LD? More Like (L)D

Lincoln Douglas debate incentivizes a flattening of literature because of a compounded format that cannot fully develop arguments. The compounded nature hollows out debates to solely include a skeleton of the argument, forcing the judge to insert their assumptions around argumentation. This silly situation is a product of a form of debate made for persuasive speaking, arbitrary values, and discussions about the core of the topic that was cut apart and patched back together so that it could fit policy debates and kritikal argumentation. The attempt to force these arguments into a form that cannot fully develop and accommodate the content has caused horrid research, evidence, and competitive practices that inevitably preclude our ability to learn from Lincoln Douglas beyond cursory taglines.

Research practices are distorted because of the lack of accountability for knowledge in a form with such short speech times. Debaters need not fully understand their link chain, theory of power, or syllogism to win. Instead, they need to understand how their argument has been strategically employed in LD debate and the basics of how they can succinctly explain that argument to a judge. For example, an unnamed debater (who has let me use this as an example) won rounds at TOC last year on disability pessimism, with their only prior knowledge coming from lectures given by other debaters. These debates can also be scripted to the point where rebuttals are read entirely off the document because arguments are recycled and easy to predict. On the other hand, it’s also harmful to attempt to fully explain an author's literature in a couple of minutes. In this way, understanding an argument entirely becomes a bonus and not a precondition to debating it.

Additionally, this condition of judge adaptation is exceptionally harmful to innovative and new arguments being read on the circuit. Debaters can get away with lackluster explanations for ideas that have been read for years or are standard on the circuit because judges are already familiar with those arguments before stepping foot in the room, which means they can fill in the gaps. Alternatively, new ideas are held to a higher bar for an explanation. This is why non-Kantian, Hobbesian, or Libertarian philosophy has largely died out; these philosophical concepts are entirely foreign to judges and are thus not nearly as strategic to read. The lack of encouragement for innovation is apparent if you read many judge paradigms – they may recommend that you rate them highly for a stock Kantian and Utilitarian debate but will struggle to evaluate any other type of philosophical debate. Problems with innovation and argumentative understanding feed into each other, the lack of innovation is to blame for why it is so easy to script speeches, while the scripting of speeches and repetition of debates is to blame for the lack of innovation.

Evidence practices in LD are also pretty terrible. The most common and overlooked practice in LD is under highlighting. Many cards being read in constructives have been de-highlighted such that they do not have a warrant. The incentive to dehighlight comes from the lack of time in rounds to read full cards. This issue is most prevalent in impact evidence. I very commonly see debaters reading evidence that says nuke war, biodiversity, etc., leads to extinction, but the warrant in the evidence is either highlighted to ignore the preface to the extinction scenario that speaks to how unlikely (but still possible) that extinction event is, or the warrant in the evidence amounts to the event and the word extinction without any warrant to bridge that gap. This issue also exists with much Kritikal evidence since there is no time to flesh out a complete theory of power, multiple links, an impact, alternative, and ballot framing arguments, along with a case push in 7 minutes. This means that Kritiks either miss essential warrants and ideas within the literature or a structural component (the link, alternative, impact, or ballot framing). This is true if you examine the average piece of Mollow or Edelman evidence read in LD and attempt to decipher a coherent warrant. These highlighting practices make debate less accessible to newer debaters because reading and listening to the highlighted pieces of evidence is insufficient to understand and refute them (since they do not include a coherent warrant). Instead, prior knowledge of how they are strategically employed is key to engagement in the debate round.

Competitive incentives have led to nonsense arguments that are read to win rounds or skew time because of the lack of testing and shortened speech times. Arguments that exist almost entirely in LD –  frivolous theory and tricks – are only able to thrive because the format is such that they create a positive time skew, especially against newer debaters, even if they are not the chosen path to the ballot. Nonsense paradoxes and one-liner theory arguments are strategic because they take very little time to read and are an easy path to the ballot if conceded, thus making them strategic arguments to read against less technical debaters. Tricks are especially strategic because of how limited speech times are; even small time skews can significantly impact the debate's direction.

Next, I'd like to turn the conversation to the demonization of the Kritik, which happens especially in discussions around bastardization of literature. It is commonly asserted that Kritiks cannot be read properly in LD because there is never a moment where debaters can explain the theory of power and its implications. While I believe this to be true, it is not unique to the Kritik. In LD policy debates there is always a broader framework that would justify why policy solutions are good that can never be developed and rarely even gets mentioned in LD. The perpetuation of tricks and theory is a product of insufficient testing because in a format where people can adequately flesh out arguments almost any procedural I have read this season wouldn't win rounds. Lastly, philosophy. Philosophy has become so completely bastardized to the point where entire philosophical positions, like pragmatism, have become a shell to hide as many tricks as possible. Each philosophy is grounded in centuries of writing that is impossible to squeeze into a tiny window. In this respect, philosophy falls into the problems of both the Kritik and tricks.

Since I believe that progressive LD is a failed experiment and an awful attempt at creating a mini-policy debate, we should just have fun. Since almost every argument read on the circuit lacks time to be developed in an educational aspect and tested properly, we should have fun exploiting the carcass of the experiment that was LD debate.

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