastructure? Marx and Lenin had proposals. Do you? Have you even explored the
cartography of the problem? Today we
are so intellectually bankrupt on these points that we even have
theorists speaking of events and acts and talking about a return to the old socialist party
systems, ignoring the horror they generated, their failures, and not even proposing ways of
avoiding the repetition of these horrors in a new system of organization. Who among our
critical theorists is thinking seriously about how to build a distribution and production
system that is responsive to the needs of global consumption, avoiding the problems of
planned economy, ie., who is doing this in a way that gets notice in our circles? Who is addressing the problems
of micro-fascism that arise with party systems (there’s a reason that it was the Negri & Hardt contingent, not the
Badiou contingent that has been the heart of the occupy movement). At least the ecologists are thinking about these things in these terms
because, well, they think ecologically. Sadly we need something more, a melding of the ecologists, the Marxists, and the anarchists. We’re not
getting it yet though, as far as I can tell. Indeed, folks seem attracted to yet another critical paradigm, Laruelle. ¶ I
would love, just
for a moment, to hear a radical environmentalist talk about his ideal high school that
would be academically sound. How would he provide for the energy needs of that school?
How would he meet building codes in an environmentally sound way? How would she
provide food for the students? What would be her plan for waste disposal? And most
importantly, how would she navigate the school board, the state legislature, the federal
government, and all the families of these students? What is your plan? What is
your alternative? I think there are alternatives. I saw one that approached an alternative in Rotterdam. If you
want to make a truly revolutionary contribution, this is where you
should start. Why should anyone even bother listening to you if you aren’t
proposing real plans? But we haven’t even gotten to that point. Instead we’re like
underpants gnomes, saying “revolution is the answer!” without addressing any of
the infrastructural questions of just how revolution is to be produced,
what alternatives it would offer, and how we would concretely go about
building those alternatives. Masturbation.¶ “Underpants gnome” deserves to
be a category in critical theory; a sort of synonym for selfcongratulatory masturbation. We need less critique not because critique isn’t important or
necessary– it is –but because we know the critiques, we know the problems. We’re
intoxicated with critique because it’s easy and safe. We best every
opponent with critique. We occupy a position of moral superiority with
critique. But do we really do anything with critique? What we need today,
more than ever, is composition or carpentry. Everyone knows something is
wrong. Everyone knows this system is destructive and stacked against
them. Even the Tea Party knows something is wrong with the economic system, despite having the wrong economic theory. None
of us, however, are proposing alternatives. Instead we prefer to shout
and denounce. Good luck with that.
Resistance Pedagogy Fails
Rothkopf 2013 – taught international affairs and national security studies at Columbia University's School of International
and Public Affairs and Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, editor-at-large of Foreign Policy, visiting scholar at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace where he chairs the Carnegie Economic Strategy Roundtable, Deputy Under Secretary of
Commerce for International Trade Policy (7/1, David, Foreign Policy, “You Say You Want a
Revolution?”, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/07/01/you_say_you_want_a_revolution_street_protests?page=full)
Few things can be as inspiring — or misleading — as the sight of millions of people
gathered in protest. From Egypt (again) to Turkey to Brazil, we have recently seen stirring displays of people power,
prompting commentators to suggest (again) that we are living in the new 1848 — an era of discontent in which the world’s emergent
middle classes are finding their voices. Putting aside the fact that many of those protesting in the Arab world and in other regions
rattled recently by civil unrest are not yet middle class by any reasonable definition, the
analogy holds in one
particularly important respect: The revolutions of 1848 failed to produce real,
immediate change. They upset the establishment to be sure, and they had longer-
term consequences that should not be discounted. But they also frittered out or
were quashed for an important reason: The revolutionaries were better at
organizing protests than they were at institutionalizing their movements or
creating, cultivating, and empowering leaders who could master existing
institutions. The genius of the American Revolution was that its leaders were good
not only at promoting upheaval, but also at creating mechanisms to foster that upheaval over
several years (a Continental Congress, a Continental Army). And then, once victory had been achieved, they created
a constitutional government that protected itself while enshrining the principles
they had fought for in a system that would both protect those principles and resist the
efforts of counterforces to reassert themselves. The system allowed for pluralistic expression of views and
smooth transitions among political groups within the society. In other words, the system preserved and was
actually sustained by the energy of the revolution. Look at some of the recent outpourings of public
discontent that have captured our imaginations in the past couple of decades. Tiananmen Square. The uprisings that brought down
the Soviet Union. Iran’s Green Revolution. Tahrir Square. Revolutions in Libya, Tunisia, and elsewhere in the Arab world. Taksim
Square. In each case, even
where revolutions have brought seeming change, the protesters
were hardly among the greatest beneficiaries of the outcomes. There were really two kinds of
outcomes. In the first, there was precious little change at all — as in the case of China, Iran, or, to date, Turkey. In the second, the
change shifted power from one entrenched elite to another: Russia may not be communist, but it is run by a former KGB officer in a
very undemocratic way; in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood sought to fill the void created when Hosni Mubarak was pushed out, and
if the current protests there play out, expect the military to resume primary control of the state, reversing the "reforms" demanded
by President Mohamed Morsy.
Their notion of resistance masks state power—they’re just an illusion of
change and empowerment—they make the problem worse and instill an
adaptive politics of being and effaces the institutional constraints that
reproduce structural violence
Brown 95 [prof at UC Berkeley, Wendy, States of Injury, 21-3]
For some, fueled by opprobrium toward regulatory norms or other mo- dalities of domination, the language of
"resistance" has taken up the ground vacated by a more expansive practice of freedom. For others, it is
the discourse of “empowerment” that carries the ghost of freedom's valence 22 . Yet as many have noted,
insofar as resistance is an effect of the regime it opposes on the one hand, and insofar as its
practitioners often seek to void it of normativity to differentiate it from the
(regulatory) nature of what it opposes on the other, it is at best politically rebellious; at worst,
politically amorphous. Resistance stands against, not for; it is re-action to
domination, rarely willing to admit to a desire for it, and it is neutral with regard to possible
political direction. Resistance is in no way constrained to a radical or emancipatory aim. a fact that emerges
clearly as soon as one analogizes Foucault's notion of resistance to its companion terms in Freud or Nietzsche. Yet in some
ways this point is less a critique of Foucault, who especially in his later years made clear that his political commitments were
not identical with his theoretical ones (and un- apologetically revised the latter), than a sign of his misappropriation. For
Foucault, resistance marks the presence of power and expands our under- standing of its mechanics, but it is in this regard
an analytical strategy rather than an expressly political one. "Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet. or rather
consequently, this resistance
is never in a position of exteriority to power. . . . (T]he strictly
relational character of power relationships . . . depends upon a multiplicity of points of
resis- tance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power
relations.*39 This appreciation of the extent to which resistance is by no means inherently
subversive of power also reminds us that it is only by recourse to a very non-Foucaultian moral evaluation of
power as bad or that which is to be overcome that it is possible to equate resistance with that which is good, progressive, or
seeking an end to domination. If popular and academic notions of resistance attach, however weakly at times, to a tradition
of protest, the other contemporary substitute for a discourse of freedom—“empowerment”—would seem to correspond more
closely to a tradition of idealist reconciliation. The
language of resistance implicitly acknowledges the
extent to which protest always transpires inside the regime; “empowerment,” in
contrast, registers the possibility of generating one’s capacities, one’s “self-esteem,” one’s life course,
without capitulating to constraints by particular regimes of power. But in so doing, contemporary discourses of
empowerment too often signal an oddly adaptive and harmonious relationship
with domination insofar as they locate an individual’s sense of worth and capacity in the
register of individual feelings, a register implicitly located on some- thing of an other worldly
plane vis-a-vis social and political power. In this regard, despite its apparent locution of
resistance to subjection, contem- porary discourses of empowerment partake strongly of
liberal solipsism—the radical decontextualization of the subject characteristic of
23 liberal discourse that is key
to the fictional sovereign individualism of liberalism. Moreover, in
its almost exclusive focus on subjects’
emotionalbearing and self-regard, empowerment is a formulation that converges with a
regime’s own legitimacy needs in masking the power of the regime. This is not to
suggest that talk of empowerment is always only illusion or delusion. It is to argue, rather, that while the notion of
empowerment articulates that feature of freedom concerned with action, with being more than the consumer subject figured
in discourses of rights and eco- nomic democracy, contemporary
deployments of that notion also draw so
heavily on an undeconstructed subjectivity that they risk establishing a wide
chasm between the (experience of) empowerment and an actual
capacity to shape the terms of political, social, or economic life.
Indeed, the possibility that one can “feel empowered” without being so
forms an important element of legitimacy for the antidemocratic
dimensions of liberalism.
Squo activism fails – too dependent on uncommitted slacktivists
McCafferty, freelance writer for Baseline Magazine, in 11 (Dennis, “Activism Vs. Slacktivism,” Communications of the ACM,
Vol. 54 No. 12, published December 2011, accessed 7-5-15, http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/12/142536-activism-vsslacktivism/fulltext; JRom)
The upshot is no matter what your cause is, you can find a great way to connect
these days. Activists are making full use of blogs, social media sites, mobile apps, and other tools to
promote their message and gain support. Nothing grabs the heartstrings like video, and participants are producing streaming
content to take advantage of this. It makes one think of how effective technology could have been through history. Consider
how the U.S. founding fathers would have tweeted Paul Revere's famous cry as
"Brits R Coming," post real-time video of his nighttime ride on Facebook, and solicit the French and other sympathetic
European supporters for financial and participatory support through Face-book, Kickstarter, and other sites. Yet, while no
one disputes that online initiatives like these draw greater attention to a cause,
opinion varies with respect to whether they make a significant, lasting impact. A
number of respected thinkers say technology does not really advance activism to achieve its most critical goals: to change the hearts
and minds of the public, and effect real change. On the other side of the debate are activists and other influencers who counter that
the impact on hearts and minds cannot be measured. What can be measured are user-traffic numbers generated, e-petition
signatures delivered, Facebook "like" counts, and other metrics that convey growing support. Back to Top A Contrarian View The
conversation here is essentially positioned as a debate over activism versus
slacktivism. The latter term refers to people who are happy to click a "like" button
about a cause and may make other nominal, supportive gestures. But they're
hardly inspired with the kind of emotional fire that forces a shift in public
perception. A telling, supportive anecdote: A popular technique of organizers on all sides of the political spectrum is an online
letter-writing campaign in which supporters are encouraged to simply copy and paste from a template form of the letter. Participants
aren't asked to come up with their own words. It's not even clear if they read the entire content of the letters they send. Does
simple "copy/paste/send" act constitute activism at its finest? In one of the more widely
discussed articles casting doubt, New Yorker contributor Malcolm Gladwell maintains that successful efforts must engage
a
participants by convincing them that they have a great personal stake in the consequences. Traditionally, highly effective movements
evolved from within parties built upon "strong tie" personal connections, such as those among classmates and church members.
Activism associated with social media, however, is dependent upon "weak tie" relationships, writes Gladwell. Organizers
seek involvement from Twitter followers they have never met or Facebook friends
with whom they would never otherwise stay in touch, according to Gladwell. These
are loose networks, whereas meaningful activism requires strong, robust
organizational structure. Even in the case of the Arab spring—arguably the political movement
most enhanced by multiple digital means—those casting doubt upon the influence
of technology contend that the events would have mattered little if old-fashioned
principles of activism were not applied: effectively planned mass assemblies in
which passionate pleas for change were expressed. The fact that the Arab spring demonstrations got
YouTubed, Facebooked, and tweeted is simply a logical progression in the continuing advancement of multimedia, just as
broadcasting civil rights demonstrations on TV news during the 1960s at one time seemed novel in its ability to connect a cause with
a nationwide audience. In
the end, activism has always been—and will always be—about
people. Specifically, people who show up in person. Just witness the protests over collective-bargaining rights for state union
employees in Wisconsin, as the liberal public-policy group MoveOn.org led a solidarity day in which 50,000 supporters turned out in
all 49 other state capitals and raised more than $3 million to support Wisconsin Democrats. "The
Wisconsin protest
was old-school organizing, with a digital edge," says Dave Karpf, an assistant professor in
communications/information at Rutgers University and a leading researcher on political blogs and Internet-mediated activist
organizations. "Angry citizens felt their rights were being trampled, so they showed up and demonstrated. It was the largest
extended labor action in a generation, and it was led by labor organizations, fighting for collective bargaining rights."
Activism fails – the chilling effect prevents participation and deters
commitment to a particular cause
Starr et al in 8 (Amory Starr, Sociology Ph. D and Chapman University professor; Luis Fernandez, Northern Arizona
University professor; Randall Amster, Georgetown University professor; Lesley Wood, York University professor; Manuel Caro,
Edgewood College professor; “The Impacts of State Surveillance on Political Assembly and Association: A Socio-Legal Analysis,”
Qualitative Sociology, Volume 31, published 2008, accessed 7-6-15,
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/225348127_The_Impacts_of_State_Surveillance_on_Political_Assembly_and_Associati
on_A_Socio-Legal_Analysis)//JRom
We were most alarmed to find security culture displacing organizing culture in
most groups, including peace groups, pacifist groups, and other groups who only do legal activities. Activists
concerned about creeping criminalization of grey and formerly legal activity take
extreme precautions, foregoing inclusivity and destroying all written records of
their work. Groups also reported not taking notes at meetings. “We’re afraid to have a piece of paper with anything written on
it at the end of any meeting.” Many interviewees, having internalized suspicion of
undercovers, said that they don’t want to be seen writing anything down, as it
would make them look as if they are surveilling the meeting. Moreover, concerned
about future investigations, they do not keep diaries. This lack of archiving is the
destruction in advance of the history of the movement, with implications for social
movements’ capacity for active reflexivity. Moreover, affiliations become more
temporary and less committed, with the result that “I’ve noticed a big shift from long-term strategizing and
community building.” Conservative decisions on the part of activists and organizations are
understandable in light of the costs of surveillance to organizational resources. The
government provides no administrative mechanisms of accountability for false accusations, improper or unwarranted investigations,
or erroneous surveillance. One organization that was illegally searched spent more than 1500 hours of volunteer time dealing with
the fallout for their membership and relations with other organizations. Their lawsuit for damages took 5 years to resolve. Of the 71
organizations in our study, only two had managed to take legal action regarding surveillance. Our findings indicate that the
harm suffered by political organizations and individuals as a result of widespread
surveillance, infiltration, and documentation, is legally cognizable and not at all
speculative (cf. ACLU-NCA 2005), suggesting that legal standing can be established to overcome the burdens raised by the
case of Laird v. Tatum, 408 US 1 (1972). Based on our reading of Cunningham (2004) and our data, we conclude that much
current law enforcement surveillance is more properly conceptualized as
counterinsurgency. The implementation of counterinsurgency (whose destructiveness is wellagainst a social movement (whose agenda is well known to be noncriminal) violates the
fundamental protections of the First Amendment (which is the foundation of a
democratic society, variously conceptualized as a marketplace of ideas, a context of free debate and dissent, or selfestablished)
governance). Our socio-legal analysis encourages a shift in the unit of analysis and litigation from individual activists and
organizations to the context of diverse associational activities which make assembly possible: the social movement. If a social
movement could gain standing as a class, it could include event participants who are not members of an organization, as well as
dissenters who may have never taken action because of anticipatory conformity. The concept of social movements can bind overt
repression, indirect interference (with fundraising, networks, etc.), and intimidating chilling effects. The previous descriptions of the
education and civil justice debates above imply that partisan voices determine the macrostructure of a debate, but that
interpretation diminishes the primacy of shared goals and public reasons as the determining factors. It seems more likely that the
macrostructure of a debate is set by the presence (in the case of an epistemic context) or the absence (in the case of an agonistic one)
of participants who have the ability and status to assert common goals and explain them in terms of compelling public reasons.
Nonpartisan participants may be more capable than partisan ones in framing these goals and reasons. For example, supporting
public reasons with new verifiable and dispassionately phrased information and analyses is usually essential to gaining the attention
of partisan stakeholders and to opinion leaders and changing the macrostructure of a debate. Consequently, nonpartisans may play
an influential, and sometimes a pivotal, role in debates if they can garner public attention.
Activism fails – lack of resources, lack of introspection, inter-organization conflicts, and subjugation of
Indigenous populations
(Aziz, “Anti-Globalisation Activism Cannot --Ignore
Colonial Realities,” accessed 7-7-15, http://www.soaw.org/resources/anti-opp-resources/114features/483-anti-globalisation-activism-cannot-ignore-colonial-realities)//JRom
Many critics of globalisation play down the role and relevance of the nation-state, attributing
power almost solely to transnational corporations and international institutions like the Bretton
Woods triplets. Yet this takes the focus away from the nature and power of the state and even
romanticises it. Such global campaigns run the risk of distracting people's gaze from longstanding injustices underfoot. In delegitimising these global actors we must be very aware of the
dangers in uncritically legitimising nation-states which are themselves based on the
dispossession of Indigenous Peoples. We cannot ignore the centuries of resistance by many
indigenous nations against incorporation into the colonial state. We cannot ignore the colonial
foundations of the countries in which we live. To do so is to mask the true nature of our
societies, and the extent to which they are built on colonisation and exploitation. How can
Indigenous Peoples be expected to validate, affirm and seek incorporation into national or
international movements dominated by non-indigenous activists, organisations and agendas
which are reluctant to address domestic issues of colonisation with the same vigour and
commitment that they put into fighting transnational capital or the WTO? Of course some
important alliances have been forged between Indigenous Peoples and non-indigenous
organisations confronting globalisation. Many (usually small, underresourced) activist groups
struggle hard to draw the connections between corporate globalisation and colonisation, to
support local indigenous sovereignty struggles and educate non-indigenous peoples about these
issues. Movements to expose and oppose corporate globalisation have a very real potential to
mobilise support from non-indigenous people for meaningfully addressing the issues of
colonisation in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the USA. We should be challenging the
jurisdiction of these colonial settler state governments as they move to sign international trade
and investment deals, in the light of their continued denial of Indigenous Peoples' rights,
jurisdiction, and title. The centuries-old culture of colonisation holds the key to understanding
and defeating the current wave of globalisation. If we understand how "democratic"
governments like Canada can sanction the ongoing assault on indigenous lands and
communities it isn't hard to understand why such governments subscribe to freemarket
international trade and investment policies. In determining the values and foundations on
Choudry, McGill University assistant professor, no date
which we build alternatives to the neoliberal agenda our movements must be prepared to
examine our own propensity to oppress. We cannot build alternatives to globalisation on the
rotten foundations of the denial of occupying indigenous lands and the ongoing suppression of
Indigenous Peoples' rights. "The colonisers are always building rotten foundations and
expecting us to step into a completed building" says Sharon Venne. If anti-globalisation activists
and organisations do not address these questions with some urgency then I fear that the growing
resistance to neoliberalism in the global North risks being as inherently colonialist as the
institutions and processes which it opposes. Our usage of the term colonisation will be little
more than empty rhetoric if our analysis does not acknowledge the context in which corporate
globalisation - and the worldwide opposition to it - is taking place. Those of us active in antiglobalisation struggles in Canada, the USA, New Zealand and Australia need to examine our role
in the colonisation and globalisation of the earth. Only then can we seriously talk about
liberation and real alternatives to the neoliberal agenda.
Student activism fails – diversity of interests, lack of news coverage, and government repression
(Philip G. Altbach, “From Revolution to Apathy: American
Student Activism in the 1970s,” Higher Education Volume 8, No. 6, published 11-1979, accessed
7-7-15, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3446222)//JRom
While neither the numbers of demonstrations nor their militancy can compare to the sixties,
instances of sporadic activism indicate that political consciousness on campus is not entirely
absent, and that dramatic issues can mobilize students. Demonstrations in 1977 at Kent State
University protesting the proposed construction of a gymnasium at the site of the 1972 shootings
resulted in the arrest of almost 200 students. Students in California and in several other parts of
the United States have protested against American policy in Southern Africa in general and
against the investment policies of universities in particular. Although these demonstrations
resulted in several hundred arrests, they led to no lasting movement and were confined to a
small number of campuses. The news media has not paid much attention to local student
activism, and this has helped to limit its national impact. The issues have been diverse, the
events sporadic and somewhat unpredictable, and the scope of demonstrations and other
activities significantly smaller than was the case in the sixties. The Kent State demonstrations
were covered by national media but the South Africa protests received little attention despite
arrests. And other demonstrations, such as the substantial but ultimately unsuccessful efforts by
students at the City University of New York to retain free tuition in the face of fiscal crisis, were
hardly reported at all. The internal communications networks of the student movement, except
for campus newspapers, had declined and the mass media was no longer much interested in
campus affairs. In the traditional sense of leftist student activism and organizational activities,
the present period is a particularly barren one. Some vestiges of the "old left" student groups
still exist and are active on campuses with a strong political tradition, but these groups are very
small and have a tiny following. Students are occasionally aroused by a political issue, although
even in these cases demonstrations tend to be small and no ongoing organizations or movement
are created.
Altbach, Boston College research professor, in 79
Policy-making, good or not, is always the endgame of theorists
(Bruce, “The Need For Praxis: Bringing Policy Relevance Back
In,” International Security Volume 26, No. 4, published spring 2002, accessed 7-7-15,
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228802753696816)//JRom
To be sure, political science and international relations have produced and continue to produce
scholarly work that does bring important policy insights. Still it is hard to deny that
contemporary political science and international relations as a discipline put limited value on
policy relevance—too little, in my view, and the discipline suffers for it.1 The problem is not just
Jentleson, Duke University professor, in 2
the gap between theory and policy but its chasmlike widening in recent years and the limited
valuation of efforts, in Alexander George’s phrase, at “bridging the gap.”2 The events of
September 11 drive home the need to bring policy relevance back in to the discipline, to seek
greater praxis between theory and practice. This is not to say that scholars should take up the
agendas of think tanks, journalists, activists, or fast fax operations. The academy’s agenda is and
should be principally a more scholarly one. But theory can be valued without policy relevance
being so undervalued. Dichotomization along the lines of “we” do theory and “they” do policy
consigns international relations scholars almost exclusively to an intradisciplinary dialogue and
purpose, with conversations and knowledge building that while highly intellectual are
excessively insular and disconnected from the empirical realities that are the discipline’s raison
d’être. This stunts the contributions that universities, one of society’s most essential institutions,
can make in dealing with the profound problems and challenges society faces. It also is
counterproductive to the academy’s own interests. Research and scholarship are bettered by
pushing analysis and logic beyond just offering up a few paragraphs on implications for policy at
the end of a forty-page article, as if a “ritualistic addendum.”3 Teaching is enhanced when
students’ interest in “real world” issues is engaged in ways that reinforce the argument that
theory really is relevant, and CNN is not enough. There also are gains to be made for the
scholarly community’s standing as perceived by those outside the academic world,
constituencies and colleagues whose opinions too often are selfservingly denigrated and
defensively disregarded. It thus is both for the health of the discipline and to fulªll its broader
societal responsibilities that greater praxis is to be pursued.
Using debate as a site of activism to encourage social change fails
Atchison and Panetta 9 – *Director of Debate at Trinity University and **Director of Debate at the University of
Georgia (Jarrod, and Edward, “Intercollegiate Debate and Speech Communication: Issues for the Future,” The Sage Handbook of
Rhetorical Studies, Lunsford, Andrea, ed., 2009, p. 317-334)
Debates as Sites of Community Change The debate community has become more self-reflexive and increasingly invested in
attempting to address the problems that have plagued the community from the start. The degrees to which things are
considered problems and the appropriateness of different solutions to the problems have been hotly contested, but some
fundamental issues, such as diversity and accessibility, have received considerable attention in recent years. This section will
address the “debate as activism” perspective that argues that the appropriate site for addressing community problems is
individual debates. In contrast to the “debate as innovation” perspective, which assumes that the activity is an isolated game
with educational benefits, proponents of the “debate as activism” perspective argue that individual debates have the
potential to create change in the debate community and society at large. If the first approach assumed that debate was
completely insulated, this perspective assumes that there is no substantive insulation between individual debates and the
community at large. From our perspective, using
individual debates to create community change is an
insufficient strategy for three reasons. First, individual debates are, for the most part, insulated from
the community at large. Second, individual debates limit the conversation to the
immediate participants and the judge, excluding many important contributors to the
debate community. Third, locating the discussion within the confines of a competition
diminishes the additional potential for collaboration, consensus, and coalition building.
Academic radicalism fails ---rejection is dangerous and ineffective
Dussel 11 [2011, Enrique Dussel is the Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, “From Critical
Theory to the Philosophy of Liberation: Some Themes for Dialogue”, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production,
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/59m869d2]
We should proceed in politics in the very same manner that Marx proceeded in
economics: working on the level of macro-institutional feasibility. The “dissolution
of the state” should be defined as a political postulate. To seek to bring this about
empirically leads to the “anti-institutional fallacy,” and the impossibility of a
critical, transformative politics. To say that we need to transform the world without
exercising power through institutions – including the state (which we need to radically
transform, but not eliminate) – is the fallacy into which Negri and Holloway fall. The
presently given institutions, and even the particular state as a political macroinstitution, are never perfect and always require transformation. But there are
moments in which institutions become diachronically repressive in the extreme, in their final
entropic moment. Hegemony – the consensus exercised over the “obedient” à la Weber's
legitimate domination91 – gives rise to domination in the Gramscian sense. The state
machinery, in the service of the economic interests of the dominant classes in the postcolonial
metropolitan nations, become definitively repressive. The popular masses go on gaining
consciousness in proportion to level of their oppression. This accumulation of power-to
(potentia),93 which takes place partially in the exteriority of the structures of the particular state
but within the “bosom of the people” (which is not without its contradictions), confronts the
political institutions currently in force. It does so to “trans-form” them (not necessarily for
reforms94, but only rarely for revolution95), not necessarily to destroy them (though it
could if required by the postulates), but to use them and transform them according to
its ends and according to the degree of correspondence to the permanence and extension of life
and symmetrical democratic participation of the oppressed people. The anti-institutionalist
believes that the destruction of the state represents an important victory on the
path to revolution. This sort of destruction is irrational . They have confused the
“dissolution of the state” as a postulate (empirically impossible, but functioning as
a principle for strategic orientation) with its empirical negation. How are we to
understand the postulate of the “dissolution of the state”? Right-wing anarchism –
like that of Nozick – proposes the dissolution of the state or something close to it
under the guise of the “minimal state.” The unhindered market produces
equilibrium, especially in Hayek's formulation; for this, the minimal state needs only to
destroy the monopolies that impede the free movement of the market. A union
seeking a wage increase is a monopoly, because it places demands on the market that do not
emanate from free competition. The duty of the state is therefore to dissolve the union.
In the service of this total market definition, the process of globalization as controlled by
transnational industrial and financial capital (not with hegemony, because this was lost in the
move to the last-instance use: the violent coercion of military power), equally proposes the
dissolution or weakening of the particular states in postcolonial peripheral nations. The
postcolonial state – however much it may be dominated by the private
bureaucracies of the transnational corporations which impose their own members onto
the political bureaucracies of those states (and we see, for example, a Coca-Cola distributor as
president96) – still represents the last possible resistance for oppressed peoples. To
dissolve or substantially weaken their states is to take away their only possible
defense. The second Iraq War represents a war against a particular postcolonial state that,
however corrupt and dictatorial, nevertheless had a certain degree of sovereignty and selfdetermination which interposed some resistance to the appropriation of its petroleum by foreign
companies. For all of this, it is tragic that a sector of the left coincides with the North American
Empire – the home-state97 of the transnationals and the ultimate example of power based on its
economic political-military complex – in dissolving the particular peripheral state. If Europeans
alongside Habermas seemed as though they were dissolving the old particular state, it is for the
strategic fortification of a Confederation of States in the European Union. In Latin America, if it
were possible to proceed to organize a Confederation of Latin American States98 without
American or Spanish influence, such a weakening of the particular state would be equally useful.
But for the moment, this is not the situation. Any struggle for the real, effective
dissolution of a particular postcolonial state is a reactionary project. It is an
entirely different thing to struggle to transform the particular postcolonial state in
view of a political postulate of the “dissolution of the state” as such. This would
mean that in the creation of any new institution, in every exercise of institutional
power, or in the transformation of all of the institutions (the transformation of the
state), one would have the “dissolution of the state” as an orienting principle.
However, this cannot take the form of the objective, empirical negation of these
institutions, but rather must take the form of a responsible, democratic, popular,
social, and participatory subjectivization of institutional functions, in which
representation proceeds by approaching (to use a Kantian word) the represented. In
this situation, the symmetrical participation of all those affected would become flesh
in all political actions to such a degree that the state will cease to weigh so heavily,
becoming lighter, more transparent, and more public and democratic. This would
not be a “minimal state” (which leaves everything to the market or to the impossibility of
perfect citizens99), but more accurately a “subjectivized state” in which the citizens
will participate to such a degree that the existing institutional sphere will shift
toward transparency, the bureaucracy will be the minimum necessary, while its
efficacy and instrumentality when it comes to the permanence and extension of
human life will nevertheless be at a maximum. I do not believe that it makes sense
to attempt to transform political institutions without the state, without exercising
power which is communicative, democratic, legitimate, participatory, socialized,
and popular. It is, however, possible to declare a postulate which could never be realized, but
which functions like the “North Star” that helped the Chinese navigators to sail at night. Despite
all that I have expounded, I think that the postulate of the “dissolution of the state” is a strategic
orienting principle that functions as a regulative horizon.
Trying to create change through debate only ensures their movement
suffers because of the presence of a ballot and competition—it forces others
to disagree with them
Atchison and Panetta 9 – *Director of Debate at Trinity University and **Director of Debate at the University of
Georgia (Jarrod, and Edward, “Intercollegiate Debate and Speech Communication: Issues for the Future,” The Sage Handbook of
Rhetorical Studies, Lunsford, Andrea, ed., 2009, p. 317-334)
The final problem with an individual debate round focus is the role of competition. Creating community change through individual
debate rounds sacrifices the “community” portion of the change. Many teams that promote activist strategies in debates
profess that they are more interested in creating change than winning debates. What is clear, however, is that the vast
majority of teams that are not promoting community change are very interested in winning debates. The tension that is
generated from the clash of these opposing forces is tremendous. Unfortunately, this is rarely a productive tension. Forcing
teams to consider their purpose in debating, their style in debates, and their approach to evidence are all critical aspects of
being participants in the community. However, the dismissal of the proposed resolution that the debaters have spent
countless hours preparing for, in the name of a community problem that the debaters often have little control over, does
little to engender coalitions of the willing. Should a debate team lose because their director or coach has been ineffective at
recruiting minority participants? Should a debate team lose because their coach or director holds political positions that are
in opposition to the activist program? Competition has been a critical component of the interest in intercollegiate debate
from the beginning, and it does not help further the goals of the debate community to dismiss competition in the name of
community change. The larger problem with locating the “debate as activism” perspective within the competitive framework
is that it overlooks the communal nature of the community problem. If each individual debate is a decision about how the
debate community should approach a problem, then the losing debaters become collateral damage in the activist strategy
dedicated toward creating community change. One frustrating example of this type of argument might include a judge
voting for an activist team in an effort to help them reach elimination rounds to generate a community discussion about the
problem. Under this scenario, the losing team serves as a sacrificial lamb on the altar of community change. Downplaying
the important role of competition and treating opponents as scapegoats for the failures of the community may increase the
profile of the winning team and the community problem, but it does little to generate the critical coalitions necessary to
address the community problem, because the competitive focus encourages teams to concentrate on how to beat the strategy
with little regard for addressing the community problem. There is no role for competition when a judge decides that it is
important to accentuate the publicity of a community problem. An extreme example might include a team arguing that their
opponents’ academic institution had a legacy of civil rights abuses and that the judge should not vote for them because that
would be a community endorsement of a problematic institution. This scenario is a bit more outlandish but not
unreasonable if one assumes that each debate should be about what is best for promoting solutions to diversity problems in
the debate community. If the debate community is serious about generating community change, then it is more likely to
occur outside a traditional competitive debate. When a team loses a debate because the judge decides that it is better for the
community for the other team to win, then they have sacrificed two potential advocates for change within the community.
Creating change through wins generates backlash through losses. Some proponents are comfortable with generating backlash and
argue that the reaction is evidence that the issue is being discussed. From our perspective, the discussion that results from these hostile
situations is not a productive one where participants seek to work together for a common goal. Instead of giving up on hope for change and
agitating for wins regardless of who is left behind, it seems more reasonable that the debate community should try the method of public
argument that we teach in an effort to generate a discussion of necessary community changes. Simply put, debate competitions do not
represent the best environment for community change because it is a competition for a win and only one team can win any given debate,
whereas addressing systemic century-long community problems requires a tremendous effort by a great number of people.
Deliberation
Good
Deliberation allows the participants to come to a reasoned decision that
benefits both parties
Chapell, Fellow in Politcal Theory, 11 (Zsuzsanna, “Deliberation”, Encyclopedia of Power, p.168-169)//WB
Deliberation refers to a process of reflection undertaken by individuals or groups
to reach reasoned and considered decisions. Deliberation has an epistemic
function to improve decisions and uncover the best argument. It is often assumed that
because of deliberation, individuals' beliefs and judgments are transformed as
they consider new facts, arguments, and points of view. In individual deliberation, the
deliberator weighs and evaluates each possible solution and then arrives at a
decision. Group deliberation consists of reasoned discussion. When groups deliberate, the process acquires a dimension of power.
Deliberation can be either formal or informal. Examples of formalized deliberating groups are juries or
legislatures. An example of informal deliberation is the ongoing discussion between different groups in civil society, but discussions within families and
civic organizations are also examples of informal deliberation. Group
deliberation is characterized by
communication aimed at persuasion. Ideal deliberative processes should be
reasoned, equal, and open discussions where participants are prepared to change
their views as a result of the arguments presented. In reality, deliberation does not live up to such a high
standard. Some members of the group will be more powerful than others, and some arguments will be more persuasive than others, regardless of their
merits. Although deliberation could ideally be aimed at reaching a common good for the group, in practice, the private interests of group members will
be powerful forces. Inequality within the group leads to differences in the power each group member possesses. The socioeconomic background of
participants can define their roles in the discussion. As an example, jury deliberations tend to be dominated by well-educated white males. Actors who
are powerful outside of deliberation will be powerful in deliberative settings as well. In deliberations between states, the most powerful nation will wield
more power. Inequalities also exist with regard to the ability of deliberators. Good orators are more likely to convince others, regardless of the merit of
their arguments. There is a danger that intelligent and persuasive individuals could manipulate deliberation to serve their own interests. Other
resources, such as time, information, or the respect of other members of the community, will also make some deliberators more influential than others.
Arguments themselves will have different power. Although some place hope in the power of the best argument
to defeat all others, this is not necessarily the argument that will resonate most with deliberators. Arguments that appeal to
strong background beliefs and feelings will be more powerful. Arguments that support the views
deliberators already hold will also be more persuasive. Deliberation is seen as a good way of increasing
citizen involvement and participation in politics. In political theory, deliberative democracy
has engendered a new interest in increasing deliberation in politics, as current
democratic systems focus more on elections than on decision making through
reasoned debate. Deliberative experiments and meetings are organized to increase citizen involvement in public policy making. In this
context, deliberation appears as a potentially valuable resource. Deliberation may
facilitate engagement across differences in complex and diverse societies, where
people need to justify to each other their publicly articulated values, interests,
identities, and goals. In this spirit, Gerard Hauser and Chantal Benoit-Barne (2002) discern in deliberation the
potential to build trust by offering interlocutors the "opportunity to acquire a
sense of the range of difference and the mediating grounds of similarity that make
it possible for us to form a civic community based on relations of collaboration" (p.
271). Hauser and Benoit-Barne caution that collaboration does not lead to consensus, but refers instead to working together even amidst disagreement.
Along these lines, Matthew
Festenstein (2005) suggests three ways that deliberation may
build trust: enabling participants to present themselves in ways that may
overcome negative stereotypes, strengthening good will and fidelity among
representatives and constituents by foregrounding reason-giving, and fostering
respect for diverse viewpoints by situating interlocutors as warranting address (p.
143). While these scholars identify deliberation as a potential source of trust, they stop short of explicating how this process might unfold.
Deliberation creates trust between groups when used in public spheres
Robert 13 (Asen, Robert. "Deliberation and trust." Argumentation and Advocacy 50.1 (2013): 2+. Academic OneFile. Web. 5
July 2015.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA355557329&v=2.1&u=umuser&it=r&p=AONE&sw=w&asid=a8afd042bec8d1f52d1
1442c56c79131)//WB
To realize this resource, scholars need to develop theoretical models that consider how trust may function in deliberation. In developing these models,
scholars cannot operate with a static concept of trust. This is a critical limit to the approaches of Robert Putnam and others, as Putnam (2007)
acknowledges, since their
reliance on survey data elides deliberation's transformative
power (pp. 150, 158-159). The significance of this data, which helps to justify my efforts in this essay, arises from
its capacity to illuminate important political and social trends. These trends may
inform the wider contexts in which deliberation occurs, but they do not
characterize processes of deliberation. Surveys inquiring about trust treat the concept as a discrete item that
researchers may link to institutions, actors, and issues. In these surveys, trust exists as a quality prior to an expressed belief or action, such as support
of a political figure or participation in a community organization. Alternatively, we may consider how deliberation may shift levels of trust.
Although deliberation offers no guarantees, it may enable interlocutors to build
levels of trust (Jacobs, Cook, & Delli Carpini, 2009; Mutz, 2006; cf. Sunstein, 2003). To fully appreciate the
relationship of deliberation and trust, scholars need a dynamic, process-based
model. Rather than seeing one as the condition for the other, we need to recognize the mutually informative and constitutive relationship of
deliberation and trust. Toward this end, I develop a model of deliberative trust as a relational
practice. I argue that scholars may appreciate the role of trust in deliberation not
by regarding trust as an attribute of one participant or another but as a quality that
may emerge in the interactions of participants--the discursive relationships they mutually construct. As a
practice, trust appears not as a precondition or an outcome of deliberation but as an
activity that unfolds through deliberation. Conceptualizing trust in this way comports with scholarly models of
deliberation by foregrounding process and participation. As a relational practice, trust is something that people do. My argument in this essay develops
over two main sections. In the first, I distinguish
deliberative trust as a participatory activity from nondeliberative conceptions of trust. Practicing trust in deliberation draws on participants'
experiences but does not require participants to possess shared experiences,
values, and/or beliefs. As it exhibits a temporal orientation that may link disparate encounters, the practice of deliberative trustwhich remains context-specific--is informed by elements of contingency, risk, and reciprocity. In the second section, I identify four qualities
for practicing trust in deliberation: flexibility, forthrightness, engagement, and
heedfulness. I explicate these qualities as mutually informative and relatively autonomous practices that constitute an analytic and normative
framework. As such, these qualities suggest foci for investigating deliberation and trust as
well as means for bolstering trust in deliberation.
Good Deliberation requires an agreed upon subject, fairness, and
contributions to democratic legitimacy
(George, “The Encyclopedia of Political Science”, CQ Press, ISBN:
9781608712434, p.384-386)//WB
Kurian, Editor in Chief, 11
A number of political theorists, notably Joshua Cohen, Amy Guttmann and Dennis Thompson, and Jürgen Habermas, have
sought to define the nature and purposes of deliberation, identify prerequisites for its existence, and construct
models of “ideal deliberation.” Central to most definitions of deliberation is giving reasons and
weighing arguments and information in favor of, or against, public policies. Most models of
deliberation also assume that citizens share a basic level of agreement on issues before they can
deliberate effectively. Because deliberation includes a variety of dimensions, however, no consensus exists about the precise definition of
deliberation. In The Mild Voice of Reason: Deliberative Democracy and American National Government (1994), government scholar Joseph M.
Bessette provides a common definition as “reasoning on the merits of public policy.” Some definitions of
deliberation, however, do not require public-spiritedness or other motivations as requisites for deliberation. Individuals deliberate as
long as they acquire and use substantive information related to public policy, even if their goals
are narrowly self-interested. Scholars have put forward a variety of criteria to judge deliberation,
including fairness, inclusiveness of participation, the breadth of viewpoints considered,
responsiveness to popular desires, the logical and empirical validity of arguments, and
contributions to democratic legitimacy.
Citizen deliberation is a key factor to creating successful policies
(George, “The Encyclopedia of Political Science”, CQ Press, ISBN:
9781608712434, p.384-386)//WB
Kurian, Editor in Chief, 11
Citizen Deliberation Before the advent of mass democracy, theorists viewed deliberation as an elite endeavor. James Madison and other framers of the
U.S. Constitution saw elite deliberation as a bulwark against the public's impulses and uninformed opinions. Legislators were responsible for filtering
and refining public opinion in such a way that they would discover their constituents' true opinions—what the public would think if citizens had the
same capabilities to deliberate as their leaders. Today,
many observers consider citizen deliberation a
vital component of democratic participation and a mechanism for maintaining
democratic accountability. Citizens cannot limit their participation to voting,
leaving policy deliberation to their leaders. The quality of citizen participation may
improve with deliberation. In a study of individuals who attended a forum on Social Security reform, individuals who attended
the forum gained more knowledge about the program than similar individuals who did not attend. Second, deliberation produced
opinion change over policy options for which there was already some consensus. For
policy options on which citizens had little consensus at the outset, opinions changed only among citizens who held their opinions weakly, according to a
2004 study by public opinion and policy scholar Jason Barabas.
Properly designed institutions may help to
develop citizens' capacities for deliberation without sacrificing the political
equality and legitimacy that are the hallmarks of modern mass democracy. Among the ideas for building citizens' capacity for
deliberation are “deliberative opinion polls” and holding “deliberation days” just before elections. Whatever the potential
drawbacks to deliberation, few people seem to be concerned that we run the risk of
having an excess of it. Given the proliferation of economic and foreign policy calamities of recent decades, it may be
more plausible that governments suffer from too little careful deliberation than
too much of it.
Deliberation allows for ideas to change and for compromise on the best
policy option to be reached
Gastil & Burkhalter, PHD’s, 8 (John
and Stephanie, Head of Penn State Department of Communication
Arts and Sciences and associate professor at Humbolt, “Group Decision Making, Political”, The
Encyclopedia of Political Science”, CQ Press, ISBN: 9781608712434, p.288-291)//WB
Citizen Deliberation The modern ideal of citizen deliberation traces back to the Athenian
assembly, in which male citizens acted as legislators on important public questions. In this vision of democracy, citizen decision
making was essential to establishing the legitimacy of the state's decisions. This
foundational idea deeply influenced democratic theorists from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Jürgen Habermas. In general, deliberative
political theory argues that democratic systems fail to the extent that they do not
promote robust, widespread deliberation. A deliberative public sphere in which
citizens participate is necessary to help individual citizens develop broad and
public-spirited perspectives and reasoned judgments on public policy. In addition, to
maintain legitimacy, formal institutions of government in representative
democracy such as legislatures, courts, and chief executives should engage in
deliberation in their decision-making processes to facilitate representative and
well-informed outcomes. A central claim in the contemporary study of citizen deliberation is that citizens'policy
views and civic attitudes can transform through public-oriented discussion, and a
wide range of political reforms have demonstrated the potency of such
deliberation. In the 1970s, citizen juries in the United States and planning cells (Planungszelle) in Germany experimented with varied
techniques for convening small representative samples of citizens to study complex public policy issues. Government agencies,
private foundations, and others have used these and related processes to gain a
sense of what the general public thinks about issues after having the opportunity
to deliberate. More recently, the deliberative poll has also become a popular means of
assessing how public opinion changes as a result of one-to-three days of
discussion.
Deliberation, especially in debate, creates higher quality political
judgement, and cohesion between peers, also anti-deliberation studies do
not have evidence
Wessler, Professor of media and communications, 8 (Hartmut,
“ Deliberation”, Encyclopedia of Political
Communication, p.168-169, Sage Publications, ISBN: 9781412953993,
In the context of political communication, deliberation refers to a process of reasoning and discussion
about political matters. Deliberation takes place in parliamentary debate, expert panels, deliberative decision-making bodies, news
media content, political talk shows, online discussion forums, civil society organizations, and everyday political talk among citizens. Normative
theories of deliberative democracy place particular emphasis on the democratic
value of deliberation. Although by no means a uniform group, deliberative democratic theorists
agree on the centrality of argumentative exchange in political communication in
order to foster both the cognitive quality of political judgment (rationality) and
mutual respect and cohesion among deliberators (social integration). Deliberation is usually
considered to be an alternative to both bargaining and rhetoric. Although bargaining involves the pursuit of particularistic interests by means of
offering incentives and applying threats, deliberation relies on the persuasive power of voluntarily accepted reasons. Whereas rhetoric can include
polemics, humor, emotional appeals, and the like, deliberation
is predicated on the literal use and
understanding of arguments. One problem of deliberative democratic theory is
how to transpose the benefits of deliberation from small-scale deliberative settings
into large-scale societal communication. Bruce Ackerman and James S. Fishkin have proposed a “deliberation day” to
bridge the gap: establishing a national holiday one week before major national elections on which citizens would be paid for participating in
deliberation groups as well as voting 1 week later. A more mundane possibility lies in measuring deliberative qualities of the mass news media and
investigating the conditions under which such deliberative media content has normatively desirable effects on political decision makers and citizens.
Vis-à-vis decision makers, mediated
deliberation can be thought to foster active justification of
political claims and decisions, thus enhancing the quality of decisions or at least
avoiding egregious mistakes. In relation to the citizenry, deliberative media content may serve
as a repository of arguments and justifications (thus reducing citizens' information costs drastically) and as
a model for deliberative behavior in everyday political talk. So far, there are only a few empirical
studies directed at measuring the deliberative qualities of mass media content. In the print media, argumentative exchange is achieved for example in
commentary, news analysis, or debate-style articles, with journalists apparently playing a particularly important role for enhancing deliberativeness. In
political talk shows, the host can foster argumentation by eliciting justifications from discussants and confronting them with opposing claims. In citizen
deliberation, argument repertoire has been shown to be a valid measure of deliberativeness; that is, the number of arguments a person can give for his
or her own position and the number of arguments a person can imagine opponents will use to support the counter-position. Exposure to disagreement
enhances argument repertoire and political tolerance but discourages political participation, suggesting that deliberative and participative behavior
cannot be optimized at the same time. Critical
accounts of political deliberation sometimes feature
claims of decay over time, but longitudinal evidence to support such claims is
scarce at best.
Ballot
Not Key
The aff simply demands a ballot for trying to spread some discourse while
claiming to create change—this ensures that no social change will ever
occur—the ballot becomes a commodity
Bryant 13 [philosophy prof at Collin College, Levi, The Paradox of Emancipatory Political Theory,
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/the-paradox-of-emancipatory-politicaltheory/]
There’s a sort of Hegelian contradiction at the heart of all academic political theory that has
pretensions of being emancipatory. In a nutshell, the question is that of how this theory can
avoid being a sort of commodity. Using Hegel as a model, this contradiction goes something like this:
emancipatory political theory says it’s undertaken for the sake of emancipation from x. Yet with rare exceptions, it is only
published in academicjournals that few have access to, in a jargon that only other academics or the highly literate can
understand, and presented only at conferencesthat only other academics generally attend. Thus, academic
emancipatory political theory reveals itself in its truth as something that isn’t
aimed at political change or intervention at all, but rather only as a move or
moment in the ongoing autopoiesis of academia. That is, itfunctions as another
line on the CVand is one strategy through which the university system carries outits
autopoiesis or self-reproduction across time. It thus functions– the issue isn’t here one of the
beliefs or intentions of academics, but how things function –as something like a commodity
within the academic system. The function is not to intervene in the
broader political system– despite what all of us doing political theory say and how we think
about our work –but rather to carry out yet another iteration of the
academic discourse (there are other ways that this is done, this has just been a particularly effective rhetorical
strategy for the autopoiesis of academia in the humanities). Were
the aim political change, then the
discourse would have to find a way to reach outside the academy, but this is precisely what
academic politicaltheory cannot do due to the publication and presentation structure, publish or
perish logic, the CV, and so on. To produce political change, the academic political theorist would have to sacrifice his or her
erudition or scholarship, because they would have to presume an audience that doesn’t have a high falutin intellectual
background in Hegel, Adorno, Badiou, set theory, Deleuze, Lacan, Zizek, Foucault (who is one of the few that was a
breakaway figure), etc. They would also have to adopt a different platform of communication. Why? Because they would
have to address an audience beyond the confines of the academy, which means something other than academic presses,
conferences, journals, etc. (And here I would say that us Marxists are often the worst of the worst. We engage in a discourse
bordering on medieval scholasticism that only schoolmen can appreciate, which presents
a fundamental
contradiction between the form of their discourse– only other experts can understand it –and the
content; they want to produce change). But the academic emancipatory political theorist can’t do either of
these things. If they surrender their erudition and the baroque nature of their discourse, they surrender their place in the
academy (notice the way in which Naomi Klein is sneered at in political theory circles despite the appreciable impact of her
work). If they adopt other platforms of communication– and this touches on my last post and the way philosophers sneer at
the idea that there’s a necessity to investigating extra-philosophical conditions of their discourse –then they surrender their
labor requirements as people working within academia. Both options are foreclosed by the sociological conditions of their
discourse. The paradox of emancipatory
academic political discourse is thus that it is formally and
functionally apolitical. At the level of its intention or what it says it aims to effect political change and intervention,
but at the level of what it does, it simply reproduces its own discourse and labor conditions without
intervening in broader social fields (and no, the classroom doesn’t count).
Unconscious recognition of this paradox might be why, in some corners, we’re seeing the execrable
call to re-stablish “the party”. The party is the academic fantasy of a philosopher-king or an academic
avant gard that simultaneously gets to be an academic and produce political change for all
those “dopes and illiterate” that characterize the people (somehow the issue of how the party eventually becomes an end
in itself, aimed solely at perpetuating itself, thereby divorcing itself from the people never gets addressed by these neo-
totalitarians). The
idea of the party and of the intellectual avant gard is a symptom of unconscious
recognition of the paradox I’ve recognized here and of the political theorist that genuinely wants to produce
change while also recognizing that the sociological structure of the academy can’t meet those requirements. Given these
reflections, one wishes that the academic that’s learned the rhetoric of politics as an
autopoieticstrategy for reproducing the university discourse would be a little less pompous and selfrighteous, but everyone has to feel important and like their the best thing since sliced bread, I guess.
Social change in debate is a myth and creates an exclusionary dichotomy
Ritter 13 JD – U Texas Law, B.A. cum laude – Trinity University, ‘13
(Michael J., “OVERCOMING THE FICTION OF “SOCIAL CHANGE THROUGH
DEBATE”: WHAT’S TO LEARN FROM 2PAC’S CHANGES?,” National Journal of
Speech and Debate, Vol. 2, Issue 1)
The fiction of social change through debate abuses the win–loss structure of
debate and permits debaters to otherize, demonize , dehumanize, and exclude
opponents. The win–loss structure of debate rounds requires a judge to
vote for one side or the other, as judges generally cannot give a double win. This precludes the
possibility of compromise on any major position in the debate when the resolution of the position
would determine the ultimate issue of “which team did the better debating.” Thus, the fiction of social change
through debate encourages debaters to construct narratives of good versus
evil in which the other team is representative of some evil that threatens to bring about
our destruction if it is endorsed (e.g. capitalism). The team relying on the fiction of social change through
debate then paints themselves as agents of the good, and gives the judge a George W.
Bush-like “option”: “You’re either with us or you’re against us.” The fiction of social change
through debate—like Bush’s rhetorical fear tactics and creation of a false, polarizing, and
exclusionary dichotomy to justify all parts of the War on Terror— enables the otherization ,
demonization, dehumanization, and exclusion of the opposing team. When the unfairness of this tactic is brought to
light—particularly in egregious situations when a team is arguing that the other team should lose because of their skin color—all can
see that the debate centers on personal attacks against opposing debaters. This causes
tensions between debaters that frequently result in debaters losing interest or quitting. By alienating and excluding members of the
competitive interscholastic debate community for the purpose of winning a debate, it also makes the reaching of any compromise
outside of the debate—the only place where compromise is possible—much less likely. By bringing the social issue into a debate
round, debaters impede out-ofround progress on the resolution of social issues within and outside the debate community by
prompting backlash.
No evidence for the power of the ballot
Ritter 13, JD – U Texas Law, B.A. cum laude – Trinity University,
(Michael J., “OVERCOMING THE FICTION OF “SOCIAL CHANGE THROUGH
DEBATE”: WHAT’S TO LEARN FROM 2PAC’S CHANGES?,” National Journal of
Speech and Debate, Vol. 2, Issue 1)
Up to this point, this article has shown how each of the
essential components of “competitive
interscholastic debate” makes it very different from any other kind of debate. But
one thing that is persuasive in any kind of debate is some sort of properly
conducted study (or even a mere survey) that provides empirical proof or
even substantial anecdotal support. To date, none of the many academics
who coach or participate in the debate community have published a study
or survey to support the social change fiction. (Perhaps they have tried, and discovered they were
just wrong.) But until such an empirical study of competitive interscholastic debate is conducted,
students, judges, and coaches should not take it for granted.
The ballot fails
Ritter ‘13, JD – U Texas Law, B.A. cum laude – Trinity University,
(Michael J., “OVERCOMING THE FICTION OF “SOCIAL CHANGE THROUGH
DEBATE”: WHAT’S TO LEARN FROM 2PAC’S CHANGES?,” National Journal of
Speech and Debate, Vol. 2, Issue 1)
The structure of competitive interscholastic debate renders any message
communicated in a debate round virtually incapable of creating any social
change, either in the debate community or in general society. And to the extent that the
fiction of social change through debate can be proven or disproven through empirical studies or surveys, academics instead
have analyzed debate with nonapplicable rhetorical theory that fails to
account for the unique aspects of competitive interscholastic debate. Rather, the
current debate relating to activism and competitive interscholastic debate concerns the following: “What is the best model to
promote social change?” But a
more fundamental question that must be addressed first
is: “Can debate cause social change?” Despite over two decades of opportunity
to conduct and publish empirical studies or surveys, academic proponents of
the fiction that debate can create social change have chosen not to prove this fundamental
assumption, which—as this article argues—is merely a fiction that is harmful in most, if not all, respects. The
position that competitive interscholastic debate can create social change is
more properly characterized as a fiction than an argument. A fiction is an invented or fabricated idea purporting to be factual
but is not provable by any human senses or rational thinking capability or is unproven by valid statistical studies. An argument, most
basically, consists of a claim and some support for why the claim is true. If the support for the claim is false or its relation to the
claim is illogical, then we can deduce that the particular argument does not help in ascertaining whether the claim is true.
Interscholastic competitive debate is premised upon the assumption that debate is argumentation. Because fictions are necessarily
not true or cannot be proven true by any means of argumentation, the competitive interscholastic debate community should be
incredibly critical of those fictions and adopt them only if they promote the activity and its purposes.
Academic Left
Wrong
The academic left criticizes conservatives for intolerance when they and guilty of it as
well as they come to predetermined conclusions
Young, Degree from Rutgers University, 12 (Cathy, 5/12/12, “The academic left’s intolerance”,
The Boston Globe, https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2012/05/11/the-academic-leftintolerance/0NMoHik0qWPI7lZi9nNQZP/story.html)//WB
The politics of higher education have been hotly debated for years: Conservatives
charge that academia is choked by left-wing
orthodoxies; liberals dismiss “political correctness” as a right-wing smear. This week, the conservative
critique got a boost — from the academic left, whose response to a blog post lambasting black studies
was not to challenge the blogger but to shut her up. On Brainstorm, the blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the heretic,
Naomi Schaefer Riley, made a post titled, “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just
Read the Dissertations.” (Full disclosure: I have met Riley at a few social events.) The blog was inspired by a Chronicle cover story about the new
generation of black studies PhDs and its sidebar profiling the first five students in Northwestern University’s black studies doctoral program. Riley sarcastically
summed up three of their dissertation topics, which she described as “left-wing victimization claptrap. The
response was fast and furious.
Posts on other blogs and on Twitter excoriated Riley. A petition demanding her removal from the
Chronicle’s blog roster gathered over 6,500 signatures. Chronicle editor Liz Miller at first defended Riley’s post
as an invitation to debate; on May 7 she reversed herself, stating that the piece “did not meet The Chronicle’s basic editorial standards” and that
Riley had been asked to leave Brainstorm. She also apologized for “the distress these incidents have caused.” While many have denounced the
Chronicle for cravenness and censorship, other commentators, such as Atlantic editor and blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates, defend its decision —
not because of Riley’s views but because of her alleged intellectual sloppiness. Her crime, evidently, was conceding in response to
critics that she had not read the dissertations she ridiculed. Of course, the initial post made it clear that
her judgment was based on the topic summaries in the sidebar. Is this unfair or intellectually shoddy? First, Riley wrote a blog
post, not an academic essay. Second, let’s turn the tables. Suppose a blogger had slammed a doctoral program at a conservative Christian university, lampooning
summaries of PhD theses which sought to show that birth control leads to society’s moral breakdown or that America’s Founders did not support church-state
separation. Would Riley’s current bashers insist on perusal of the actual dissertations? Doubtful. Whether Riley’s indictment was too sweeping is another question.
One project she mentioned focuses on black women’s childbirth experiences, a subject she believes is too narrow. In an e-mail exchange, Riley noted that she has
also criticized esoteric research topics in other fields. Others would argue that such research can yield valuable knowledge. This is the problem with fields like black
studies and women’s studies. Riley’s other two targets, however, have all the hallmarks of political advocacy posing as scholarship. Take “Strange Bedfellows: The
Rise of the New (Black) Right in Post Civil Rights America” by La TaSha Levy. According to the Chronicle, Levy “argues that conservatives like Thomas Sowell,
Clarence Thomas, John McWhorter, and others have ‘played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.’ ” Levy’s
interest in the subject apparently stems from her concern, as director of a campus black cultural center, about students reading black conservative authors. This
is more than enough to suggest a hatchet job — particularly when Levy lumps John McWhorter, who is
sharply critical of left-wing pieties on race but considers himself a liberal Democrat and a Barack Obama supporter,
together with conservatives. (Talk about intellectual sloppiness!) The problem with fields like black studies and
women’s studies is not that their subjects are unworthy of inquiry; it is that they tend to promote
predetermined conclusions and agendas, which is anathema to true scholarship. Would a student whose research led her to agree with
McWhorter’s critique of race-based preferences in college admissions be welcome in a black studies program? All this could have been debated
in response to Riley’s post. Instead, she has been accused of everything from racism — even though her husband is black — to a
viciously damaging assault on vulnerable graduate students, as if their stardom in the Chronicle did not outweigh any mythical
damage from a blog post. The petitioners who succeeded in their demand for Riley’s dismissal are now celebrating a victory. But the only real winners here are
those on the right who depict the academy as a bastion of “liberal intolerance” rather than intellectual freedom.
Liberalism is a disease of intolerance running through America, they can not accept
that people may think differently
Linker, Degree from Michigan State University, 14 (Damon, 7/11/14, “How Liberalism became
an intolerant dogma”, The Week, http://theweek.com/articles/445434/how-liberalism-becameintolerant-dogma)//WB
Liberalism's decline from a political philosophy of pluralism into a rigidly intolerant
dogma. The decline is especially pronounced on a range of issues wrapped up with religion and sex. For a
time, electoral self-interest kept these intolerant tendencies in check, since the strongly liberal position on social issues was clearly a minority view. But the cultural shift
during the Obama years that has led a majority of Americans to support gay marriage seems to have
opened the floodgates to an ugly triumphalism on the left. The result is a dogmatic form of liberalism that
threatens to poison American civic life for the foreseeable future. Conservative Reihan Salam describes it, only somewhat hyperbolically,
as a form of "weaponized secularism." The rise of dogmatic liberalism is the American left-wing expression of the broader
trend that Mark Lilla identified in a recent blockbuster essay for The New Republic. The reigning dogma of our time, according to Lilla, is libertarianism — by which he means
My own cherished topic is this:
far more than the anti-tax, anti-regulation ideology that Americans identify with the post-Reagan Republican Party, and that the rest of the world calls "neoliberalism." At its deepest level,
libertarianism is "a mentality, a mood, a presumption… a prejudice" in favor of the liberation of the
autonomous individual from all constraints originating from received habits, traditions, authorities, or institutions. Libertarianism in this sense fuels the American right's
anti-government furies, but it also animates the left's push for same-sex marriage — and has prepared the way for
its stunningly rapid acceptance — in countries throughout the West. What makes libertarianism a dogma is the inability
or unwillingness of those who espouse it to accept that some people might choose, for morally legitimate reasons, to
dissent from it. On a range of issues, liberals seem not only increasingly incapable of comprehending how or why
someone would affirm a more traditional vision of the human good, but inclined to relegate dissenters to the
category of moral monsters who deserve to be excommunicated from civilized life — and sometimes coerced into
compliance by the government. The latter tendency shows how, paradoxically, the rise of libertarian dogma can have
the practical effect of increasing government power and expanding its scope. This happens when individuals look to the
government to facilitate their own liberation from constraints imposed by private groups, organizations, and institutions within civil society. In such cases, the government
seeks to bring those groups, organizations, and institutions into conformity with uniform standards that
ensure the unobstructed personal liberation of all — even if doing so requires that these private entities
are forced to violate their distinctive visions of the good.
The left uses a debunk moral system to charge Israel and the US with moral crimes
while hiding behind a shield of righteousness
Cravatts, PHD, 12 (Richard, President of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, 3/18/12, “How The
Academic Left Came To Hate Israel”, The Jewish Press, http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/frontpage/how-the-academic-left-came-to-hate-israel/2012/04/18/0/)//WB
The visceral hatred by the Left of its favorite hobgoblins, imperialist America and its codependent
oppressor, Israel, finds similar expression from morally defective professors such as Juan Cole, who in his
writings regularly takes swipes at Israeli and American defenses while simultaneously excusing Arab complicity for violence or terror. In fact, according to
Cole it is the militancy of the West that causes the endemic problems in the Middle East, and makes
America guilty for its moral and financial support of Israel. “When Ariel Sharon sends American-made helicopter gunships and F16s to fire missiles into civilian residences or crowds in streets,” Cole wrote in 2004, “as he has done more than once, then he makes the United States complicit in
his war crimes and makes the United States hated among friends of the Palestinians. And this aggression and disregard of Arab life on the part of the proto-fascist
Israeli Right has gotten more than one American killed, including American soldiers.” This
cultural condescension – the disingenuous lie
from the Left that all cultures are equal but some are more or less equal, to paraphrase Orwell – leads liberals
into a moral trap where they denounce Israel’s military self-defense as being barbaric, criminal, and
Nazi-like (because Israel is a powerful, democratic nation) and regularly excuse or apologize for genocidal Arab terrorism as an acceptable and inevitable result
of a weak people suffering under Western oppression. In fact, when a professor such as Columbia University’s Joseph
Massad writes about Palestinian terror, he essentially justifies it by characterizing the very existence of
Israel as being morally defective, based, in his view, on its inherent racist and imperialist nature. “What the
Palestinians ultimately insist on is that Israel must be taught that it does not have the right to defend its racial supremacy,” Massad wrote during the 2009 Israeli
defensive incursions into Gaza, “and that the Palestinians have the right to defend their universal humanity against Israel’s racist oppression.” The
charge of
racism also enables liberals to excuse the moral transgressions of the oppressed, and, as an extension of
that thinking, to single out Israel and America for particular and harsh scrutiny owing to their perceived
“institutionalized” racism and greater relative power. The self-righteousness leftists feel in pointing out Zionism’s essential defect of being a racist
ideology insulates them from having to also reflect on Arab transgressions, since, as Ruth Wisse pointed out in If I Am Not For Myself: The Liberals Betrayal of the
Jews, liberals can excuse their own betrayal of Israel by holding it fully responsible for the very hatreds it inspires. “Ascribing to Israel the blame for its predicament,
democratic countries can pursue their self-interest free of any lingering moral scruple,” Wisse wrote. “Israel is examined for its every moral failing to justify policies
of disengagement, while the moral failings of Arab countries are considered no one’s business but their own, so that their blatant abuses of human rights should not
get in the way of realpolitick.” Coupled
with academia’s fervent desire to make campuses socially ideal settings where
the other newly-popular impulse to inculcate students with a longing for what
is called “social justice,” a nebulous term lifted from Marxist thought that empowers left-leaning administrators and
faculty with the false ethical security derived from feeling that they are bringing positive moral and
ethical precepts to campuses. For the Left, according to David Horowitz, a former radical leftist turned conservative, social justice is “the concept of a world
racial and cultural strife cease to exist is
divided into oppressors and oppressed.” Those seeking social justice, therefore, do so with the intention of leveling the economic, cultural, and political playing
fields; they seek to reconstruct society in a way that disadvantages the powerful and the elites, and overthrows them if necessary – in order that the dispossessed
and weak can acquire equal standing. In other words, the
Left yearns for a utopian society that does not yet exist, and is
willing to reconstruct and overturn the existing status quo – often at a terrible human cost – in the
pursuit of seeking so-called justice for those who, in their view, have been passed over or abused by history. And in the minds of
academic leftists, there are no superior national behaviors; all nations are equal in value and in the court of world opinion. This
contorted reason is commonly referred to as “moral relativism,” and is a seminal cause of the way Israel’s actions in defending
itself against genocidal Arab aggression over 60 years are seen to be no different from homicide attacks on Israeli civilians initiated by its enemies. This
rationalization, that violence is an acceptable, if not welcomed, component of seeking social justice – that
is, that the inherent “violence” of imperialism, colonialism, or capitalism will be met by the same violence as the oppressed attempt to throw off their oppressors –
is exactly the style of self-defeating rationality that in this age has proven to be an intractable part of the
war on terror. America-hating and Israel-hating academics have not infrequently wished for harm to come to these countries at the hands of the victim
groups to whom they readily give their sympathies.
AT Stuff
AT: Framework = Policing
Acting with a policy rhetoric is the only way to create the change that leftist
philosophers want
McClean, 01 – Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Molloy College, New York
(David E., “The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope,” Presented at the 2001 Annual Conference of the Society
for the Advancement of American Philosophy, www.americanphilosophy.org/archives/past_conference_programs/pc2001/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm)
Our new president, possessing no towering intellect, talks of a people who share a continent, but are not a nation. He is right, of course. We
are
only beginning to learn to put tribal loyalties aside and to let ourselves take
seriously other more salutary possibilities, though we delude ourselves into
believing that we have made great progress. Perhaps so-called "compassionate
conservatism," though a gimmick to win a political contest, will bear a small harvest of unintended and
positive consequences, although I remain dubious about this if the task of thinking
through what it might actually mean remains the chore of George W. Bush. But if the nottoo-Neanderthal-Right is finally willing to meet the not-too-wacky-Left at a place of dialogue somewhere in the "middle," then that is good news,
provided the Left does not miss the opportunity to rendevous. Yet, there is a problem here. Both
the Cultural Left and the
Cultural Right tend to be self-righteous purists. The best chance, then, is for the
emergence of Rorty's new Political Left, in conjunction with a new Political Right .
The new Political Left would be in the better position of the two to frame the discourse since it probably has the better intellectual hardware (it tends to
be more open-minded and less dogmatic) to make a true dialogue work. They,
unlike their Cultural Left peers,
might find it more useful to be a little less inimical and a little more sympathetic to
what the other side might, in good faith, believe is at stake. They might leave
behind some of the baggage of the Cultural Left's endless ruminations (Dewey's philosophical
cud chewing) about commodity fetishization, or whether the Subject has really died, or where crack babies fit into neo-capitalist hegemonies, and
join the political fray by parsing and exposing the more basic idiotic claims and
dogmas of witless politicians and dangerous ideologues, while at the same time finding common ground, a larger "We"
perspective that includes Ronald Reagan and Angela Davis under the same tent rather than as inhabitants of separate worlds. The operative spirit
should be that of fraternal disagreement, rather than self-righteous cold shoulders. Yet I am not at all convinced that anything I have described is about
to happen, though this essay is written to help force the issue, if only a little bit. I
am convinced that the modern
Cultural Left is far from ready to actually run the risks that come with being taken
seriously and held accountable for actual policy-relevant prescriptions. Why should it? It
is a hell of a lot more fun and a lot more safe pondering the intricacies of high
theory, patching together the world a priori
(which means without any real consideration of those officers and
bureaucrats I mentioned who are actually on the front lines of policy formation and regulation). However the
risk in this apriorism
is that both the conclusions and the criticisms will miss the mark, regardless of
how great the minds that are engaged. Intellectual rigor and complexity do not make silly ideas politically salient, or less
pernicious, to paraphrase Rorty. This is not to say that air-headed jingoism and conservative rants about republican virtue aren't equally silly and
pernicious. But it
seems to me that the new public philosopher of the Political Left will
want to pick better yardsticks with which to measure herself. Is it really possible to
philosophize by holding Foucault in one hand and the Code of Federal Regulation
or the Congressional Record in the other? Given that whatever it has meant to be a philosopher has been under siege
at various levels, I see no reason why referring to the way things are actually done in the
actual world (I mean really done, not done as we might imagine) as we think through issues of public
morality and social issues of justice shouldn't be considered a viable alternative to
the way philosophy has proceeded in the past. Instead of replacing epistemology with hermeneutics or God knows
what else as the foundation of philosophical practice, we should move social philosophers in the direction of becoming more like social and cultural
auditors rather than further in the direction of mere culture critics. We
might be able to recast philosophers who
take-up questions of social justice in a serious way as the ones in society able to
traverse not only disciplines but the distances between the towers of the academy
and the bastions of bureaucracies seeking to honestly and sometimes dishonestly
assess both their failings and achievements. This we can do with a special advantage over economists, social
scientists and policy specialists who are apt to take the narrow view of most issues. We do have examples of such persons. John Dewey and Karl Popper
come to mind as but two examples, but in neither case was there enough grasp of the actual workings of social institutions that I believe will be called
for in order to properly minister to a nation in need of helpful philosophical insights in policy formation. Or it may just be that the
real work
will be performed by philosophically grounded and socially engaged practitioners
rather than academics. People like George Soros come to mind here. But there are few people like George Soros around, and I think
that the improbability of philosophers emerging as a special class of social auditor also marks the limits of social hope, inasmuch as philosophers are
the class most likely to see the places at which bridges of true understanding can be built not only between an inimical Right and Left, but between
public policy and the deep and relevant reflections upon our humanity in which philosophers routinely engage. If
philosophers seek
to remain what the public thinks we are anyway, a class of persons of whom it can
be said, as Orwell put it, One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things
like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool, then I do not know from what
other class of persons to turn to navigate the complicated intellectual and
emotional obstacles that prevent us from the achievement of our country. For I do not see
how policy wonks, political hacks, politicians, religious ideologues and special interests will do the work that needs to be done to achieve the kind of
civic consensus envisioned in our Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Without
a courageous new breed of
public intellectual, one that is able to help articulate new visions for community and social well being without fear of reaching out to
others that may not share the narrow views of the Cultural Left and Cultural Right, I do not see how America moves
beyond a mere land of toleration and oligarchy.
Disagreement is central to debate as long as it produces a policy conclusion
Anderson 6 (Amanda Anderson, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University, Spring 2006,
“Reply to My Critic(s),” Criticism, Vol. 48, No. 2, p. 281-290)//WB
MY RECENT BOOK, The Way We Argue Now, has in a sense two theses. In the first place, the
book makes the case for the
importance of debate and argument to any vital democratic or pluralistic
intellectual culture. This is in many ways an unexceptional position, but the premise of the book is that the claims of
reasoned argument are often trumped, within the current intellectual terrain, by
appeals to cultural identity and what I gather more broadly under the rubric of
ethos, which includes cultural identity but also forms of ethical piety and
charismatic authority. In promoting argument as a universal practice keyed to a
human capacity for communicative reason, my book is a critique of relativism and
identity politics, or the notion that forms of cultural authenticity or group identity
have a certain unquestioned legitimacy, one that cannot or should not be subjected
to the challenges of reason or principle, precisely because reason and what is often
called "false universalism" are, according to this pattern of thinking, always
involved in forms of exclusion, power, or domination. My book insists, by contrast, that argument
is a form of respect, that the ideals of democracy, whether conceived from a
nationalist or an internationalist perspective, rely fundamentally upon procedures
of argumentation and debate in order to legitimate themselves and to keep their
central institutions vital. And the idea that one should be protected from debate, that argument is somehow injurious to persons if
it does not honor their desire to have their basic beliefs and claims and solidarities accepted without challenge, is strenuously opposed. As is the notion
that any attempt to ask people to agree upon processes of reason-giving argument is somehow necessarily to impose a coercive norm, one that will
disable the free expression and performance of identities, feelings, or solidarities. Disagreement
is, by the terms of my
book, a form of respect, not a form of disrespect. And by disagreement, I don't
mean simply to say that we should expect disagreement rather than agreement,
which is a frequently voiced-if misconceived-criticism of Habermas. Of course we should expect disagreement. My point is that we should focus on the
moment of dissatisfaction in the face of disagreement-the internal dynamic in argument that imagines argument might be the beginning of a process of
persuasion and exchange that could end in agreement (or partial agreement). For those who advocate reconciling ourselves to disagreements rather
than arguing them out, by contrast, there is a complacent-and in some versions, even celebratory-attitude toward fixed disagreement. Refusing these
options, I make the case for dissatisfied disagreement in the final chapter of the book and argue that people should be willing to justify their positions in
dialogue with one another, especially if they hope to live together in a post-traditional pluralist society. One
example of the
trumping of argument by ethos is the form that was taken by the late stage of the
Foucault/Habermas debate, where an appeal to ethos-specifically, an appeal to Foucault's style of ironic or negative critique,
often seen as most in evidence in the interviews, where he would playfully refuse labels or evade direct answers-was used to exemplify an alternative to
the forms of argument employed by Habermas and like-minded critics. (I should pause to say that I provide this example, and the framing summary of
the book that surrounds it, not to take up airtime through expansive self-reference, but because neither of my respondents provided any contextualizing
summary of the book's central arguments, though one certainly gets an incremental sense of the book's claims from Bruce Robbins. Because I don't
assume that readers of this forum have necessarily read the book, and because I believe that it is the obligation of forum participants to provide
sufficient context for their remarks, I will perform this task as economically as I can, with the recognition that it might have carried more weight if
provided by a respondent rather than the author.) The
Foucauldian counter-critique importantly
emphasizes a relation between style and position, but it obscures (1) the
importance or value of the Habermasian critique and (2) the possibility that the
other side of the debate might have its own ethos to advocate, one that has precisely to do with an
ethos of argument, an ideal of reciprocal debate that involves taking distance on one's pre-given forms of identity or the norms of one's community,
both so as to talk across differences and to articulate one's claims in relation to shared and even universal ideals. And this leads to the second thesis of
the book, the
insistence that an emphasis on ethos and character is interestingly
present if not widely recognized in contemporary theory, and one of the ways its vitality and existential
pertinence makes itself felt (even despite the occurrence of the kinds of unfair trumping moves I have mentioned). We often fail to
notice this, because identity has so uniformly come to mean sociological, ascribed,
or group identity-race, gender, class, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, and so forth.
Instances of the move toward character and ethos include the later Foucault (for whom ethos is a central concept), cosmopolitanism (whose aspiration
it is to turn universalism into an ethos), and, more controversially, proceduralist ethics and politics (with its emphasis on sincerity and civility).
Another version of this attentiveness to ethos and character appears in contemporary pragmatism, with its insistence on casualness of attitude, or
insouciance in the face of contingency-recommendations that get elevated into full-fledged exemplary personae in Richard Rorty's notion of the
"ironist" or Barbara Herrnstein Smiths portrait of the "postmodern skeptic." These examples-and the larger claim they support-are meant to defend
theory as still living, despite the many reports of its demise, and in fact still interestingly and incessantly re-elaborating its relation to practice. This
second aspect of the project is at once descriptive, motivated by the notion that
characterology within theory is intrinsically interesting, and critical, in its attempt to identify how
characterology can itself be used to cover or evade the claims of rational argument, as inappeals to charismatic authority or in what !identify as narrow
personifications of theory (pragmatism, in its insistence on insouciance in the face of contingency, is a prime example of this second form). And
as
a complement to the critical agenda, there is a reconstructive agenda as well, an
attempt to recuperate liberalism and proceduralism, in part by advocating the
possibility, as I have suggested, of an ethos of argument. Robbins, in his extraordinarily rich and
challenging response, zeroes in immediately on a crucial issue: who is to say exactly when
argument is occurring or not, and what do we do when there is disagreement over the fundamentals (the primary one being
over what counts as proper reasoning)? Interestingly, Robbins approaches this issue after first observing a certain tension in the book: on the one hand,
The Way We Argue Now calls for dialogue, debate, argument; on the other, its project is
"potentially something a bit stricter, or pushier: getting us all to agree on what
should and should not count as true argument." What this point of entry into the larger issue reveals is a kind of
blur that the book, I am now aware, invites. On the one hand, the book anatomizes academic debates, and in doing so is quite "debaterly" This can give
the impression that what I mean by argument is a very specific form unique to disciplinary methodologies in higher education. But the book is not
generally advocating a narrow practice of formal and philosophical argumentation in the culture at large, however much its author may relish
adherence to the principle of non-contradiction in scholarly argument. I
take pains to elaborate an ethos of
argument that is linked to democratic debate and the forms of dissent that
constitutional patriotism allows and even promotes. In this sense, while argument here
is necessarily contextualized sociohistorically, the concept is not merely academic .
It is a practice seen as integral to specific political forms and institutions in modern democracies, and to the more general activity of critique within
modern societies-to the tradition of the public sphere, to speak in broad terms. Additionally, insofar as argument
impels one to
take distance on embedded customs, norms, and senses of given identity, it is a
practice that at once acknowledges identity, the need to understand the
perspectives of others, and the shared commitment to commonality and
generality, to finding a way to live together under conditions of difference. More than
this: the book also discusses at great length and from several different angles the issue that
Robbins inexplicably claims I entirely ignore: the question of disagreement about what counts as
argument. In the opening essay, "Debatable Performances," I fault the proponents of communicative ethics for not having a broader
understanding of public expression, one that would include the disruptions of spectacle and performance. I return to and underscore this point in my
final chapter, where I
espouse a democratic politics that can embrace and accommodate a
wide variety of expressions and modes. This is certainly a discussion of what
counts as dialogue and hence argument in the broad sense in which I mean it, and
in fact I fully acknowledge that taking distance from cultural norms and given
identities can be advanced not only through critical reflection, but through ironic
critique and defamiliarizing performance as well. But I do insist-and this is where I take a position on the
fundamental disagreements that have arisen with respect to communicative ethics-that when they have an effect, these other dimensions of experience
do not remain unreflective, and insofar as they do become reflective, they are contributing to the very form of reasoned analysis that their champions
sometimes imagine they must refuse in order to liberate other modes of being (the affective, the narrative, the performative, the nonrational). If
a
narrative of human rights violation is persuasive in court, or in the broader
cultural public sphere, it is because it draws attention to a violation of humanity
that is condemned on principle; if a performance jolts people out of their
normative understandings of sexuality and gender, it prompts forms of
understanding that can be affirmed and communicated and also can be used to
justify political positions and legislative agendas.