High school debate has always been broken. It has only very rarely been about the contest of ideas, and always been about how to win. For example there is a concept called 'spreading' in policy debate. This is where you speak as fast as humanly possible to lay out as many points as possible and if the opposing team fails to address or mention any of them you claim victory. For some reason this strategy, which makes the debaters all but unintelligible is allowed and leads to victory.
In Lincoln Douglas debate it was common to construct what is called a 'collapsing tautology'. Your argument is constructed to look like a series of logical steps with which there can be argument, but in fact all it is is a tautology that ultimately can't be refuted. It's a trap and if the opponent engages at all they lose.
More generally HS debate is politics and persuasion. Know the judges, build charisma, learn what works regardless of the content.
The introduction of a new noxious debating strategy might be noteworthy, but it is no more ruining debate than all the others, and the students don't actually care about the strategy or its tenants any more than they care about the validity of Rawlsian justice.
What you describe as "spreading" sounds a lot like the infamous "Gish Gallop", a hugely effective debate technique named after young-earth creationist Duane Gish, who would spew out dozens of weakly supported arguments, secure in the knowledge that each argument would require at least twice the amount of time to refute [1].
The most interesting part of this article to me was the end, where the author argues about how important High School Debate is and how Kritiks are the ruin of this important tradition. I was a HS debator in the early 90s, before K's were popular, and from my experience debate was already a fun but ultimately harmful activity. The whole idea was to spew a constant stream of arguments that didn't have any merit as quickly as possible, hoping the opposing team would forget to respond to just one out of 100, and then you win.
HS Debate already trained a generation of win-at-all-costs, who cares if you are right folks like Karl Rove. I don't see how the current generation of kritik based debate could possibly be any worse
There are typically time limits in structured debate. Spewing an avalanche of nonsense so that your opponent doesn’t have time to refute it all is not a polite or respectable way to “win” anything.
If your thinking is sound, your arguments should be sound and they should be able to stand on their own.
I'm reminded of Patrick McKenzie's experience in college debate, where he took to every compatible proposition the argument "abolish the koseki" (the Japanese family register), a problematic Japanese cultural tradition that he could count on his opposition being unfamiliar with, until they ultimately had to change the debate rules to prevent that strategy:
This story doesn't really hold water for me; you do this once, we all laugh about it, but by the next week every team has a neg case file for this and a dozen variations of it.
It's funny, I have mixed feelings about my policy debate experience but the sort of tendentious criticism in the article makes me want to defend it.
(I want to call the article ill-informed but I suspect the author is actually at least generally aware of all the dynamics you describe and just relying on their audience not to be.)
The quotes from judge's paradigms are clearly selected to generate outrage. I disagree that her intention was reflection, I think her intention was to get readers for slow boring.
> “Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist... I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging... I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments... Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc.”
This is not at all a typical judge paradigm, she had to search quite hard to find that (she also is wrong about where she got it from, this is not a 2023 ToC paradigm).
Despite everything odious about Malcolm Gladwell, he recently did something nice: got himself his ass handed to him in a debate and then went to find out why he lost so badly. Made for a pretty fun podcast, if you are the sort of person who takes joy in Malcolm Gladwell getting knocked down a notch or two. :)
Then there's people acting like 'politics' was never a meta-argument to begin with, it's just as much apart of the breakage. I remember having an assistant coach who'd debated in the 80s being befuddled that we were arguing what Republicans thought of the plan.
In Lincoln Douglas debate it was common to construct what is called a 'collapsing tautology'. Your argument is constructed to look like a series of logical steps with which there can be argument, but in fact all it is is a tautology that ultimately can't be refuted. It's a trap and if the opponent engages at all they lose.
More generally HS debate is politics and persuasion. Know the judges, build charisma, learn what works regardless of the content.
The introduction of a new noxious debating strategy might be noteworthy, but it is no more ruining debate than all the others, and the students don't actually care about the strategy or its tenants any more than they care about the validity of Rawlsian justice.