Wow, just out of nowhere, Marxism has made it into our high schools. Damn. The rampant dumbassery that passes for moderate leftism, a/k/a old school liberals, knows no bounds. Liberals tolerated the radical left for decades because in close elections, the Marxists could cover the margin. But, no surprise here, the old schoolers lacked and continue to lack the backbone to reject radicalism. Now they are becoming the junior partners. In time, they will be managing the gulags. Idiots.
I find it odd to characterize the K as an elite tool or inaccessible to less privileged students. At least when I was debating 12ish years ago, the amount of research needed to win a negative round based on counter plans and disadvantages (traditional policy arguments) meant that debate required a large amount of time spent researching, especially making sure your arguments were updated to as close as possible to the day of the round. At my well funded program, we each spent hours on research and also had multiple coaches who performed research for us so we could run arguments such as "government spending is bad" or "political capital should be directed towards a different priority than the resolution". The schools that lacked resources could use the kritik to sidestep the judging paradigm of "who has the most recent, extensive, and convincing research to present". Also, I think there's a distinction between rounds where a kritik is introduced alongside other arguments, which was common, or teams that exclusively run a Marxism k for their entire speech time regardless of what the affirmative case is or what year it is. "Protect students from ideas" to me is antithetical to the point of debate. Fwiw I have grown up to find theory very tiring and my politics is much more based on state action to improve outcomes than the idea of a revolution or whatever. But I think exposure to these ideas is good.
This is what happens when life has reached a sort of ease that you can't be bothered to wonder if other people might not actually be evil. Arguing a point that might be associated with 'the other team' is unconscionable. You couldn't argue for keeping the minimum wage low, that sounds Republican, so you stick with your tribe and go all afro-pessimist on the poor bastard that just made a good argument for a minimum wage hike.
This is a good example of the fact that when people polarize themselves, they tend to go further to the extreme. It is happening on both sides.
This is unrecognizable from when I did Lincoln-Douglas back in high school (and occasionally judged in college, maybe the only STEM major who did) back in the '90s.
When I judged, I used to just toss arguments that veered off-topic.
"Western societies are structured on Enlightenment-era philosophy that fundamentally does not value Black people as people, and defines them as slaves. Even though documents like the Constitution have been amended to end slavery, it created a society that is rotten to the core, and the only way to fix it is to burn down civil society."
Counter-Argument: The Second Law of Thermodynamics will result in the heat-death of the universe anyway, so this kritiks argument doesn't matter in the big picture. Checkmate.
The problem of course is the chickensh*t judges who won't give these losers an "F" for failing the assignment. Soft bigotry of low expectations, indeed.
This is a really interesting post! I totally agree with your arguments that debate matters for American politics and I appreciate your points there.
I have a few questions about the methodology when it comes to Public Forum (PF) debate:
1. How complete is the data underlying the first graph for PF? To my knowledge, I am the only person who posted a video of a semifinal or final round in PF at the 2016 Tournament of Champions, meaning the dataset is missing at least two debates.
2. How many total debates constitute the 12.5% of semifinal/final rounds of the TOC in PF that featured critical theory from 2015-2023? There were 18 semifinal and 9 final rounds at the TOC over that time period, so by my count that means the raw total is 3.375 debates. Am I off or is this just three debates?
3. What are the criteria by which you determine if a PF judge at the 2023 TOC said they were willing to vote for critical theory? Does it count if a judge says they will consider critical theory arguments like any other? Or that they don't like them but won't ignore them? What if the judge doesn't say how they feel about kritiks in Public Forum specifically and the paradigm is clearly copied from when they judged a different event?
Going through the list of paradigms, it seems like there’s a big grey area. One judge (whose paradigm was clearly copied and pasted from when they judge Lincoln-Douglas) wrote “I think I am an ok judge for critical arguments” – does that count as the judge saying they are willing to vote for critical theory? Another says “I would prefer if you don't read theory or kritiks (but I'll try my best to evaluate them)” – does that count too?
For context, I have a deep background in Public Forum. As a Public Forum debater, I was in elimination rounds of the Tournament of Champions and won several national tournaments as well as a state championship; as a coach, I have worked at multiple successful schools and helped several teams reach elimination rounds of the TOC; as a camp instructor, I have worked at some of the top debate camps in the country for Public Forum; I have also judged at many tournaments including elimination rounds of the TOC.
Based on my ten years of experience in and around Public Forum, I am not all that persuaded by this post. Critical theory is more common today in PF then it was ten years ago, but it is still extremely uncommon. The Public Forum debater who is quoted in the post is highly unrepresentative of the event as a whole (which makes sense, given that they were in the top 4 in the country)—I would estimate that in at least 90% of PF tournaments, debaters do not need to know critical theory or be prepared to respond to it in order to win.
Here are a few more related thoughts that I expanded on in a twitter thread (twitter.com/kevin_klyman/status/1685760465509474304?s=20); sorry if the criticism is a bit sharp, it's my nature as a debater to make the argument as full-throatedly as I can 😅
1. It’s misleading to say that TOC elimination rounds are an imperfect representation of local debate leagues for Public Forum—they are an entirely inaccurate representation of nearly every other Public Forum tournament in the country. The TOC is the most elite tournament in the country with only about 100 teams competing in Public Forum. Minus a few other national tournaments, the competitors, judges, and norms, as well as the strategies that succeed, are quite different than for other competitions.
2. There are many factors that make Public Forum different from Policy/Lincoln-Douglas that make some of the points in the piece not apply to PF, such as the affirmative/negative split, a less uniform culture of watching and learning from debate videos, different norms around how judges write and disclose their paradigms, different rules for judging the debate, etc.
3. Public Forum is overwhelmingly judged by inexperienced parents, meaning that critical theory does not work as a strategy even at the national level. A team competing at the Illinois state tournament would lose every debate if they tried to emulate TOC elimination rounds (critical theory-laden or otherwise) because they are being judged by parents who may not even know how to take good notes.
4. Paradigms from the TOC in Public Forum are such a noisy and messy dataset that they are not a good basis for assessing trends in the event (even if the dataset was larger than just one year). Some judge's paradigms are just one sentence long, others are copied verbatim from when they judge other events (meaning that when they give an oral paradigm ahead of the round it likely differs), and others haven't been updated in 5+ years (see the list here https://www.tabroom.com/index/tourn/paradigms.mhtml?category_id=63121&tourn_id=24340). In any case, the sample size here of 57 TOC judges who said they would vote for critical theory arguments (45% of total of 128 in PF) is too small to make any sweeping claims. There are thousands of people who judge PF each year—this looks more like a rounding error than evidence that "critical theory has started to invade Public Forum."
5. Generalizing about the state of an extracurricular that thousands of students take part in from such a small sample size of rounds and paradigms is a bit much for me. The tone of the article doesn't match the experience of the vast majority of people competing in, judging, and watching Public Forum debate every year. I have seen no evidence that PF is trending towards being "societally rejectionist" or leading students to "to advocate for nihilist accelerationism in order to win rounds."
I am not an expert in Policy, Lincoln-Douglas, or Parliamentary debate so I will refrain from commenting on those debate formats. But my bottom line is that the post does not have enough evidence to prove its point when it comes to Public Forum.
Can ... someone explain to me how this happened? I've never been in a debate club, so maybe I just don't know how this works, but I genuinely don't understand. When this trend was first starting, why were students permitted to just ... not engage with the topic they were assigned to debate? Why were judges and the societies/clubs as a whole okay with that? These were school activities, right? Why were teachers on board with people just deciding not to do their assignments and do a different assignment instead? And now that the trend has taken hold, why are the administrators okay with judges admitting that they won't judge fairly? Why were these people accepted as judges in the first place? What are the prompts for argument like at this point? Have they shifted what kinds of arguments they tell people to make, or are they still the same kinds of prompts, but many positions are just not possible to argue under these conditions? I legitimately don't understand.
Fascinating, disturbing post. Fairly mediocre HS debater, reminds me of my much better partner who would run numerous “independent topicality attacks” which obviously would not fly today. (I was more respectable at Extemp - btw, in the early 80’s they still had “Boys Extemp” and “Girls Extemp.”)
Nonetheless - the analogue to this debating trend is government policy making that is not designed to actually work but is designed for superficial appeal only. Why bother trying to solve difficult problems when you can just change the subject and float a vaguely popular notion?
I enjoyed this. Back when I did policy in HS the K was becoming more and more accepted. Coming from a smaller school, they were one asymmetric tactic to use against teams from larger programs that had the best / update to date evidence, sometimes passed down from alums in college programs or otherwise curated for years. Another quirk we tried was just getting really good at topicality arguments.
Personally, it was a bit of a mind fuck reading a bunch of authors without the lived or intellectual maturity to fully comprehend the authors, but I’m glad I got to read bell hooks, Zizek, Lacan, Foucault, Baudrillard... at 16 or so. As another commenter mentioned, people would try to apply the bodycount method using a K on us. Smart judges would ask at that point if anybody knew what the hell they were citing in those types of rounds.
We were never true believers, I guess. As another example, we were perfectly happy to take either side of the NATO argument and go either full realist or full neo lib depending on the judge. I’m sure lots of us got flashbacks to a particular Walter Russel Mead card in the past year or two. Anyway, I do think this was net harmful for me in the short term because my personal identity kind of wavered in between some leftist ideal of what I should be versus the very real desires to be the first one in my family to graduate college, and make a shit ton of money afterwards.
I never did great on the national circuit but did well enough locally to be accepted to some very good summer camps. A good amount of people who attended went to elite colleges and now have so-called elite careers, I guess. I have a good memory for names, so every once in a while I’ll see one that I remember from debate writing in the national discourse somewhere (or popping up as a job candidate after business school, one time).
I’ll always remember the kid who’s summer fame was based on hugging Zizek in some low budget doc in the early war on terror years.
Terrific article that explains a lot, from uncompromising “woke” behavior on campus to the utter distrust of standard media and political leadership among younger adults as well as students. What is omitted, essentially, is the possibility that right wing extremism among younger politicians and conservative personalities is analogous: every policy question is subordinated to religious (Christian) and traditional (racist) critique. We can recognize that fundamentalist Christianity and White supremacy are every bit as ideological, and not subject to discussion, as are neo-Marxism and Black Pessimism. Finally, I have long wondered whether education in “critical thinking” in secondary schools went off the rails, by substituting argument for judgement.
I never did competitive debate myself, but from all of your examples, it seems like there's a fatal flaw, in that the debaters weren't given a well defined prompt.
Whenever a prompt uses the word "should" (as in, "The U.S. should increase the federal minimum wage", or "The U.S. should increase troops in the Korean DMZ", you force all participants (both debate teams, and the judges) to bring their own assumptions about what the goal is. And as long as different participants are operating on different assumptions, you cannot possibly expect a rational discussion to take place.
There are two ways to address this problem. One way to address it is by explicitly stating a goal. For example, if the prompt is "The U.S. should increase troops in the Korean DMZ", you could say that the goal is to "minimize the probability of nuclear warfare over the next 50 years". Or you could say that the goal is to "improve the U.S. relationship with China". Once you explicitly state the assumed goal, then critical theories don't matter, and the only thing that's important to the debate is actual knowledge about history and diplomacy.
The other way to address the problem is with a more direct prompt. For instance, rather than saying "The U.S. should increase troops in the Korean DMZ", you would say, "If the U.S. increased troops in the Korean DMZ, it would improve U.S. relations with China". Now that's something you can actually debate logically.
But if you ever use the word "should" in the prompt, it essentially guarantees that different participants bring different assumptions. And if different participants bring different assumptions, that, in turn, guarantees that the debate will not be logical. Or at least it won't be about the actual topic.
The broader question of what our goals "should" be as a society, is of course an important question. But it needs to be its own question. Not just an unstated assumption of a different question. It seems to me like that's the only way you can solve this problem of critical theory taking over competetive debate. And it's also the only way to improve debate and discourse in public life.
Remember this: All debate is worthless if all parties don't agree on the assumptions!
1.) I understand where all these radicalized tots are coming from. They're not wrong that there is an immorally-driven bunch of lunatics out there trying to oppress us all, that the land they stand on wouldn't be theirs to inhabit without some amount of historical injustice, and that much of the way the global economy/system is run needs a thorough rethinking. That's more true the more unaccountable power Trumpists and their allies garner for themselves.
2.) But. . . but but BUT. You're not going to remedy all that by burning the system down and starting a revolution, from the debate stage or anywhere else.
Ironically, one tends to fix the radicalizing problem solely with boring normie politics and within the "eStAbLiShMeNt". Counterintuitive, and hard to believe for many of these passionate, loquacious children, but true.
Also,
3.) One thing I love to harp on about the Bernie-fied left is how they see the world as a "debating society". They love to argue and prove how right they are, and imagine that proving how right you are in public is how politics and policy are won. Had no idea how literally they took that notion.
I moved to the US for college in 2008 after doing a lot of British Parliamentary debate during high school in the UK. I found US-style debate baffling, partly due to the use of Kritiks which seemed sophomoric to me but won people debates nonetheless. Sorry to hear it's even more entrenched now but glad US Parliamentary is taking a stand against it
Wow, just out of nowhere, Marxism has made it into our high schools. Damn. The rampant dumbassery that passes for moderate leftism, a/k/a old school liberals, knows no bounds. Liberals tolerated the radical left for decades because in close elections, the Marxists could cover the margin. But, no surprise here, the old schoolers lacked and continue to lack the backbone to reject radicalism. Now they are becoming the junior partners. In time, they will be managing the gulags. Idiots.
I find it odd to characterize the K as an elite tool or inaccessible to less privileged students. At least when I was debating 12ish years ago, the amount of research needed to win a negative round based on counter plans and disadvantages (traditional policy arguments) meant that debate required a large amount of time spent researching, especially making sure your arguments were updated to as close as possible to the day of the round. At my well funded program, we each spent hours on research and also had multiple coaches who performed research for us so we could run arguments such as "government spending is bad" or "political capital should be directed towards a different priority than the resolution". The schools that lacked resources could use the kritik to sidestep the judging paradigm of "who has the most recent, extensive, and convincing research to present". Also, I think there's a distinction between rounds where a kritik is introduced alongside other arguments, which was common, or teams that exclusively run a Marxism k for their entire speech time regardless of what the affirmative case is or what year it is. "Protect students from ideas" to me is antithetical to the point of debate. Fwiw I have grown up to find theory very tiring and my politics is much more based on state action to improve outcomes than the idea of a revolution or whatever. But I think exposure to these ideas is good.
This is what happens when life has reached a sort of ease that you can't be bothered to wonder if other people might not actually be evil. Arguing a point that might be associated with 'the other team' is unconscionable. You couldn't argue for keeping the minimum wage low, that sounds Republican, so you stick with your tribe and go all afro-pessimist on the poor bastard that just made a good argument for a minimum wage hike.
This is a good example of the fact that when people polarize themselves, they tend to go further to the extreme. It is happening on both sides.
This is unrecognizable from when I did Lincoln-Douglas back in high school (and occasionally judged in college, maybe the only STEM major who did) back in the '90s.
When I judged, I used to just toss arguments that veered off-topic.
"Western societies are structured on Enlightenment-era philosophy that fundamentally does not value Black people as people, and defines them as slaves. Even though documents like the Constitution have been amended to end slavery, it created a society that is rotten to the core, and the only way to fix it is to burn down civil society."
Counter-Argument: The Second Law of Thermodynamics will result in the heat-death of the universe anyway, so this kritiks argument doesn't matter in the big picture. Checkmate.
The problem of course is the chickensh*t judges who won't give these losers an "F" for failing the assignment. Soft bigotry of low expectations, indeed.
This is a really interesting post! I totally agree with your arguments that debate matters for American politics and I appreciate your points there.
I have a few questions about the methodology when it comes to Public Forum (PF) debate:
1. How complete is the data underlying the first graph for PF? To my knowledge, I am the only person who posted a video of a semifinal or final round in PF at the 2016 Tournament of Champions, meaning the dataset is missing at least two debates.
2. How many total debates constitute the 12.5% of semifinal/final rounds of the TOC in PF that featured critical theory from 2015-2023? There were 18 semifinal and 9 final rounds at the TOC over that time period, so by my count that means the raw total is 3.375 debates. Am I off or is this just three debates?
3. What are the criteria by which you determine if a PF judge at the 2023 TOC said they were willing to vote for critical theory? Does it count if a judge says they will consider critical theory arguments like any other? Or that they don't like them but won't ignore them? What if the judge doesn't say how they feel about kritiks in Public Forum specifically and the paradigm is clearly copied from when they judged a different event?
Going through the list of paradigms, it seems like there’s a big grey area. One judge (whose paradigm was clearly copied and pasted from when they judge Lincoln-Douglas) wrote “I think I am an ok judge for critical arguments” – does that count as the judge saying they are willing to vote for critical theory? Another says “I would prefer if you don't read theory or kritiks (but I'll try my best to evaluate them)” – does that count too?
For context, I have a deep background in Public Forum. As a Public Forum debater, I was in elimination rounds of the Tournament of Champions and won several national tournaments as well as a state championship; as a coach, I have worked at multiple successful schools and helped several teams reach elimination rounds of the TOC; as a camp instructor, I have worked at some of the top debate camps in the country for Public Forum; I have also judged at many tournaments including elimination rounds of the TOC.
Based on my ten years of experience in and around Public Forum, I am not all that persuaded by this post. Critical theory is more common today in PF then it was ten years ago, but it is still extremely uncommon. The Public Forum debater who is quoted in the post is highly unrepresentative of the event as a whole (which makes sense, given that they were in the top 4 in the country)—I would estimate that in at least 90% of PF tournaments, debaters do not need to know critical theory or be prepared to respond to it in order to win.
Here are a few more related thoughts that I expanded on in a twitter thread (twitter.com/kevin_klyman/status/1685760465509474304?s=20); sorry if the criticism is a bit sharp, it's my nature as a debater to make the argument as full-throatedly as I can 😅
1. It’s misleading to say that TOC elimination rounds are an imperfect representation of local debate leagues for Public Forum—they are an entirely inaccurate representation of nearly every other Public Forum tournament in the country. The TOC is the most elite tournament in the country with only about 100 teams competing in Public Forum. Minus a few other national tournaments, the competitors, judges, and norms, as well as the strategies that succeed, are quite different than for other competitions.
2. There are many factors that make Public Forum different from Policy/Lincoln-Douglas that make some of the points in the piece not apply to PF, such as the affirmative/negative split, a less uniform culture of watching and learning from debate videos, different norms around how judges write and disclose their paradigms, different rules for judging the debate, etc.
3. Public Forum is overwhelmingly judged by inexperienced parents, meaning that critical theory does not work as a strategy even at the national level. A team competing at the Illinois state tournament would lose every debate if they tried to emulate TOC elimination rounds (critical theory-laden or otherwise) because they are being judged by parents who may not even know how to take good notes.
4. Paradigms from the TOC in Public Forum are such a noisy and messy dataset that they are not a good basis for assessing trends in the event (even if the dataset was larger than just one year). Some judge's paradigms are just one sentence long, others are copied verbatim from when they judge other events (meaning that when they give an oral paradigm ahead of the round it likely differs), and others haven't been updated in 5+ years (see the list here https://www.tabroom.com/index/tourn/paradigms.mhtml?category_id=63121&tourn_id=24340). In any case, the sample size here of 57 TOC judges who said they would vote for critical theory arguments (45% of total of 128 in PF) is too small to make any sweeping claims. There are thousands of people who judge PF each year—this looks more like a rounding error than evidence that "critical theory has started to invade Public Forum."
5. Generalizing about the state of an extracurricular that thousands of students take part in from such a small sample size of rounds and paradigms is a bit much for me. The tone of the article doesn't match the experience of the vast majority of people competing in, judging, and watching Public Forum debate every year. I have seen no evidence that PF is trending towards being "societally rejectionist" or leading students to "to advocate for nihilist accelerationism in order to win rounds."
6. In terms of nihilism, there are many many other more significant causes. See https://twitter.com/erikmbaker/status/1685779979366289408?s=20.
I am not an expert in Policy, Lincoln-Douglas, or Parliamentary debate so I will refrain from commenting on those debate formats. But my bottom line is that the post does not have enough evidence to prove its point when it comes to Public Forum.
Can ... someone explain to me how this happened? I've never been in a debate club, so maybe I just don't know how this works, but I genuinely don't understand. When this trend was first starting, why were students permitted to just ... not engage with the topic they were assigned to debate? Why were judges and the societies/clubs as a whole okay with that? These were school activities, right? Why were teachers on board with people just deciding not to do their assignments and do a different assignment instead? And now that the trend has taken hold, why are the administrators okay with judges admitting that they won't judge fairly? Why were these people accepted as judges in the first place? What are the prompts for argument like at this point? Have they shifted what kinds of arguments they tell people to make, or are they still the same kinds of prompts, but many positions are just not possible to argue under these conditions? I legitimately don't understand.
Fascinating, disturbing post. Fairly mediocre HS debater, reminds me of my much better partner who would run numerous “independent topicality attacks” which obviously would not fly today. (I was more respectable at Extemp - btw, in the early 80’s they still had “Boys Extemp” and “Girls Extemp.”)
Nonetheless - the analogue to this debating trend is government policy making that is not designed to actually work but is designed for superficial appeal only. Why bother trying to solve difficult problems when you can just change the subject and float a vaguely popular notion?
I enjoyed this. Back when I did policy in HS the K was becoming more and more accepted. Coming from a smaller school, they were one asymmetric tactic to use against teams from larger programs that had the best / update to date evidence, sometimes passed down from alums in college programs or otherwise curated for years. Another quirk we tried was just getting really good at topicality arguments.
Personally, it was a bit of a mind fuck reading a bunch of authors without the lived or intellectual maturity to fully comprehend the authors, but I’m glad I got to read bell hooks, Zizek, Lacan, Foucault, Baudrillard... at 16 or so. As another commenter mentioned, people would try to apply the bodycount method using a K on us. Smart judges would ask at that point if anybody knew what the hell they were citing in those types of rounds.
We were never true believers, I guess. As another example, we were perfectly happy to take either side of the NATO argument and go either full realist or full neo lib depending on the judge. I’m sure lots of us got flashbacks to a particular Walter Russel Mead card in the past year or two. Anyway, I do think this was net harmful for me in the short term because my personal identity kind of wavered in between some leftist ideal of what I should be versus the very real desires to be the first one in my family to graduate college, and make a shit ton of money afterwards.
I never did great on the national circuit but did well enough locally to be accepted to some very good summer camps. A good amount of people who attended went to elite colleges and now have so-called elite careers, I guess. I have a good memory for names, so every once in a while I’ll see one that I remember from debate writing in the national discourse somewhere (or popping up as a job candidate after business school, one time).
I’ll always remember the kid who’s summer fame was based on hugging Zizek in some low budget doc in the early war on terror years.
haha I need an explainer about the speed debate phenomenon, like wtf!?
At the top of the Wikipedia entry on critical theory:
“Not to be confused with critical thinking.”
Hehe
Terrific article that explains a lot, from uncompromising “woke” behavior on campus to the utter distrust of standard media and political leadership among younger adults as well as students. What is omitted, essentially, is the possibility that right wing extremism among younger politicians and conservative personalities is analogous: every policy question is subordinated to religious (Christian) and traditional (racist) critique. We can recognize that fundamentalist Christianity and White supremacy are every bit as ideological, and not subject to discussion, as are neo-Marxism and Black Pessimism. Finally, I have long wondered whether education in “critical thinking” in secondary schools went off the rails, by substituting argument for judgement.
I just want to say thank you for convincing me to never let me kids do Debate.
I never did competitive debate myself, but from all of your examples, it seems like there's a fatal flaw, in that the debaters weren't given a well defined prompt.
Whenever a prompt uses the word "should" (as in, "The U.S. should increase the federal minimum wage", or "The U.S. should increase troops in the Korean DMZ", you force all participants (both debate teams, and the judges) to bring their own assumptions about what the goal is. And as long as different participants are operating on different assumptions, you cannot possibly expect a rational discussion to take place.
There are two ways to address this problem. One way to address it is by explicitly stating a goal. For example, if the prompt is "The U.S. should increase troops in the Korean DMZ", you could say that the goal is to "minimize the probability of nuclear warfare over the next 50 years". Or you could say that the goal is to "improve the U.S. relationship with China". Once you explicitly state the assumed goal, then critical theories don't matter, and the only thing that's important to the debate is actual knowledge about history and diplomacy.
The other way to address the problem is with a more direct prompt. For instance, rather than saying "The U.S. should increase troops in the Korean DMZ", you would say, "If the U.S. increased troops in the Korean DMZ, it would improve U.S. relations with China". Now that's something you can actually debate logically.
But if you ever use the word "should" in the prompt, it essentially guarantees that different participants bring different assumptions. And if different participants bring different assumptions, that, in turn, guarantees that the debate will not be logical. Or at least it won't be about the actual topic.
The broader question of what our goals "should" be as a society, is of course an important question. But it needs to be its own question. Not just an unstated assumption of a different question. It seems to me like that's the only way you can solve this problem of critical theory taking over competetive debate. And it's also the only way to improve debate and discourse in public life.
Remember this: All debate is worthless if all parties don't agree on the assumptions!
The weird thing is,
1.) I understand where all these radicalized tots are coming from. They're not wrong that there is an immorally-driven bunch of lunatics out there trying to oppress us all, that the land they stand on wouldn't be theirs to inhabit without some amount of historical injustice, and that much of the way the global economy/system is run needs a thorough rethinking. That's more true the more unaccountable power Trumpists and their allies garner for themselves.
2.) But. . . but but BUT. You're not going to remedy all that by burning the system down and starting a revolution, from the debate stage or anywhere else.
Ironically, one tends to fix the radicalizing problem solely with boring normie politics and within the "eStAbLiShMeNt". Counterintuitive, and hard to believe for many of these passionate, loquacious children, but true.
Also,
3.) One thing I love to harp on about the Bernie-fied left is how they see the world as a "debating society". They love to argue and prove how right they are, and imagine that proving how right you are in public is how politics and policy are won. Had no idea how literally they took that notion.
I moved to the US for college in 2008 after doing a lot of British Parliamentary debate during high school in the UK. I found US-style debate baffling, partly due to the use of Kritiks which seemed sophomoric to me but won people debates nonetheless. Sorry to hear it's even more entrenched now but glad US Parliamentary is taking a stand against it