There But For the Grace of God

Over at the bad place, Batya Ungar-Sargon is mainlining copium to explain Donald Trump's debate performance.

My take on the debate is that Harris did well because she's a factory settings Democratic apparatchik, and the main skill for doing that well is one she's good at: acting, pretending the neoliberal (or now neoconservative!) agenda of the Democratic elite is your own,…

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) September 11, 2024

Ah yes, that explains it. Donald Trump is just too pure authentic for this world. His raw untamable independent streak just couldn't be corralled to please "the elites" ("on either side"!). Harris gets "if anything, she was too prepared" version 2.0. It's amazing how hard one has to work to avoid the Occam's Razor explanation* that Trump sounded like a madman because he is one; that Trump's inability to articulate a concept of a plan for America beyond crude xenophobic nativism is because he lacks one.

Batya's descent into utter madness brain worms territory (which has been ongoing for years, including being a key player making Newsweek the house journal for the alt-right and antisemitic White supremacists and parroting the crudest Putinist propaganda about how funding of "Zelensky's War" is why Americans don't have manufacturing jobs) legitimately frightens me, because I don't know what zombie bit her and so I don't know how to ensure it doesn't bite me too. My main inference right now is "don't become opinion editor for a Jewish media outlet", because it was her experience at the Forward that seemed to drive her into the arms of madness, but I'm terrified that if exposed to the wrong trauma I too might go from being a reasonable intelligent and thoughtful commentator to a true believer in every fever swamp inanity imaginable.

I'm not really exposed to Batya these days, since she's not on BlueSky. There's a line on BlueSky that it's an echo chamber, and that's something I worry about too -- isn't it important that I be exposed to more views like Batya's, to ensure that I'm not cocooning myself in an epistemic bubble? The problem, though, is that while when I expose myself to the Batya's of the world I may pat myself on the back for being a good, virtuous epistemic citizen willing to challenge myself with views-not-my-own, in reality exposing myself to the likes of Batya feels less challenging than it is confirmatory. Reading her takes only makes me feel incredibly relieved that I don't have her takes. She is anti-persuasive. 

If the point of reading diverse views is to have that "huh, I never thought of it that way" moment, reading these people makes me go "huh, turns out that the caricatured mental model I have of brain-rotted right-wingers isn't a caricature at all." They're saying exactly what I expect them to say; there are no surprises. I'm unconvinced that confirming that instinct is actually healthier, even along the axis of remaining open-minded to divergent opinions.

* Of course, this circle also struggles mightily to understand what an "Occam's Razor" explanation is.

UPDATE: Matt Taibbi got bit as well.

UPDATE 2x: The Taibbi piece, in particular, reminded me of an exchange I had with an old high school buddy of mine who sadly has also gone off the deep end. He posted a collage of various media outlets all reporting on the travails of Twitter/X under Elon Musk -- that it had cratered in value and become a haven for bigots and extremists. He decided that the fact that similar reporting was appearing across many different media outlets could only mean one thing: a conspiracy by the legacy media to collude in order to slander Elon Musk's reputation. I sarcastically wondered if he saw a similar conspiracy in the fact that every Atlas will tell you the capital of Norway is Oslo, or every science textbook will inform you that the Earth rotates around the Sun. 

He said "I bet you think you're so smart." I assured him that I never dreamed that my observation required any intelligence whatsoever.

The Debate Link: Origins

This blog is called The Debate Link.

That's no accident.

I started this blog when I was eighteen, just after graduation, when debate was the activity that most defined my high school experience. It was something I did nearly every weekend for four years, travelling all across the country. I was nationally-ranked. I won tournaments at both the local and national level. I wasn't just a "debater". I was, if I do say so myself, a pretty elite debater.

This blog was in many ways a continuation of that experience, and an attempt to fill its void. Its initial tagline was "The arguments, made by and for the debating public." In fact, here's my very first post, from way back in 2004:

Hey everyone! My name is David, and I am an ex-debater from Bethesda MD. My 4 years of debate has given me a healthy appreciation of the issues that concern America, and a desire to share some of the better arguments on some those issues I've come accross during those years. So hopefully, whenever I come up with a good idea (or stumble across someone else's), I'll post it on here.

See you soon,

David

(How adorable was I? Seriously.)

It is impossible to overstate the degree to which high school debate was formative in my life. It taught me how to think. It taught me how to write. It generated friendships that persist to this day. It even, indirectly, made me realize I wanted to be a law professor. There are few facets of David Schraub 2023 that are not in some way traceable to David Schraub, high school debater.

High school debate is having a moment in the news, prompted by this article by James Fishback chronicling an alleged takeover of the events by the radical left. I want to comment on his piece and his allegations, as well as on some commentary given by Kristen Soltis Anderson, who I knew and competed against in my generation of debate.

There are few reasons to read Fishback's account with grains of salt, beyond the obvious fact that he is at the helm of an insurgent competitor to the established National Speech and Debate Association (formerly known as the National Forensics League) and so has a vested incentive in undermining it.

First, whenever I read accounts like this about craziness allegedly afflicting student-centered activities, I always ask myself "what are the students saying?" Do the actual students involved share the perception that high school debate is rotting from the inside out? Or is their view that these accounts are misleading, exaggerated, and not reflective of what's actually happening on the ground? I certainly remember from my student days how frequent it was that I'd read breathless accounts about "what was going on" at my school or in my club or on my campus that bore zero relationship to what I actually saw. Once I was no longer a student, I still tried to remember that experience -- how many times have the "adults" parachuted in to "solve" problems at schools or on campus in cases where the actual putative victims have been screaming "you are not helping!" The older I get, the harder it will be to remember that instinct, but for the moment I can still rage against the dying of the light. And to that end, it is notable that Fishback's post contains very little in the way of contemporary student commentary or support indicating that they share his view about either the gravity or ubiquity of the problems he identifies -- a failure which makes me profoundly skeptical of whether he's accurately describing the underlying reality.

Second, I also remember to beware of apocryphal anecdotes. I doubt there has ever been a generation of debaters that didn't have stories about the lurid, ridiculous, extreme-performative arguments that supposedly were winning rounds left and right. In my generation, I distinctly recall a story circulating about a debater who simply wrote "Rwanda. Rwanda. Rwanda." on the board over and over again in their first speech (on any topic) as some sort of commentary on the moral intolerability of engaging in regular debate in the face of genocide. Trading the story across the lunch table, that debater cleaned up at elite tournaments. In retrospect, I can't say I ever recall actually seeing a round that was anything like that -- and I both witnessed and participated in many elite-level debate rounds. Stories are stories.

All of that said, I can't fully accuse Fishback of nutpicking. The "Marxist-Leninist-Maoist" judge that opens his story was a collegiate debate champ, and so can't be dismissed as a complete non-entity. For recent graduates who are looking back on their competition-days, it is very, very easy to miss "having the ball in your hands"; to think on the arguments you would have made now that you're (slightly) older and (arguably) wiser, and live out that saudade for being a competitor by turning the act of judging into "what would I have argued." It's easy, but it's not good, and it takes the event away from the people who are actually competing in it. There's no such thing, in my view, as a debate where only one side is allowed to show up, and judges who functionally make that demand are toxic to the enterprise.

At the same time, the problem in debate of bad judges is an eternal one. And I have sympathy for the NSDA here, because it's actually a really difficult problem to regulate. It's unfeasible for the NSDA at a national level to actually police the judging styles and capacities of hundreds if not thousands of judges at tournaments across the country (which is one reason why the norm has shifted to disclosure -- we can't control if your judge is good, but you can at least know what their paradigm is). And for obvious reasons, the NSDA does not want to open the door to ad hoc challenges of particular judging decisions on general claims of "unfairness" -- that way lies anarchy (particularly when you're dealing with debaters, who always can come up with reasons why their losses are unfair!). In reality, much like Supreme Court ethics rules, there's probably not much that the NSDA can do other than vaguely promote norms of fairness and hope for the best.

Indeed, in many ways the problem with debate judges is not so different than the problem with Article III judges. There's little that's more frustrating than the sense that the judge in front of you has rigid ideological commitments that will prevent them from fairly assessing your arguments no matter what you do. That frustration is multiplied by the fact that, if they do act in that abusive fashion, there's little in the way of recourse -- we can't get rid of bad, biased Article III judges and, practically speaking, we can't get rid of bad, biased debate judges. The same mechanisms that ensure an independent judiciary and facilitate the orderly administration of justice by not allowing every unpopular decision to be second-guessed also provide a near-impenetrable suit of armor for hacks and incompetents alike if they do manage to get through the door. That is, to reiterate, insanely frustrating. But there's no straightforward resolution to it.

The reality is that the political demographics of both the most common participants in debate (publicly-engaged 14-18 year olds) and the most common judges of those debates (publicly-engaged 18-24 year olds) means that debate will almost inevitably slant to the left. Again, that's not something that can easily be fixed short of manually changing people's political opinions. We hold our opinions because we're persuaded by them; so it's inevitable that the arguments we tend to find persuasive are more likely to be the one's resonant with our opinions. That tendency can be checked, but it probably can't be overcome entirely. 

But to some extent, the focus on "liberal" versus "conservative" ideas in high school debate to my mind reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what debate is -- and overlooks one of its most valuable features. 

It's natural for an outsider to think that high school debate, insofar as it touches on politically salient issues, naturally divides itself into contemporary liberal and conservative divides. If the topic is a resolution on, say, foreign aid, one participant will lay out roughly what you might hear on the subject from a Democratic Senator, the other, from a Republican House member. But, at least when I was competing, this was rarely what happened. Debate tackled issues from a multitude of different perspectives and angles that rarely, if ever, neatly tracked contemporary partisan divisions. Despite the seeming binary imposed by pro/con, affirmative/negative, the lived reality of debate transcended these narrow divisions.

And this is a good thing. The purpose of debate is not to give competitors a working understanding of and fluency in what arguments are currently circulating in the halls of Congress. Debaters are not there to parrot the arguments that one most commonly hears on CNN or Fox News. The purpose of debate is to give competitors the tools to think creatively about their own arguments, to try to make those arguments as strong as possible, and to assess and defend them against any range of potential responses. It is perhaps a sad commentary on politics that a focus on strong arguments means that the resulting product will typically have little bearing on the actual contemporary disputes over liberal versus conservative politics. But that's how it goes. Moreover, it is entirely possible to have a productive, valuable debate round where both competitors basically accept liberal, or conservative, or Marxist priors and then argue "what's the best way of doing X from within that framework?" That sort of debate also teaches people how to critically assess and defend positions, just as effectively as debate rounds that more expressly cut across classic ideological paradigms. It is far too narrow, and constrains the vision of young debaters, to try to limit them to thinking purely within the well-worn grooves of American party politics.

And that brings me, in conclusion, to some of Kristen's comments. Kristen admits that, in contrast to Fishback's presentation, it does not seem like (in her recent experience) conservative ideas have been locked out of high school debate. And even when it comes to the specific conservative bugaboo of the day -- DEI initiatives -- much of the content the NSDA is promoting is entirely reasonable and salutary. Kristen remembers judges criticizing her and other female competitors for their "shrill" or "squeaky" voices; I remember a major tournament official repeatedly and openly -- as in, when making public announcements of awards -- engaging in homophobic taunting of one of my friends (he would repeatedly mispronounce the name of the student -- who was a regular top-tier competitor and absolutely known to the organizer -- so one of the syllables in his name was spoken as "gay", when the syllable in question was pronounced "guy"). If those sorts of practices are being arrested, it's all for the better.

But Kristen is concerned about some of the things that are listed as potential examples of DEI-related debate topics (inside the NSDA website's section on inclusivity). To be clear, it seems evident that the NSDA is suggesting that tournaments include some of these topics as part of the tournament's overall package, not to exclusively draw from them. But within this subcategory, Kristen thinks that the questions possess a liberal slant -- a problem even if (as is naturally the case in a debate context) people will inevitably be encouraged to take both "pro" and "con" positions.

Reading these topics, I understand why they're thought to be coded as liberal. At the same time, for at least a good quotient of them, it makes me sad that they are coded as liberal. Consider the question "Why are there so few startups founders who identify as women in the United States?" On the one hand, I get why this question seems to be "liberal". On the other hand, why is this question coded as liberal? Can it really be the case that conservatives don't have thoughts on this matter -- or at least thoughts they're not embarassed to share? When did conservatives decide that the only thought a conservative is permitted to think on this sort of question is "don't ask it"?

The students who answer this sort of question are not, overwhelmingly, thinking in terms of "how do I slot this in to a liberal or conservative ideological frame." They're going to be thinking practically about what sorts of factors or conditions lead to disproportionately fewer women founding startups. The reason why this codes as liberal, though, is that the very act of thinking through a question like that with any degree of seriousness (i.e., not just smirking "it's because women are for making babies!") has been coded as something that only liberals do. That, to my mind, is tragic -- but that's not a DEI problem or a NSDA problem, that's a conservative problem. Conservatives absolutely should have thoughts on why there are relatively few women founding startups. They also should have thoughts on questions like "How can the federal government do more to promote Latino/a/x entrepreneurship?" and "How can the US government increase participation rates of gender minorities in STEM fields?" These are important social problems which all of us should be tackling. Perhaps those thoughts will be radically different than what liberals have to say. Perhaps they'll be surprisingly resonant (think about cross-ideological coalitions forming around YIMBY zoning reform, or relaxing occupational licensing requirements). But to the extent that even trying to work through "how can we increase the representation of underrepresented minorities" is viewed as an inherently liberal endeavor; well, I think that's a tragedy.

More broadly: the point, again, of high school debate is not to give teenagers the opportunity to parrot the shibboleths of Democratic or Republican talking heads, and so high school debate does not fail when it forces a student to develop thoughts on a question that Democratic or Republican talking heads don't have thoughts on. So ultimately, I think it's a mistake -- and not reflective of high school debate as I remember it -- to ask whether or not students are presenting "liberal" or "conservative" views on a given question. Overwhelmingly, that entire framework is a projection by adults; it is not the approach taken by the competitors, nor should it be. Institutionally-speaking, debate should be about prompting students to think about interesting questions. The answers we get rarely will fully map on to contemporary political factions -- and that's a very good thing.

2016 Presidential Debate #2: Quick Reactions

I have never, in my life, seen a debate where expectations where set so low for one of the candidates. Donald Trump would have done "better than expected" if he managed to go the whole evening without being kicked off the ballot by his own party. And yet, at the start, he managed to possibly sink below a bar that was literally lying on the ground. He looked like hell. He could not stop sniffing. His answer to the question about his sexual assault braggadocio was beyond awful. His constant whining about the terrible biased moderators was simply pathetic. And then there was his horrifying promise to jail Hillary Clinton when the night was over -- a statement that goes well beyond "will Donald Trump be bad for America" and crosses into "will Donald Trump preserve democracy in America?"

He did, to be sure, get better as the night went on. For the most part, "better" just meant that he was merely incoherent -- repeating buzz words and talking points without even the semblance of substance behind them. Still, you could at least spot some potentially plausible themes (Clinton is all talk, no action) that could have resonance. And Clinton, for her part, didn't seem as comfortable with the format as she did in the first debate. Her big strength the first time around was basically acting as if Donald wasn't in the room -- refusing to engage him, refusing to give him oxygen. The more free-wheeling town hall format (and Trump's incessant interruptions) seemed to nudge her towards feeding the troll Trump, and not to her benefit. Finally, it has to be said that Trump's last answer ("say one nice thing about your opponent") was actually, genuinely, not-grading-on-a-curve excellent.

But still, the absolute best you could say for Trump was this was a draw (CNN's instant poll gave Clinton a solid victory, YouGov gave her a narrower win). And a draw isn't going to cut it for a candidate who is falling behind and whose  campaign is floundering.

So right now, I'm less focused on the horse race aspects, and more on where we are as a nation. Ezra Klein got it right a few days ago:

But the question isn’t whether Trump has any decency. We’ve known for some time that he doesn’t. The question is whether we have any decency — whether we will elect this man, or even come close to electing this man, knowing all we know about him.

What's sad about tonight is the way it represents such a retrogression for our nation. The world is changing at a breakneck pace, and with these changes come new and novel concerns. The problems that have emerged -- getting universal health care for everyone, ensuring that equality is true in practice as well as creed, overcoming unprecedented environmental hazards that threaten our entire ecosystem (just to name a few) -- are both difficult but also solvable if we put our heads down and work on them. Yet what the Trump candidacy has shown -- even if he loses -- is that we're still stuck on the basics. "Do we jail our political opponents?" "Do we brag about our ability to assault women?" "Do we impose flat bans on entire religious groups?" This is all 101-level material, and yet this is what we are spending our political efforts on.

America deserves better than this. But we're not going to get it, not because Hillary Clinton isn't qualified to tackle these issues -- she absolutely is -- but because Trump has dragged us back from a mature democracy to a faltering, barely functioning one. And that is truly unforgivable.

(See my reaction to the first debate here)

2016 Presidential Debate #1: Quick Reactions

First things first: Under any definition of "winning" that goes beyond "did Donald Trump manage to stay coherent and under control for a single 90 second span", Hillary Clinton won this debate hands down. There's simply no question. No, Donald Trump did not spontaneously combust in a paroxysm of rage (though there were a few moments where I genuinely wondered if he was having a panic attack). Yes, he did manage to emphasize a few effective tropes, such  the alleged mismatch between Clinton's rhetoric now and her record of accomplishment. But the overall effect was of a blustering, out of his league lunatic who could not stop interrupting, could not stop snorting, could not stop eye-rolling, and for much of the evening could barely string two coherent sentences together. That's just not going to fly on this level.

Of course, I'm biased -- but even the Republicans I've seen have scored the debate either a Clinton win or, at best, a draw. Their main complaint, of course, is to blame the refs -- the moderator, we're told, was biased! They point out that far less time was spent on Clinton's emails than on Trump's birtherism.

You want to know why that is? It's because Clinton's answer on emails was simple: she acknowledged a mistake, and left it at that. No attempt at a convoluted justification, no complaints that the whole thing was blown out of proportion, no conspiracy theory about how it was all in her opponent's head. And if you contrast that to Trump, you get what might have been his biggest problem all night: he could not let anything go. Birtherism? It was all Clinton's fault, and Trump actually did Obama a favor! Iraq war? An endless stream of consciousness demanding that we call Sean Hannity to verify that he was too an opponent. Racial discrimination? "We never admitted any guilt," and by the way, did I tell you about the time my club admitted Black people? It reached a peak when Trump started going off on how actually he had the better "temperament" compared to Clinton, and I was like "really dude? Is this the hill you want to die on?" Even Trump's supporters must have been groaning.

Clinton performed well because she actually possesses some self-discipline and was able to blunt potential problem areas early, sucking the air out of the issue. Trump was like a frenzied chihuahua on Adderall, chasing down anything and everything and hobbling himself with assertions that ranged from ludicrous (everything was "the worst deal ever") to self-sabotaging (did he just admit he paid no federal taxes?). And I have to think that every single woman watching that debate had their blood pressure rise in empathy each time Donald Trump insisted on talking over the calm, collected, prepared woman next to her.

The only thing that seems to be causing people to hesitate in awarding Clinton a total victory is the idea that "Trump is different." We thought he got eviscerated in the primary debates too, and his people loved him even more for it. I saw Nicolle Wallace make that point on NBC, and Kevin Drum said the same in his recap. To that, I simply observe that the GOP primary is not the general, and the same rules don't apply. GOP primary rules get you Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell. General election rules get those candidates annihilated as independents flee in terror.

This debate was the first time Americans really got a chance to see their 2016 choices side-by-side. It presented a stark choice, and not a particularly difficult one. I predict that when the full reactions are in, independents and swing voters will not react kindly to what Trump was selling.

Waffle House Song

The name of this blog, The Debate Link, emerged from my time as a high school debater (my first post here was June 2004, shortly after I graduated high school). The original mission statement of the blog was to link commentary on political issues to the debating world (the first tagline of The Debate Link was "The arguments, presented by and for the debating public.").

Among my happiest memories in high school were attending the Florida Forensics Institute (since closed -- read here for more on that story). One year, we adopted as our unofficial theme The Waffle House Song, communicated to us by one Jeff Hannan. A quick google search reveals no record of this song currently exists on the internet. This deserves rectification, and so, without further adieu, I present its lyrics:

We're at the Waffle House!
We're all messed up!
We're at the Waffle House!
We're all messed up!
We're gonna eat our waffles, gonna eat our waffles, gonna eat our waffles fast!
 Gonna eat our waffles, gonna eat our waffles, gonna eat our waffles fast!
[Quickly, while pointing] Drunk driving ain't funny!

And with that, a priceless bit of our cultural heritage has been preserved. You're welcome.

The Trump Card

As many of you know, there are a lot of people running for President on the Republican side. So many, that the first GOP presidential debate will not be able to feature them all. Only the top 10 candidates -- as measured by a composite of several national polls -- will make it in. So who's looking like they'll make that elite list? According to a recent CNN poll, the top 10 are (in order):

1. Jeb Bush
2. Donald Trump
3. Mike Huckabee
4(t). Ben Carson
4(t). Rand Paul
6(6). Marco Rubio
6(t). Scott Walker
8. Rick Perry
9(t). Chris Christie
9(t). Ted Cruz
9(t). Rick Santorum

On the outside looking in (but still within striking distance of the bottom tier) are Carly Fiorina, Bobby Jindal, and John Kasich.

Personally, I just adore learning that Donald Trump has 4x the support of Ted Cruz. Live by the crazy sword, die by the crazy sword. And how humiliating must it be for Bobby Jindal that he can't make even make it onto the big stage but Ben Carson can?

Oh, it's going to be a fun primary, I can tell.

Yesterday's News Roundup

I went to bed last night before I could do a roundup, so much of this stuff is from yesterday.

* * *

Is Israel responsible for the OWS crackdowns? No. But is Max Blumenthal lying about his sources? In all likelihood, yes.

Jeffrey Goldberg agrees with Peter Beinart that the settlements are slowly making a "one-state solution" inevitable, and if Israel wants to survive, it has to muster the balls to cut them loose.

11th Circuit decides that discrimination on basis of transgender status is sex discrimination. Arch-conservative Judge Bill Pryor surprises by joining the opinion.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius' overruling of the FDA on P;an B is a complete and utter disgrace.

Palestinian poet successfully gets Jewish Israeli Arab writer booted from a panel.

Tim Kaine and George Allen are already trading shots as they chase Virginia's open Senate seat.

Finally, someone from Berkeley has linked through Facebook to my discussion of their JSU's appalling decision to exclude J Street. I'm just curious about the context (is it someone's wall, or is it a Facebook page for one of the relevant orgs?). So if someone knows and wants to drop a comment to satiate my curiosity, I'd be grateful [UPDATE: Mystery solved, I think!].

Duke It Out

Marc Tracy is scoring the Twitter war between Atlantic (soon to be Tablet) columnist Jeffrey Goldberg and Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon. He's got Goldberg up 78-73 after eight rounds (including a seventh round knockdown). Incidentally, I agree with Goldberg that the most newsworthy thing about their exchange might be Ayalon furiously denying he wants Israel to maintain control over the West Bank.

Meanwhile, Hussein Ibish recaps his debate with far-right settler activist David Ha'ivri. Ibish accurately characterized the debate as not between "Israelis" and "Palestinians" per se, but rather between "modernists" and "medievalists" on both sides:

Modern thinking, I explained, recognizes both the inherent rights of individuals as human beings and the rights of self-defined peoples to national self-determination. Medieval thinking, on the other hand, relies on holy texts and symbols, and conceives of people not as individuals and groups of individuals, but as fixed categories in a divinely ordained hierarchy.

Extreme revanchist settlers like Ha'ivri have far, far more in common with Hamas supporters than they do with mainstream liberal Zionists. And Ibish has far more in common with the average Kadima voter than he does with Islamic Jihad. One can recognize that there needs to be considerably more work in building a political constituency for the modernist perspective (at least as applied to Jews) amongst Palestinians, without deluding ourselves into thinking that folks like Ha'ivri even remotely resemble a friend of the Israel most Jews wish to support.

Moot Court Round 1.1

My first moot court round (well, half of it -- we each go once as petitioner and respondent in round one) is now complete, and I think it went rather well. The judges told me I spoke a little fast, which I take to be a big victory (normally I speak blindingly fast). They also noted that I overgesticulate, which is definitely true. But they had naught but happy words for my substance and seemed generally pretty satisfied, so, yay.

It Turns Out Taxes are Uncertain Too

The folks at Verum Serum decided to call out TNR's Jon Chait for supposed hypocrisy, after he flagged poll results indicating that the American people think the rich don't pay enough in taxes. You see, Jon Chait also was outraged (or Isaac Chotiner -- but probably Chait too) "threw a hissy fit" regarding Sarah Palin's "death panel" nonsense. But here, they argue, Chait is relying on those same ignorant viewpoints he previously condemned. Doesn't he know that the rich actually pay the far and away largest share of American income taxes?

Oh, boy, this is going to be good. Anytime Chait gets the chance to throw down with smug idiots who think they got game, I break out the popcorn. And he doesn't disappoint.

Chait kind of eviscerates the post on every angle, but I want to focus on one thing in particular. The VS authors seem not to understand the difference between facts and values. The death panel claim was factually incorrect. The claim "the rich don't pay enough in taxes" cannot be factually correct or incorrect -- it is a subjective value judgment. This isn't to say facts can't play a role in forming normative judgments, only that they never inherently support one side over the other. It is entirely plausible to notice that the rich (defined as they are in the studies in question) pay 70% of total federal income taxes, and still say they should pay more. It's particularly plausible when one notes that the rich make over 50% of America's total income. Let's keep repeating this for the slow folks in the class: in any society with income stratification and percentage-based income taxation (including a flat tax) the rich will pay a higher percentage of the total income tax receipts than anyone else. That's not a shortcoming in the system design, that's a product of elementary mathematics.

VS offers a remarkably weak-sauce response that, to the extent it proffers an argument, claims that Chait is advancing falsehoods because if people knew the facts about tax rates, they wouldn't hold the subjective opinions that they do. Chait says there's virtually no reason to think this is true, and I agree -- as I noted above, there is a perfectly compelling story where -- taking into account the share of wealth owned by the wealthiest 20%, a preference for a progressive tax structure, and a desire to counteract regressive state tax structures -- the wealthiest 20% paying a 70% share of taxes is perfectly sensible or, indeed, too small of a share. I'm not saying that's the only plausible inference from the facts, but the VS folks are effectively saying the opposite, and that's simply not feasible. It's almost definitely true that most Americans don't know the specifics of federal tax rates or distributions. But it is hardly the case that knowledge of these specifics would compel a change in belief, even from a ideal deliberative standpoint.

That the VS folks believe the facts to so obviously compel one normative outcome, even as other folks believe (with equal fervor) that the same facts point to a completely opposite normative stance, is explainable based on a popular misconception of how facts aid political deliberation. Generally, we believe that as people learn more facts about a given subject, their policy beliefs on the subject will begin to converge. The idea makes sense: learning more means dispelling inaccurate stereotypes and prejudices; as information is attained, people begin discarding stances that don't fit the facts and instead adopt those which do.

Unfortunately, as research by Dan Kahan and others indicates, the opposite is usually true (Professor Kahan actually delivered a lecture at Chicago today on this very topic). Providing additional facts and information doesn't cause policy convergence, it causes policy polarization. The reason is that most fact patterns contain narratives, inferences, and interpretations which plausibly can be deployed to support diverse policy positions. People accordingly interpret the information they receive in manners which support their prior dispositions, only now they feel more comfortable in these beliefs because they have "facts" to back them up. Given this latent ambiguity, there is no incentive to agree, and lots of psychological incentives to latch on to friendly fact stories in order to preserve ones preexisting beliefs.

Fundamentally, one cannot bridge the fact/value division here. It is true that I do, in fact, support higher taxes on the wealthy, and part of my reasons have to do with the above factual account I gave (wealthy earn a higher share of the income, state tax systems are often regressive), mixed with some value positions (progressive tax schemes are good). But I would never claim that the above factual account mandates the policy positions I hold, because that would be nonsense -- if you have different values than I do, the same facts will carry entirely different meaning.* Facts matter, but at bottom what really matters are subjective value preferences.

So to be clear, the reason Chait is right and the VS folks are wrong isn't because the facts prove his policy prescriptions correct. The facts don't prove anything by themselves; they are vessels for attaining our value preferences. Chait is correct because he recognizes that tax policy is a value judgment and thus opinions about it exist on a fundamentally different plane than purely factual claims like Sarah Palin's imaginary death panels.

* Professor Kahan related an amusing story on this. Regarding a study he published on differing interpretations of facts surrounding the HPV vaccine debate, he cited a blogger who reported the study and then said it showed why some conservatives opposed the vaccine: "they're biased -- they just interpret the facts to support a preexisting worldview!" Of course, Professor Kahan noted, the point of the study is that this is how everyone evaluates facts -- the people who support vaccination are as "guilty" of it as the opponents -- and the errant blogger was a perfect illustration of that very theory: s/he interpreted the text presented in such a way as to verify prior intuitions, even though it actually contained no such normative force.

UPDATE: At TMV, I adopted this post to focus more specifically on the inability of increased information to give us the fabled convergence towards "moderate" policies.

The Great Debate

I watched the first 10 minutes of this debate between Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz and J Street's Jeremy Ben Ami (moderated by Eliot Spitzer), but got bored relatively quickly. Why? Because, try as they might, they don't disagree about much. What disputes they have are nearly invariable about either focus or degree, rarely about substance. So both support two-states, both oppose the settlements, both support some division of Jerusalem.

In a sense, this is why I am very surprised by the amount of controversy J Street has managed to gin up. It's quite apparent here that Professor Dershowitz really wants to accentuate the differences between his positions and those of Mr. Ben Ami; it is equally clear that they really just aren't that far apart. The dissonance, I think, comes from popular misunderstandings both of J Street and the broader pro-Israel community: the former is often portrayed as much further to left than it is, the latter, much further to the right. And this debate helps illustrate just how facile those assumptions are. Professor Dershowitz is often used as a bogey-man for the broke-no-criticism-of-Israel wing, but as he notes he is a longstanding critic of several key Israeli policies (like the settlements). And if J Street can't be considered mainstream after essentially being in cheerful agreement with most of Alan Dershowitz's positions, what would establish it?

Ultimately, J Street isn't out of the mainstream of Jewish policy positions on Israel because there remains a relatively robust center-left consensus amongst American Jews regarding Israel, one that's been well represented amongst all the fixtures of American Israel-commentators. This debate simply dramatized the effect.

Study Center

Matt Yglesias likes this ad from New Orleans mayor candidate James Perry, but I, debate geek that I am, prefer this one:



Bam!

Debaters Do Well

I already noted that one of my former vanquished debate opponents later went on to become a Rhodes Scholar. With this year's list out, I see at least two more debaters from my own era on the circuit have also attained that illustrious award. Stephanie Bell (Univ. of Chicago '08) competed in LD, so I only knew of her back when I was competing (though I met her post-graduation -- she was very nice). But Eva Lam (Harvard '10) and I were quite close as she came up through the ranks -- indeed, I remember her from her very first Harvard tournament! My, how they grow.

In any event, congratulations to both!

Somebody was a Policy Kid

Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) abandoned his threat to have his whole amendment to the climate change bill read, but he wanted to hear a taste of the speed-reader Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) hired first. He didn't disappoint.

Agonism, Debate, and Blood Sports

Linking to Happy Bodies only when I agreed with them would be lazy. Finding times when I disagree is a far more challenging endeavor. A certain author on that fine blog writes against the "blood sport" conception of academic discussion, which she analogizes to a "whip it out and measure it" approach. She also links to a post by Mandolin at AAB entitled "Debate", which claims (among other things) that debate is characterized by "power games, attempts at manipulation, and a confrontational mindset." My disagreement here isn't actually that deep, as much of it boils down to what I take to be a mistaken view on what a "blood sport" approach to academics means. As someone who has used the "blood sport" metaphor in a relatively positive context, and has "debate" right in his blog's name, I want to distinguish the "blood sport" approach from the type of abusive practices Jill and Mandolin identify (which I agree are all too prevalent), because I think the latter is in actuality a serious distortion of what a true "blood sport" academic discussion should be trying to accomplish.

Jill writes:

[I]n this “academics as blood sport” model, the goal is not to grow. The goal is not to reach a consensus, or to get to the bottom of a thorny problem in the text, or to hash out a controversial point. The goal is to make the other person look as stupid as possible. The goal is to, as a friend once put it, “whip it out and measure it.” Women play at it sometimes, but this is a game for men.

Ideally speaking: No, probably yes, yes, maybe, no, and no. Let me explain.

The "blood sport" model, at its heart, is an articulation of the belief that academic discussion is most fruitful when proponents of particular positions are willing to "let their hands go" (to adopt language from my favorite blood sport, boxing). We should press weaknesses, probe implications, attack shoddy reasoning, all in pursuit of making each participant present their best possible case. We develop intellectually by challenging and being challenged as strongly as possible; what remains at the end is indubitably stronger than what came before. I often say that one of the reasons I wanted to attend the University of Chicago for law school was because I wanted to "put myself through the fire"; that is, I wanted to be placed in an environment where I knew I would be challenged to the greatest possible extent, knowing that I could only develop by facing the most advanced and vocal advocates of alternative positions. J.A. Hodnicki gives similar advice to junior faculty members deciding where to present their works in progress.

Though I don't think it's bound to it, I also think the "blood sport" approach is tied intricately to the position of philosophical agonism expounded by writers like Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. Agonists believe that, at root, disagreement will never be expunged from democratic societies. Mouffe, in a quote I've referenced before, claims that holding out "consensus" as a paramount goal in a pluralist democracy actually threatens democracy itself:

To believe that a final resolution of conflicts is eventually possible...far from providing the necessary horizon of the democratic project, is something that puts it at risk. Indeed, such an illusion implicitly carries the desire for a reconciled society where pluralism would be superseded. When pluralist democracy is conceived in such a way, it becomes a self-refuting ideal because the very moment of its realization coincides with its disintegration.[Chantal Mouffe, Democracy and Pluralism: A Critique of the Rationalist Approach, 16 Cardozo L. Rev. 1533, 1544 (1995)]

Consensus, in this view, is a trap: it means consensus on grounds acceptable to the empowered classes. There is not always a true consensus to be had, no "bottom" to get down to. Collaborativeness is another word for exclusivity, because we're not all just trying to achieve the same thing. I concur with Mouffe and others in that I believe that many value disputes are fundamentally irreducible, and that this is something we simply have to accept as members of the deliberative community.* Even Iris Marion Young, queen of the deliberative democrats, believes that "rational" discourse only requires that the parties come in with an aim, rather than a guarantee, of agreement. I agree with this as well -- I don't think we should pick fights just for their own sake -- but Young certainly is keenly aware of the illiberal risks in demanding agreement when disagreement still lingers.

But this is getting far afield. The point is that, believing that political conflict is inevitable and indeed desirable, the agonist political project is centered around managing it so that there still exists a basic framing of mutual respect. Since we can't ground mutual respect on some form of "we're all really working for the same thing" (because we're not -- at least not necessarily), it must be located elsewhere. And in this, agonists find the "blood sport" metaphor to be very helpful. Samuel Chambers writes:

Agonism implies a deep respect and concern for the other; indeed, the Greek agon refers most directly to an athletic contest oriented not merely toward victory or defeat, but emphasizing the importance of the struggle itself-a struggle that cannot exist without the opponent. Victory through forfeit or default, or over an unworthy opponent, comes up short compared to a defeat at the hands of a worthy opponent-a defeat that still brings honor. An agonistic discourse will therefore be one marked not merely by conflict but just as importantly, by mutual admiration.

I think this is tremendously illuminating. There is a considerable amount of literature on the different discussion styles of men and women, including how men often simply try and bludgeon their way to "victory" by blunt verbal force. This is an example of "victory by default", and it is not truly legitimate. The true agonist does not wish to claim victory simply because he's rigged the discursive rules in his favor. The struggle is only valid when everyone is in a position where they can participate as strongly and ably as they are capable of. Consequently, persons who conceive of themselves as participants in a "blood sport" view of academics should work actively to insure a level playing field amongst the participants; not taking advantage of structural or contingent advantages (think Inigo Montoya's sword fight with Wesley in The Princess Bride). That means avoiding, not reinforcing, gendered modes of silencing or shutting down alternative perspectives.

There is an (unfortunately, mostly liberal) conceit that the participants in blood sports are all ruthless, cutthroat savages, and a consequent conflation of "blood sport" with "win at all costs". This is quite far from the truth. In most blood sports, one observes an important dynamic of respect between the players; and disrespect for those who care only about winning but do not respect their adversary. Boxers often talk a lot of trash before the fight begins to sell tickets, but nearly invariably they will embrace afterward and have naught but high praise for each other. I still remember Bernard Hopkins -- immediately after handing Kelly Pavlik the first loss of his career -- going to the younger man's corner and giving him some fighting advice, promising him that he would one day become the best in the world. The agonist debater should likewise see his or her project as facilitating the mutual development of themselves and their interlocutor as advocates.

The ethos of the "blood sport" is one steeped in language of glory and honor. But the persons who engage in self-aggrandizing pugnaciousness to prove that they're the smartest guy in the room are running quite far afield from this ideal.** They are not behaving honorably. They are fighting for themselves, when they should be fighting for the greater ideal of illumination and elucidation, or at the very least making all participants the best they can be as advocates and proponents of their causes. Moreover, agonist struggle implies a willing and eager partner: forcing someone who does not wish to fight into a debate context is as incompatible with agonist ideals as a boxer picking a random guy out at a bar and pummeling him senseless. The agonist does hold -- properly in my view -- that if one does wish to enter the fora of public deliberation, then one can't demand that everyone put aside their difference and "collaborate" together.*** But not everyone wants to be in the fora all the time, or on all subjects.

I do believe that the best academic discussions are ones in which eager and talented participants are trading their best shots at one another. But not everyone is in a position to do that. Some people aren't eager. Some people don't know enough to be thrown in with the sharks yet. Predators seek out these persons because they want another notch in their "W" column, but there is no true honor in that. There are, after all, models of combat which are premised on building someone up rather than taking them down (e.g., a sparring session), and this too ought be (and I believe is) incorporated into a true agonist frame. In this way, conflict and collaboration are reconciled.

Debate ought to be an honorable activity. Many persons, unfortunately, do not practice it in this way. They relish victory for its own sake, with no regard for their partner and with no purpose other than victory. But whatever else it is, that sort of behavior is not consistent with the ethos of the blood sport.

***

* Even if disputes over values can't always be dissolved, this doesn't mean that debate is futile. There are still several important functions debate can serve. First, it can solve factual disagreements masquerading as value disputes (e.g., what tax policy is most beneficial to the nation's poorest?). Second, it can reveal the reasons advocates have for their position and the passion with which they hold them, which may be important to people who base their decisions in part on the opinions of others. Third, it can clarify the interplay between various disconsonent values which may be implicated in any given dispute, forcing people to reveal what values they are giving up or sublimating in order to adhere to their position.

** There are actually two distinct problems here. On the one hand, there is the guy who doesn't know a lot, and masks it by being unreasonable aggressive and belligerent. This is obnoxious if for no other reason than it forces more advanced participants in a discussion to continually hash out basic 101 material. But sometimes, the best response to the sort of person really is just to crack his skull a bit. A systematic evisceration of his "analysis" may inspire more humility next time.

On the other hand, there is the person who really does know a lot about the subject at hand, but uses that knowledge to crush the more incipient or inchoate ideas of his less knowledgeable or confident fellows. The violation here is the one I focus on above -- it is preying on less experienced or willing adversaries, before they can pose any serious challenge or threat. Eventually, the student may become the master, but only if the master doesn't systematically squash all his students as babes.

*** Consider how White feminists used this line of argument to silence dissident voices of women of color; arguing that those differences should be pushed aside precisely because they would threaten the collaborative nature of the women's movement -- "coming together as women". I'm not sure why, faced with White feminist leaders who claimed to care about racism but systematically ignored it in word and deed, women of color should not have attempted to draw some blood in response.

Revenge of the Blip

Lay observers who watched a good old fashioned spread debater in high school LD invariably come out appalled. What possible use does this serve? What is the educational value? When will you ever be faced with a situation where the goal is to spit out as much information as possible with reckless disregard for accuracy or even coherency?

The answer, my friends, is a law school final. Years of debate training have finally paid off.

Cue Up Barry White

Phoebe Maltz wins at debate live-blogging:

Obama just told parents to "turn off the television." Is this a sign that the X-rated portion of the debate is about to commence?

Drill, baby, drill.

$100 to the First To Kill Joe the Plumber

I'm kidding, of course -- it's not Joe's fault. But I like how he managed to incorporate whatever characteristic McCain or Obama wanted.

I had the debate on, but wasn't watching closely -- in fact, I was playing solitaire while listening with an ear to it. The bottom line is that Obama is like a Winky Wright -- you simply can't hurt him. He's too good defensively. A fellow chessmaster might be able to out-box him, but McCain is no debate whiz. McCain needed a knockout, and he wasn't going to get it. And in striving for it, he sounded far more conservative and doctrinaire than he has at any point in the last few weeks. His derision at protecting the "health of the mother" in abortion -- though undoubtedly thrilling to the conservative base -- is going to kill him with independent women.

Choosing Your Phrases Carefully

Oh, and one more thing on the debate....

Was I the only (Jewish?) person who winced when Sarah Palin repeatedly used the phrase "never again" to refer to how we should respond to the financial crisis? Obviously that phrase has very particular connotations to me that aren't appropriately applied to even the worst economic situation, but I can't decide if I was being objectively unreasonable or if other Jews might have reacted the same way.

The VP Debate

These are off-the-cuff reactions, without having seen any commentary on the debate.

In my only post on the subject prior to the VP debate, I talked a little bit about the "expectations game" and the extent to which it's reasonable or unreasonable to use it as a frame for evaluating the debate. The basic theme I tried to lay out was that while beating expectations -- particularly when the bar was set as low as it was for Gov. Palin -- wasn't enough for a win per se, it's not entirely untrue that Palin doing better than expected was irrelevant if she didn't objectively beat Joe Biden. Insofar as some voters who would be agnostic about a seemingly typical, average, mediocre politician might still be turned off if they thought Palin was in a uniquely dim-witted class, she could still score points simply by being pretty good if that would move her overall impression into "average" territory.

So, did Palin "beat expectations"? Depends what you mean. If the expectation was that she would be a babbling nitwit, then yes, she did exceed that bar. Most of the time, anyway. But she didn't get much above that, and there were times were she lapsed back into Katie Couric territory -- most notably, her answer on the global warming question, which embarrassingly came right after she named energy as her core area of expertise. She got caught totally blind by the question about endorsing Dick Cheney's "ghost branch" argument regarding the VP, and actually endorsed it, which is incredible to me -- though I don't think she actually understood what it was she was being asked. The net effect was that, even if she performed marginally better than she did with Gibson and Couric, it was still not enough even to mark her as mediocre.

So let's be clear: under any objective evaluation, Joe Biden thrashed Sarah Palin tonight. It was a demonstration of what happens when you put politicians who are simply in separate leagues together in a room. And I got the distinct impression that Biden genuinely either does not like or does not respect Gov. Palin. It's hard to blame him -- I feel the same way -- and if I were a distinguished public servant like Biden I would have taken Palin's answers as a personal insult to the entire public profession. I think that explains the one time Biden really seemed to snap tonight, when Palin started talking about how she knew what it was like to raise a family in difficult circumstances, and that made her unique. Biden virtually never talks about his first wife and the horrible catastrophe that struck him, and it's obvious it's still painful to him. From a purely Machiavellian standpoint, maybe you could say Palin rattled him. But I think it made him more human, and more Palin -- who went right back on the attack -- look even more craven.

But Biden was, for the most part, on his game tonight. He was substantive, he was clear, he was aggressive without coming off as mean-spirited. And Governor Palin was the absolute reverse. Her talk about how Biden kept looking to the past when he was talking about the failures of Bush/McCain policies was absolutely inane. She would flat-out refuse to talk about any issue that might be difficult for her -- from when she smarmily said she wouldn't answer the way the "moderator" and Biden wanted her to in response to a perfectly reasonable request to discuss Biden's charges regarding McCain's stance on regulation (she talked about tax cuts instead), to her blanket refusal to admit she's ever changed her mind about anything. The latter quality was something she claimed as a virtue -- an exemplification of "straight talk" -- much as the fact that Sen. Kerry had learned from mistakes was taken as evidence of weak character in 2004.

Indeed, quite often Gov. Palin sounded like a 2004 flashback. She was at her strongest -- which in this case is "maintained reasonable coherency" -- when she was either a) reciting campaign cliches about being a maverick or hailing from small town America (note to Palin: I've met plenty of small town Americans in my life, and without exception none of them felt compelled to keep pointing it out to me. If being from a small town really impacts who you are and how you live your life, you should be able to demonstrate it by showing us, not telling us) or b) lobbing superficial rhetorical bombs about how Democrats want to "surrender" in Iraq, are "dangerous", and of course, the conservative mantra about tax raising. It's not impressive to me, and I don't think it stirs good memories in the minds of American voters anymore.

This is the election for the vice presidency. We don't grade on a curve here. Biden I give an A- -- I wish he would have mentioned even more his work on the Violence Against Women Act, which opens so many angles of attack it is not funny. And Palin? D+. "Exceeds expectations" isn't good enough. She had to prove Couric and Gibson were flukes, and she did not come close to doing that.