Check Out The New Slow Boring Piece About Debate

It's really good

How critical theory is radicalizing high school debate

Maya Bodnick—an intern at Slow Boring—has just written an article about debate. It’s very good and worth checking out. It also quotes me favorably, so it can’t be bad! The basic point of the article is, I think, true. Debate used to focus on very detailed discussions of policy. As a result, debaters who graduated became journalists, professors of political science, lawyers, and politicians.

Now, however, debate has become largely about postmodernism and critical theory. This has made it so that lots of successful debaters see politics as objectionable. Their politics is so radical, that they oppose modest, incremental reform. As a result, rather than doing anything to actually move the ball on policy, they—to the extent that they succeed in the unbelievably competitive arena of academia—become radicals in academia.

By making debate mostly about critical theory, debaters become anti-capitalist radicals—who think that it’s plausible that the world improving for black people is genuinely impossible. They become convinced of oodles of bad ideas and, because these ideas succeed in debate, they think they’re correct.

The paradigm example of what debaters become after debate has shifted. They no longer are like Matt Yglesias or Kelsey Piper. They now become academics or racial sensitivity trainers. Rather than thinking about the complex and detailed questions of how to effectively better the world, they become political nihilists, wanting to burn everything to the ground. Debaters become trapped in an echo-chamber full of faux radicalism and bad ideas. Debate has been impoverished by its current tendencies which produce fewer Matt Yglesiases and more Robin DiAngelos.