1NC

Topicality

Our interpretation is that the affirmative must be responsible for defending the
desirability of topical action---winning the United States federal government
should not establish national health insurance should always be a sufficient
condition for voting negative.

Most predictable---the agent and verb indicate a debate about hypothetical

government action
Jon M Ericson 3, Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et
al., The Debater’s Guide, Third Edition, p. 4
The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key elements, although they
have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1. An agent doing the acting ---“The
United States” in “The United States should adopt a policy of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a proposition
of value, the agent is the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb should—the first part of a verb phrase that urges
action. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a
program or policy into action through governmental means . 4. A specification of
directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the
topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce.
The entire debate is about whether
Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred.

something ought to occur . What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient
and compelling reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you propose.

Establishing a policy requires enacting new laws

David Schultz 5, professor in the Hamline University Department of Political Science, 2005,
Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court, p. 8-9
The Constitution established three branches of government, the legislative, judicial, and executive. It
does refer to other elements of government but does not specifically define what those elements should be. Government
agencies, however, were necessary from the birth of the nation to carry out functions of the
government and conduct the day-to-day business and duties of government. Congress may have
the power to make law and establish policy, but do they have the time to enforce each of those
laws and policies? No. And the other two branches of government are similarly situated. They were
established to deal with broad and major issues facing the nation, not the minutiae of day-today
government function. And because there was a need for administrative agencies there also became a
need for administrative law to regulate those agencies.

Vote neg for predictable limits---allowing the affirmative to pick any grounds for
the debate makes negative engagement impossible, by skirting a predictable
starting point and making our preparation and research useless. Abdicating
debates about the resolution makes all limits impossible---topic relevance isn’t
enough to ensure effective clash
Steinberg and Freeley 13, David, Lecturer in Communication studies and rhetoric, advisor to
Miami Urban Debate League, Director of Debate at U Miami, former President of CEDA, and
Austin, attorney who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, JD, Suffolk
University, Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making, 121-4
Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a controversy, a difference of opinion or a
conflict of interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a feet or value or policy,

there is no need or opportunity for debate; the matter can be settled by unanimous consent. Thus, for example, it would
be pointless to attempt to debate "Resolved: That two plus two equals four,” because there is simply no controversy about this statement. Controversy is
an essential prerequisite of debate. Where there is no clash of ideas, proposals, interests, or expressed positions of issues, there is no debate.
Controversy invites decisive choice between competing positions. Debate cannot produce effective decisions without clear identification of a question or
questions to be answered. For example, general argument may occur about the broad topic of illegal immigration. How many illegal immigrants live in
the United States? What is the impact of illegal immigration and immigrants on our economy? What is their impact on our communities? Do they
commit crimes? Do they take jobs from American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do they require social services? Is it a problem that some do not speak
English? Is it the responsibility of employers to discourage illegal immigration by not hiring undocumented workers? Should they have the opportunity
to gain citizenship? Does illegal immigration pose a security threat to our country? Do illegal immigrants do work that American workers are unwilling
to do? Are their rights as workers and as human beings at risk due to their status? Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and
businesses? How are their families impacted by their status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state to maintain its borders?
Should we build a wall on the Mexican border, establish a national identification card, or enforce existing laws against employers? Should we invite
immigrants to become U.S. citizens? Surely you
can think of many more concerns to be addressed by a
conversation about the topic area of illegal immigration. Participation in this “debate” is likely to
be emotional and intense. However, it is not likely to be productive or useful without focus on a
particular question and identification of a line demarcating sides in the controversy. To be
discussed and resolved effectively, controversies are best understood when seated clearly such that all parties to the debate share an understanding
about the objective of the debate. This
enables focus on substantive and objectively identifiable issues
facilitating comparison of competing argumentation leading to effective decisions.
Vague understanding results in unfocused deliberation and poor decisions , general feelings
of tension without opportunity for resolution, frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the
failure of the U.S. Congress to make substantial progress on the immigration debate. Of course,
arguments may be presented without disagreement. For example, claims are presented and supported within speeches,
editorials, and advertisements even without opposing or refutational response. Argumentation occurs in a range of settings from informal to formal,
and may not call upon an audience or judge to make a forced choice among competing claims. Informal discourse occurs as conversation or panel
discussion without demanding a decision about a dichotomous or yes/no question. However, by definition, debate requires "reasoned judgment on a
proposition. The proposition is a statement about which competing advocates will offer alternative (pro or con) argumentation calling upon their
audience or adjudicator to decide. The proposition provides focus for the discourse and guides the decision process. Even when a decision will be made
through a process of compromise, it is important to identify the beginning positions of competing advocates
to begin negotiation and movement toward a center, or consensus position. It is frustrating and usually
unproductive to attempt to make a decision when deciders are unclear as to what the decision is
about. The proposition may be implicit in some applied debates (“Vote for me!”); however, when a vote or consequential decision is called for (as in
the courtroom or in applied parliamentary debate) it is essential that the proposition be explicitly expressed (“the
defendant is guilty!”). In academic debate, the proposition provides essential guidance for the

preparation of the debaters prior to the debate, the case building and discourse presented
during the debate, and the decision to be made by the debate judge after the debate. Someone
disturbed by the problem of a growing underclass of poorly educated, socially disenfranchised youths might observe,
“Public schools are doing a terrible job! They' are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas.
Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a
complex range of issues, might arrive at an unhelpful decision, such as "We ought to do some-
thing about this” or, worse, “It’s too complicated a problem to deal with." Groups of concerned citizens
worried about the state of public education could join together to express their frustrations , anger, disillusionment,

and emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for their discussions , they could easily agree

about the sorry state of education without finding points of clarity or potential
solutions. A gripe session would follow. But if a precise question is posed—such as “What can
be done to improve public education?”—then a more profitable area of discussion is opened up
simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution step. One or more judgments can be phrased in the form
of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for legislative assemblies, The statements "Resolved: That the federal
government should implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities” and “Resolved; That the state of Florida should adopt a school
voucher program" more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate. They provide
specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference. This focus contributes to better and more informed decision
making with the potential for better results. In academic debate, it provides better depth of argumentation and enhanced opportunity for reaping the
educational benefits of participation. In the next section, we will consider the challenge of framing the proposition for debate, and its role in the debate.
To have a productive debate, which facilitates effective decision making by directing and placing limits on the decision to be made, the basis for
argument should be clearly defined. If we merely talk about a topic, such as ‘"homelessness,” or “abortion,” Or “crime,” or “global warming,” we are
likely to have an interesting discussion but not to establish a profitable basis for argument. For example, the statement “Resolved: That the pen is
mightier than the sword” is debatable, yet by itself fails to provide much basis for dear argumentation. If we take this statement to mean Iliad the
written word is more effective than physical force for some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or
physical force for a specific purpose, perhaps promoting positive social change. (Note that “loose” propositions, such as the example above, may be
defined by their advocates in such a way as to facilitate a clear contrast of competing sides; through definitions and debate they “become” clearly
understood statements even though they may not begin as such. There are formats for debate that often begin with this sort of proposition. However,
in any debate, at some point, effective and meaningful discussion relies on identification of a
clearly stated or understood proposition.) Back to the example of the written word versus physical force. Although we
now have a general subject, we have not yet stated a problem. It is still too broad , too loosely worded to promote well-
organized argument. What sort of writing are we concerned with—poems, novels, government documents, website development, advertising, cyber-
warfare, disinformation, or what? What does it mean to be “mightier" in this context? What kind of physical force is being compared—fists, dueling
swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A more specific question might be, “Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective
in assuring Laurania of our support in a certain crisis?” The basis for argument could be phrased in a debate proposition such as “Resolved: That the
United States should enter into a mutual defense treaty with Laurania.” Negative advocates might oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet
maneuvers would be a better solution. This
is not to say that debates should completely avoid creative
interpretation of the controversy by advocates, or that good debates cannot occur over competing
interpretations of the controversy; in fact, these sorts of debates may be very engaging. The
point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided by focus on a particular
point of difference , which will be outlined in the following discussion.

This has two impacts:

First is fairness:

A predictable limit is the only way to give the neg a chance to win---radical aff
choice shifts the grounds for the debate and puts the aff far ahead. Pre-
tournament negative preparation is structured around topical plans as points of
offense, which means anything other than a topical plan structurally favors the
affirmative.

Fairness is an intrinsic good---debate is fundamentally a game and requires

effective competition between the aff and the neg---the only way for any benefit to
be produced from debate is if the judge can make a decision between two sides
who have had a relatively equal chance to prepare for a common point of debate.

Fairness also comes before substance---deciding any other argument in this debate
cannot be disentangled from our inability to prepare for it---any argument you
think they’re winning is a link, not a reason to vote for them, because it’s just as
likely that they’re winning it because we weren’t able to effectively prepare to
defeat it.

Second is idea testing:

A well-defined resolution is critical to allow the neg to refute the aff in an in-depth
fashion---this process of negation produces iterative testing and improvement,
where we learn to improve our arguments based on our opponents’ arguments.
This process does not proscribe particular styles or forms of argument, but does
require a common point of disagreement around which arguments can be
organized.
Ralf Poscher 16, director of the Institute for Staatswissenschaft & Philosophy of Law, Professor
of Public Law and Legal Philosophy, “Why We Argue About the Law: An Agonistic Account of
Legal Disagreement,” in Metaphilosophy of Law, ed. Gizbert-Studnicki, Dyrda, Banas, 2/19/16,
SSRN
This also holds where we seem to be in agreement. Agreement without exposure to disagreement can be
deceptive in various ways. The first phenomenon Postema draws attention to is the group polarization effect. When a
group of like‐minded people deliberates an issue, informational and reputational cascades
produce more extreme views in the process of their deliberations.105 The polarization and biases that are
well documented for such groups 106 can be countered at least in some settings by the inclusion of dissenting
voices . In these scenarios, disagreement can be a cure for dysfunctional deliberative polarization and biases.107 A second
deliberative dysfunction mitigated by disagreement is superficial agreement, which can even be manipulatively used in the sense of a
“presumptuous ‘We’”108. Disagreement can help to police such distortions of deliberative processes by challenging superficial
agreements. Disagreements may thus signal that a deliberative process is not contaminated with dysfunctional agreements
stemming from polarization or superficiality. Protecting our discourse against such contaminations is valuable even if we do not
come to terms. Each of the opposing positions will profit from the catharsis it received “by looking
the negative in the face and tarrying with it”.
These advantages of disagreement in collective deliberations are mirrored on the individual level. Even if the probability of
reaching a consensus with our opponents is very low from the beginning, as might be the case in deeply
entrenched conflicts, entering into an exchange of arguments can still serve to test and improve
our position . We have to do the “labor of the negative” for ourselves. Even if we cannot come up with a line of argument that
coheres well with everybody else’s beliefs, attitudes and dispositions, we can still come up with a line of argument that achieves this
goal for our own personal beliefs, attitudes and dispositions. To provide ourselves with the most coherent system of our own beliefs,
attitudes and dispositions is – at least in important issues – an aspect of personal integrity – to borrow one of Dworkin’s favorite
expressions for a less aspirational idea.
In hard cases we must – in some way – lay out the argument for ourselves to figure out what we believe
to be the right answer. We might not know what we believe ourselves in questions of abortion, the death
penalty, torture, and stem cell research, until we have developed a line of argument against the background
of our subjective beliefs, attitudes and dispositions. In these cases it might be rational to discuss the issue with
someone unlikely to share some of our more fundamental convictions or who opposes the view towards which we lean. This might
even be the most helpful way of corroborating a view, because we know that our adversary is much more motivated
to find a potential flaw in our argument than someone with whom we know we are in
agreement. It might be more helpful to discuss a liberal position with Scalia than with Breyer if we want to make sure that we
have not overlooked some counter‐argument to our case.
It would be too narrow an understanding of our practice of legal disagreement and argumentation if we restricted its purpose to
persuading an adversary in the case at hand and inferred from this narrow understanding the irrationality of argumentation in hard
cases, in which we know beforehand that we will not be able to persuade. Rational argumentation is a much more complex practice
in a more complex social framework. Argumentation with an adversary can have purposes beyond
persuading him: to test one’s own convictions, to engage our opponent in inferential
commitments and to persuade third parties are only some of these; to rally our troops or express our convictions might be
others. To make our peace with Kant we could say that “there must be a hope of coming to terms” with someone though not
necessarily with our opponent, but maybe only a third party or even just ourselves and not necessarily only on the issue at hand, but
maybe through inferential commitments in a different arena.
f) The Advantage Over Non‐Argumentative Alternatives
It goes without saying that in real world legal disagreements, all of the reasons listed above usually play in concert and will typically
hold true to different degrees relative to different participants in the debate: There will be some participants for whom our hope of
coming to terms might still be justified and others for whom only some of the other reasons hold and some for whom it is a mixture
of all of the reasons in shifting degrees as our disagreements evolve. It is also apparent that, with the exception of the first reason,
the rationality of our disagreements is of a secondary nature. The
rational does not lie in the discovery of a
single right answer to the topic of debate, since in hard cases there are no single right
answers. Instead, our disagreements are instrumental to rationales which lie beyond the topic at
hand, like the exploration of our communalities or of our inferential commitments. Since these reasons are
of this secondary nature, they must stand up to alternative ways of settling irreconcilable disagreements that have other secondary
reasons in their favor – like swiftness of decision making or using fewer resources. Why does our legal practice require lengthy
arguments and discursive efforts even in appellate or supreme court cases of irreconcilable legal disagreements? The closure has to
come by some non‐argumentative mean and courts have always relied on them. For the medieval courts of the Germanic tradition it
is bequeathed that judges had to fight it out literally if they disagreed on a question of law – though the king allowed them to pick
surrogate fighters.109 It is understandable that the process of civilization has led us to non‐violent non‐ argumentative means to
determine the law. But what was wrong with District Judge Currin of Umatilla County in Oregon, who – in his late days – decided
inconclusive traffic violations by publicly flipping a coin?110 If we are counting heads at the end of our lengthy argumentative
proceedings anyway, why not decide hard cases by gut voting at the outset and spare everybody the cost of developing elaborate
arguments on questions, where there is not fact of the matter to be discovered?
One reason lies in the mixed nature of our reasons in actual legal disagreements. The different second order reasons can be held
apart analytically, but not in real life cases. The hope of coming to terms will often play a role at least for some time relative to some
participants in the debate. A second reason is that the objectives listed above could not be achieved by a
non‐argumentative procedure. Flipping a coin, throwing dice or taking a gut vote would not help us to
explore our communalities or our inferential commitments nor help to scrutinize the positions
in play. A third reason is the overall rational aspiration of the law that Dworkin relates to in his integrity account111. In a
justificatory sense112 the law aspires to give a coherent account of itself – even if it is not the only right one – required by equal
respect under conditions of normative disagreement.113 Combining legal argumentation with the non‐argumentative decision‐
making procedure of counting reasoned opinions serves the coherence aspiration of the law in at least two ways: First, the labor
of the negative reduces the chances that constructions of the law that have major flaws or
inconsistencies built into the arguments supporting them will prevail. Second, since every position must be
a reasoned one within the given framework of the law, it must be one that somehow fits into the overall structure of the law along
coherent lines. It thus protects against incoherent “checkerboard” treatments114 of hard cases. It is the combination of reasoned
disagreement and the non‐rational decision‐making mechanism of counting reasoned opinions that provides for both in hard cases:
a decision and one – of multiple possible – coherent constructions of the law. Pure non‐rational procedures – like flipping a coin –
would only provide for the decision part. Pure
argumentative procedures – which are not geared towards a
decision procedure – would undercut the incentive structure of our agonistic
disagreements.115 In the face of unresolvable disagreements endless debates would seem an idle enterprise. That the
debates are about winning or losing helps to keep the participants engaged. That the decision
depends on counting reasoned opinions guarantees that the engagement focuses on rational argumentation. No plain non‐
argumentative procedure would achieve this result. If the judges were to flip a coin at the end of the trial in hard cases, there would
be little incentive to engage in an exchange of arguments. It is specifically the count of reasoned opinions which provides for rational
scrutiny in our legal disagreements and thus contributes to the rationales discussed above.
2. The Semantics of Agonistic Disagreements
The agonistic account does not presuppose a fact of the matter, it is not accompanied by an
ontological commitment, and the question of how the fact of the matter could be known to
us is not even raised. Thus the agonistic account of legal disagreement is not confronted with the
metaphysical or epistemological questions that plague one‐right‐answer theories in particular. However, it must still
come up with a semantics that explains in what sense we disagree about the same issue and are not just talking at cross purposes.
In a series of articles David Plunkett and Tim Sundell have reconstructed legal disagreements in semantic terms as metalinguistic
negotiations on the usage of a term that at the center of a hard case like “cruel and unusual punishment” in a death‐penalty case.116
Even though the different sides in the debate define the term differently, they are not talking past each other, since they are engaged
in a metalinguistic negotiation on the use of the same term. The metalinguistic negotiation on the use of the term serves as a
semantic anchor for a disagreement on the substantive issues connected with the term because of its functional role in the law. The
“cruel and unusual punishment”‐clause thus serves to argue about the permissibility of the death penalty. This account, however
only provides a very superficial semantic commonality. But the commonality between the participants of a legal disagreement go
deeper than a discussion whether the term “bank” should in future only to be used for financial institutions, which fulfills every
criteria for semantic negotiations that Plunkett and Sundell propose. Unlike in mere semantic negotiations, like the on the
disambiguation of the term “bank”, there is also some kind of identity of the substantive issues at
stake in legal disagreements.
A promising route to capture this aspect of legal disagreements might be offered by recent semantic approaches that try to
accommodate the externalist challenges of realist semantics,117 which inspire one‐right‐answer theorists like Moore or David Brink.
Neo‐ descriptivist and two‐valued semantics provide for the theoretical or interpretive element of realist semantics without having to
commit to the ontological positions of traditional externalism. In a sense they offer externalist semantics with no ontological strings
attached.
The less controversial aspect of the externalist picture of meaning developed in neo‐ descriptivist and two‐valued semantics can be
found in the deferential structure that our meaning‐providing intentions often encompass.118 In the case of natural kinds, speakers
defer to the expertise of chemists when they employ natural kind terms like gold or water. If a speaker orders someone to buy $
10,000 worth of gold as a safe investment, he might not know the exact atomic structure of the chemical element 79. In cases of
doubt, though, he would insist that he meant to buy only stuff that chemical experts – or the markets for that matter – qualify as
gold. The deferential element in the speaker’s intentions provides for the specific externalist element of the semantics.
In the case of the law, the meaning‐providing intentions connected to the provisions of the law can be understood to defer in a
similar manner to the best overall theory or interpretation of the legal materials. Against the background of such a semantic
framework the conceptual unity of a linguistic practice is not ratified by the existence of a single
best answer, but by the unity of the interpretive effort that extends to legal materials and legal
practices that have sufficient overlap119 – be it only in a historical perspective120. The fulcrum of
disagreement that Dworkin sees in the existence of a single right answer121 does not lie in its
existence, but in the communality of the effort – if only on the basis of an overlapping
common ground of legal materials, accepted practices, experiences and dispositions. As two
athletes are engaged in the same contest when they follow the same rules, share the same concept of
winning and losing and act in the same context, but follow very different styles of e.g. wrestling, boxing, swimming etc. They are in
the same contest, even if there is no single best style in which to wrestle, box or swim. Each, however, is
engaged in developing the best style to win against their opponent, just as two lawyers try to develop the
best argument to convince a bench of judges.122 Within such a semantic framework even people with radically
opposing views about the application of an expression can still share a concept , in that they
are engaged in the same process of theorizing over roughly the same legal materials and practices.
Semantic frameworks along these lines allow for adamant disagreements without abandoning the idea
that people are talking about the same concept. An agonistic account of legal disagreement can build on such a
semantic framework, which can explain in what sense lawyers, judges and scholars engaged in agonistic disagreements are not
talking past each other. They are engaged in developing the best interpretation of roughly the same legal materials, albeit against the
background of diverging beliefs, attitudes and dispositions that lead them to divergent conclusions in hard cases. Despite the
divergent conclusions, semantic
unity is provided by the largely overlapping legal materials that
form the basis for their disagreement. Such a semantic collapses only when we lack a
sufficient overlap in the materials. To use an example of Michael Moore’s: If we wanted to debate whether a certain
work of art was “just”, we share neither paradigms nor a tradition of applying the concept of justice to art such as to engage in an
intelligible controversy.

They can’t get offense---we don’t have the power to impose a norm, only to
persuade you that their arguments should be rejected---every debate requires a
winner and loser, so voting negative doesn’t reject them from debate, it just says
they should make a better argument next time
Amanda Anderson 6, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown
University, Spring 2006, “Reply to My Critic(s),” Criticism, Vol. 48, No. 2, p. 281-290
Lets first examine the claim that my book is "unwittingly" inviting a resurrection of the "Enlightenment-equals-totalitarianism
position." How, one wonders, could a book promoting argument and debate, and promoting reason-
giving practices as a kind of common ground that should prevail over assertions of cultural
authenticity, somehow come to be seen as a dangerous resurgence of bad Enlightenment?
Robbins tells us why: I want "argument on my own terms"-that is, I want to impose reason on
people , which is a form of power and oppression. But what can this possibly mean? Arguments
stand or fall based on whether they are successful and persuasive , even an argument in favor of
argument . It simply is not the case that an argument in favor of the importance of reasoned
debate to liberal democracy is tantamount to oppressive power . To assume so is to assume, in the manner of
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, that reason is itself violent, inherently, and that it will always mask power and enforce
exclusions. But to assume this is to assume the very view of Enlightenment reason that Robbins claims we are "thankfully" well rid
of. (I leave to the side the idea that any individual can proclaim that a debate is over, thankfully or not.) But perhaps Robbins
will say, "I am not imagining that your argument is directly oppressive, but that what you argue
for would be, if it were enforced ." Yet my book doesn't imagine or suggest it is enforceable; I simply
argue in favor of, I promote , an ethos of argument within a liberal democratic and proceduralist
framework. As much as Robbins would like to think so, neither I nor the books I write can be cast as an arm
of the police .
Robbins wants to imagine a far more direct line of influence from criticism to political reality,
however, and this is why it can be such a bad thing to suggest norms of argument. Watch as the gloves
come off:
Faced with the prospect of submitting to her version of argument roughly, Habermass version-and of being thus authorized to
disagree only about other, smaller things, some may feel that there will have been an end to argument, or an end to the arguments
they find most interesting. With current events in mind, I would be surprised if there were no recourse to the metaphor of a regular
army facing a guerilla insurrection, hinting that Anderson wants to force her opponents to dress in uniform, reside in well-
demarcated camps and capitals that can be bombed, fight by the rules of states (whether the states themselves abide by these rules
or not), and so on-in short, that she wants to get the battle onto a terrain where her side will be assured of having the upper hand.
Lets leave to the side the fact that this is a disowned hypothetical criticism. (As in, "Well, okay, yes, those are my gloves, but those
are somebody elses hands they will have come off of.") Because far more interesting, actually, is the sudden elevation of
stakes. It is a symptom of the sorry state of affairs in our profession that it plays out repeatedly
this tragicomic tendency to give a grandiose political meaning to every object it analyzes or
confronts. We have evidence of how desperate the situation is when we see it in a critic as thoughtful as Bruce Robbins, where it
emerges as the need to allegorize a point about an argument in such a way that it gets cast as the equivalent of war
atrocities. It is especially ironic in light of the fact that to the extent that I do give examples of
the importance of liberal democratic proceduralism, I invoke the disregard of the protocols of
international adjudication in the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq; I also speak about concerns with
voting transparency. It is hard for me to see how my argument about proceduralism can be associated
with the policies of the Bush administration when that administration has exhibited a flagrant
disregard of democratic procedure and the rule of law. I happen to think that a renewed focus on
proceduralism is a timely venture, which is why I spend so much time discussing it in my final chapter. But I hasten to
add that I am not interested in imagining that proceduralism is the sole political response to the needs
of cultural criticism in our time: my goal in the book is to argue for a liberal democratic culture of
argument , and to suggest ways in which argument is not served by trumping appeals to identity
and charismatic authority. I fully admit that my examples are less political events than academic debates; for those uninterested in
the shape of intellectual arguments, and eager for more direct and sustained discussion of contemporary politics, the approach will
disappoint. Moreover, there will always be a tendency for a proceduralist to under-specify substance, and that is partly a principled
decision, since the point is that agreements, compromises, and policies get worked out through the communicative and political
process. My book is mainly concentrated on evaluating forms of arguments and appeals to ethos, both those that count as a form of
trump card or distortion, and those that flesh out an understanding of argument as a universalist practice. There is an intermittent
appeal to larger concerns in the political democratic culture, and that is because I see connections between the ideal of argument and
the ideal of deliberative democracy. But there is clearly, and indeed necessarily, significant room for further elaboration here.
There is a way to make Robbins’s point more narrowly which would run something like this:
Anderson has a very restricted notion of how argument should play out, or appear, within academic
culture, given the heavy emphasis on logical consistency and normative coherence and
explicitness. This conception of argument is too narrow (and hence authoritarian). To this I
would reply simply that logical consistency and normative coherence and explicitness do not
exhaust the possible forms, modes, and strategies of argumentation . There is a distinction to be
made between the identification of moves that stultify or disarm argument , and an insistence on
some sort of single manner of reasoned argument . The former I am entirely committed to; the
latter not at all , despite the fact that I obviously favor a certain style of argument, and even despite the
fact that I am philosophically committed to the claims of the theory of communicative reason. I do address the issue of diverse forms
and modes of argument in the first and last chapters of the book (as I discuss above), but it seems that a more direct reflection on the
books own mode of argumentation might have provided the occasion for a fuller treatment of the issues that trouble Robbins.
Different genres within academe have different conventions, of course, and we can and do make
decisions all the time about what rises to the level of cogency within specific academic venues,
and what doesn't. Some of those judgments have to do with protocols of argument. The book review,
for example, is judged according to whether the reviewer responsibly represents the scholarship under
discussion, seems to have a good grasp of the body of scholarship it belongs to, and convincingly and fairly points out
strengths and weaknesses. The book forum is a bit looser-one expects responsible representation of the scholarship under
discussion, but it can be more selectively focused on a key set of issues. And one expects a bit of provocation, in order to make the
exchange readable and dramatic. But of course in a forum exchange there is an implicit norm of argument, a
tendency to judge whether a particular participant is making a strong or a weak case in light of
the competing claims at play. Much of our time in the profession is taken with judging the quality of
all manner of academic performance, and much of it has to do with norms of argument, however
much Robbins may worry about their potentially coercive nature.
From time to time I myself have wondered whether my book is too influenced by the modes of academe. But when I read a piece of
writing like the one that Elspeth Probyn produced, I find myself feeling a renewed commitment to the evaluative
norms of responsible scholarship, and to the idea that clearly agreed-upon genres and
protocols of fair scholarship benefit from explicit affirmation at times. Probyn's piece does not
conform at all to the conventions of the forum response. She may herself be quite delighted that it does not. Robbins may find
himself delighted that she represents a viewpoint that does not agree on my (totalitarian)
fundamentals of forum responses. But I would simply say that here we do not have fair or reasoned
argument, which is one of the enabling procedures of forum exchanges. Indeed, I hear a
different genre altogether: the venting phone call to a friend or intimate. In this genre, which I think we are all
familiar with, one is not expected or required to give reasons or evidence, as one is in academic argument. Here's how the phone call
might go: "Ugh. I have to write a response to this awful book. I agreed to this because I thought the book had an interesting title; it's
called The Way We Argue Now. But I can't get through it; it isn't at all what I expected. I find myself alternately bored and irritated.
It's so from the center—totally American parochial, and I just hate the style: polemical in a slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am way—really
quite mean-spirited. She's so arrogant. And you wouldn't believe the so-called critique of Foucault. I don't know, I think I'm just sick
of abstract theory—I mean, aren't we past this? It's so stultifying. I wish there were some way to get out of the commitment. I don't
know how I'm ever going to get to it anyway, with all my journalism deadlines." The friend: "That sounds awful. But just use the
occasion to write about something else, something you think is important. Write about yourself. Direct attention to a book that you
do like. Whatever you do, don't spend too much time on it. And definitely call her out on the American centrism."
 1NC
The 1AC represents a performance of powerlessness---contemporary left politics
has become defined by performances of moral virtue that protest existing
structures but provide no mechanism for building political programs to change the
allocation of material power. Voting aff endorses the idea that the sole criteria for
the success of a political act is the individual strength by which it expressed its
values, rather than how well it created tangible means by which power can be
retaken---that’s fatal for any concrete political struggle.
Peter Dorman 16, faculty member in political economy at the Evergreen State College, 5/16/16,
“The Climate Movement Needs to Get Radical, but What Does that Mean?,”
http://nonsite.org/editorial/the-climate-movement-needs-to-get-radical-but-what-does-that-
mean
2. The cultural turn has gone too far. Of course, the deciphering of discourses has much to
recommend it; all social action takes place in a context of meanings—shared, contested or both. It’s
remarkable, however, that a high profile book that claims to be about radical social change, and
which has won widespread approval across the leftward half of the political spectrum, could sidestep any sustained
consideration of wealth and power altogether.
Why have governments failed to act to counter the threat of catastrophic climate change? Is it solely because of faulty thinking, or
there exists a gross imbalance of power in every modern capitalist country, such that
could it be that
business interests are firmly in control? What institutions wield this power and what
methods do they use? Crucially, how can those who struggle for democratic collective action
contest this power? What types of organizations can be effective? What structural changes
should be prioritized to rebalance power and enable rational solutions to overriding problems like
climate change? I wouldn’t fault Klein for failing to provide answers—who has? What is astonishing, however, is
that the questions are never posed , not even in passing. What does it mean to espouse radical
politics and never take up the issue of power?
But a second absence is even more telling. At various points Klein refers to the need for a price to be placed on carbon; it clearly is
not her main interest, since she devotes no space at all to the political struggle required to achieve this, but she recognizes it is an
important part of the story. What’s missing, however, is any serious consideration of how much money this will be, out of whose
pockets it will be extracted and to whose pockets it will be transferred. I cannot emphasize how extraordinary it is for a book to be
ostensibly about capitalism but pay so little attention to money.
The reality is that carbon revenues will be immense. If even approximately sufficient global action is undertaken, the sums will be in
the trillions of dollars. And despite Klein’s moral calculus, the actual, real-life operation of carbon pricing will guarantee that it is the
public at large—everyone who purchases a good or service with a carbon energy component—that will pay it. This is visible in
gasoline taxes today, which consumers pay at the pump; a carbon price, whether it is engineered by a tax or a cap on permits, will be
the same sort of tax writ very, very large. Such a tax will be regressive, and lower income people will effectively be taxed at a higher
rate.
This is potentially catastrophic on multiple levels. It is intolerable from a social justice perspective in an age of rampaging inequality.
It would also be impossible to disguise from voters, making it difficult to impossible to get majority support for a stiff carbon price.
Klein blithely recommends using this new source of revenue to finance green investments, but she doesn’t inquire whose money is
being spent, nor does she consider that, in practice, governments will simply shift a lot of the investments they would have made
anyway over to this new revenue spigot, freeing up more money for their other pet projects. The one word that sums up Klein’s
attitude toward this trillion-dollar question is uninterested.
Of course, there are ways to turn around the economics of carbon pricing. The money can be returned to the public on an equal per
capita basis, which would have the effect of turning an otherwise regressive transfer system into a progressive, inequality-reducing
one. Given the amount of money at stake, this will require a massive political mobilization, but it is worth fighting for. To repeat,
however, the purpose of bringing up this issue is not to proselytize for a different system of carbon pricing, but simply to point out
the glaring incongruity of an ostensibly radical, anti-capitalist book (a rather long one at that) which ignores the single most
important principle for how things work in a capitalist society: follow the money!
3. Theleft has adapted to powerlessness . This Changes Everything practically exudes triumphalism, especially
in the final hundred pages or so. Vibrant, righteous movements are springing up everywhere, we are told,
and through their proliferation they will change the world.
Except, of course, they won’t . They do not have the means to change the world to
something different, only to obstruct the bits of the existing world they can get their bodies in
front of. That is important to do, and it can play a crucial role in a larger movement to contest power—if that movement can come
into existence. If
no larger movement arises, the local fires will be put out one by one . A radical
political vision cannot abjure politics, and it is politics which is missing from Klein.
Here it is necessary to step back and consider the historical context. In the English-speaking world, and to a lesser extent in other
wealthy, capitalist countries, the past several decades have seen profound defeat and demobilization on
the left. In no country is there a mass political party with a program to transform the existing
political economic order into something else. Unions, where they have any clout at all, have been fighting a
rearguard struggle to retain as many of the gains of former times as they can. Of course, there have also been
substantial victories for racial, gender and other social equalities and a general drift toward less
authoritarian cultural norms. But the core institutions of wealth and power are more firmly entrenched
now than they have been in generations, and the left as a political force is hardly noticeable.
How have those who still identify with the left coped with this epoch of powerlessness? There are
many answers, but all of them express some form of disengagement . For instance, redefining
politics as the performance of moral virtue rather than the contest for
power can provide consolation when political avenues appear to be blocked. Activities of
this sort are evaluated according to how expressive they are — how good they
make us feel —rather than any objective criterion of effectiveness in achieving concrete goals
or altering the balance of political forces. This is how I would interpret Blockadia, for instance, in the absence of a
broader movement that includes both direct action and political contestation: Klein can devote page after page to how righteous
these activists are without any attention to whether they have had or have any prospect of having an impact on carbon emissions.
Their very activism constitutes its own victory, which is convenient if the more conventional sort of victory is believed to be out of
reach. (It is bad form to even bring this up: why, some will ask, am I dwelling on the negative with so much positive energy to
celebrate?)
Another response is to collapse social change into personal choices over lifestyle and
philosophy . If you believe that the threat of climate change can be defeated by a shift to more modest
consumption habits and rejection of the false intellectual gods of globalization and economic growth,
one individual at a time, then each moment of conversion constitutes its own little
victory . The reader of Klein’s book, feeling a sense of unity with that consciousness and its program to downshift consumption,
can experience this victory first hand. This is very gratifying, and it reinforces the message that powerlessness in
conventional terms is irrelevant, since the change we are part of is at a deeper level than
governments and their laws or corporations and their assets. After all, what can be more subversive than
thinking new thoughts?
One of Klein’s favorite adaptations is the conflation of wishes and operative political
programs . Again and again she holds up statements of intent —protect Mother Earth, treat all people
equally, respect all cultures, live simple, natural, local lives— as if they were proposals whose
implementation would have these outcomes . It’s all ends and no means . This is a
double convenience: first it eliminates the need to be factual and analytical about programs, since
announcing the goal is sufficient unto itself, and second, it evades the disconcerting
problem of how to deal with the daunting political challenge of getting such programs
(if they even exist) enacted and enforced . I believe the treatment of goals as if they were programs is
the underlying reason for the sloppiness of this book on matters of economics and law. Klein can say we should finance
a large green investment program by taxing fossil fuel profits, or we should simultaneously shrink the economy and increase the
number of jobs, because in the end it doesn’t matter whether these or other recommendations could
actually prove functional in the real world. The truth lies in the rightness of the demand, not the
means of fulfilling it. But this too is an adaptation to powerlessness.
To close, I wish to emphasize that this critique is ultimately not directed at a single individual. On the contrary,
even if we consider only this one book, it is clear that its writing was a team effort; the long acknowledgments section identifies both
paid assistants and an army of internal reviewers. But what I find diagnostic is the warm reception it received from virtually every
media outlet on the English-speaking left. This suggests that Klein is moving with the political tide and not against it, and that the
problems that seemed obvious to me were either invisible to her reviewers or regarded as too insignificant to bring up. The view
that capitalism is a style of thinking, progress is a myth, and political contestation is
irrelevant to “true” social change belongs not just to this one book but to all the commentators who
found nothing to criticize. That’s the real problem .

Trump’s success in colonizing political institutions depends on the degree to which

civil society adopts pessimistic, cynical readings of the political and withdraws
from institutional engagement---the damage he’ll do is not yet determined, and
organized resistance that insists on holding institutions accountable can restrain
him---but the aff’s method precludes that by retreating into the fortresses of
cultural, apolitical strategies
David Frum 17, Senior Editor at The Atlantic, March 2017, “How to Build an Autocracy,”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-
autocracy/513872/?utm_source=fbb
The lurid mass movements of the 20th century—communist, fascist, and other—have bequeathed to our
imaginations an outdated image of what 21st-century authoritarianism might look like.
Whatever else happens, Americans are not going to assemble in parade-ground formations, any more than they will crank a
gramophone or dance the turkey trot. In a society where few people walk to work, why mobilize young men
in matching shirts to command the streets? If you’re seeking to domineer and bully, you want your storm troopers to
go online, where the more important traffic is. Demagogues need no longer stand erect for hours orating into
a radio microphone. Tweet lies from a smartphone instead .
“Populist-fueled democratic backsliding is difficult to counter,” wrote the political scientists Andrea Kendall-
Taylor and Erica Frantz late last year. “Because it is subtle and incremental, there is no single moment that
triggers widespread resistance or creates a focal point around which an opposition can coalesce
… Piecemeal democratic erosion, therefore, typically provokes only fragmented resistance.” Their
observation was rooted in the experiences of countries ranging from the Philippines to Hungary. It could apply here too.
If people retreat into private life, if critics grow quieter, if cynicism
becomes endemic , the corruption will slowly become more brazen, the intimidation of
opponents stronger. Laws intended to ensure accountability or prevent graft or protect civil liberties
will be weakened.
If the president uses his office to grab billions for himself and his family, his supporters will feel empowered to take millions. If he
successfully exerts power to punish enemies, his successors will emulate his methods .
If citizens learn that success in business or in public service depends on the favor of the president and his ruling clique, then it’s not
only American politics that will change. The economy will be corrupted too, and with it the larger culture. A culture that has
accepted that graft is the norm, that rules don’t matter as much as relationships with those in power, and that people can
be punished for speech and acts that remain theoretically legal—such a culture is not easily
reoriented back to constitutionalism, freedom , and public integrity.
The oft-debated question “Is Donald Trump a fascist?” is not easy to answer. There are certainly fascistic elements to him: the
subdivision of society into categories of friend and foe; the boastful virility and the delight in violence; the vision of life as a struggle
for dominance that only some can win, and that others must lose.
Yet there’s also something incongruous and even absurd about applying the sinister label of fascist
to Donald Trump. He is so pathetically needy , so shamelessly self-interested, so fitful and distracted.
Fascism fetishizes hardihood, sacrifice, and struggle—concepts not often associated with Trump.
Perhaps this is the wrong question. Perhaps the better question about Trump is not “What is he?” but “What will he do to us?”
By all early indications, the Trump presidency will corrode public integrity and the rule of law —and also
do untold damage to American global leadership, the Western alliance, and democratic norms around the
world. The damage has already begun, and it will not be soon or easily undone. Yet exactly how much
damage is allowed to be done is an open question —the most important
near-term question in American politics. It is also an intensely personal one, for its answer will
be determined by the answer to another question: What will you do? And you? And you?
Of course we want to believe that everything will turn out all right. In this instance, however, that lovely and customary American
assumption itself qualifies as one of the most serious impediments to everything turning out all right. If the story ends without too
much harm to the republic, it won’t be because the dangers were imagined, but because citizens resisted.
The duty to resist should weigh most heavily upon those of us who—because of ideology or partisan affiliation or some other
reason—are most predisposed to favor President Trump and his agenda. The years ahead will be years of temptation as well as
danger: temptation to seize a rare political opportunity to cram through an agenda that the American majority would normally
reject. Who knows when that chance will recur?
A constitutional regime is founded upon the shared belief that the most fundamental commitment of the political system is to the
rules. The rules matter more than the outcomes. It’s because the rules matter most that Hillary Clinton conceded the presidency to
Trump despite winning millions more votes. It’s because the rules matter most that the giant state of California will accept the
supremacy of a federal government that its people rejected by an almost two-to-one margin.
Perhaps the words of a founding father of modern conservatism, Barry Goldwater, offer guidance. “If I should later be attacked for
neglecting my constituents’ ‘interests,’  ” Goldwater wrote in The Conscience of a Conservative, “I shall reply that I was informed
their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.” These words should be kept in mind by those
conservatives who think a tax cut or health-care reform a sufficient reward for enabling the slow rot of constitutional government.
Many of the worst and most subversive things Trump will do will be highly popular. Voters liked the threats and incentives that kept
Carrier manufacturing jobs in Indiana. Since 1789, the wisest American leaders have invested great ingenuity in creating institutions
to protect the electorate from its momentary impulses toward arbitrary action: the courts, the professional officer corps of the armed
forces, the civil service, the Federal Reserve—and undergirding it all, the guarantees of the Constitution and especially the Bill of
Rights. More than any president in U.S. history since at least the time of Andrew Jackson, Donald Trump seeks to subvert those
institutions.
Trump and his team count on one thing above all others: public indifference . “I think
people don’t care,” he said in September when asked whether voters wanted him to release his tax returns. “Nobody cares,” he
reiterated to 60 Minutes in November. Conflicts of interest with foreign investments? Trump tweeted on
November 21 that he didn’t believe voters cared about that either: “Prior to the election it was well known that I have
interests in properties all over the world. Only the crooked media makes this a big deal!”
What happens in the next four years will depend heavily on whether Trump is right or wrong
about how little Americans care about their democracy and the habits and conventions that
sustain it. If they surprise him, they can restrain him .
Public opinion, public scrutiny, and public pressure still matter greatly in the U.S. political system. In
January, an unexpected surge of voter outrage thwarted plans to neutralize the independent House
ethics office. That kind of defense will need to be replicated many times. Elsewhere in this issue, Jonathan
Rauch describes some of the networks of defense that Americans are creating.
Get into the habit of telephoning your senators and House member at their local offices, especially if you live in a red state. Press
your senators to ensure that prosecutors and judges are chosen for their independence—and that their independence is protected.
Support laws to require the Treasury to release presidential tax returns if the president fails to do so voluntarily. Urge new laws to
clarify that the Emoluments Clause applies to the president’s immediate family, and that it refers not merely to direct gifts from
governments but to payments from government-affiliated enterprises as well. Demand an independent investigation by qualified
professionals of the role of foreign intelligence services in the 2016 election—and the contacts, if any, between those services and
American citizens. Express your support and sympathy for journalists attacked by social-media trolls, especially women in
journalism, so often the preferred targets. Honor civil servants who are fired or forced to resign because they defied improper
orders. Keep close watch for signs of the rise of a culture of official impunity, in which friends and supporters of power-holders are
allowed to flout rules that bind everyone else.
Those citizens
who fantasize about defying tyranny from within fortified compounds
have never understood how liberty is actually threatened in a modern bureaucratic state: not
by diktat and violence, but by the slow, demoralizing process of corruption
and deceit . And the way that liberty must be defended is not with amateur firearms,
but with an unwearying insistence upon the honesty, integrity, and
professionalism of American institutions and those who lead them. We are living through
the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has
encountered. What happens next is up to you and me. Don’t be afraid . This
moment of danger can also be your finest hour as a citizen and an American.
Radical social pessimism is the single thing most likely to prop up the tangible
manifestations of oppressive power structures---statements that we’re incapable
of molding social formations are self-fulfilling prophecies that disempower
attempts to create a better world. The alternative is a politics of optimism that sees
social structures as malleable and reversible---it’s not a naïve faith in the
inevitability of progress but rather a sober assessment of what’s most likely to
change our lived reality in ways that move away from oppression. The ballot has
performative effects, and investing its energy into describing the world that we
want actively redraws the boundaries of the possible
Alex Steffen 15, award-winning writer, speaker and foresight consultant, in 2013-2014 was
Planetary Futurist in Residence at the design and innovation firm IDEO, 4/28/15, “The Politics
of Optimism,” http://www.alexsteffen.com/the_politics_of_optimism
I've written before about my belief that in times like these, optimism is a powerful political act . As I put
it in the book,
Optimism is a political act.
Entrenched interests use despair, confusion and apathy to prevent change. They encourage modes
of thinking which lead us to believe that problems are insolvable , that nothing we do can
matter, that the issue is too complex to present even the opportunity for change. It is a long-standing political art to
sow the seeds of mistrust between those you would rule over: as Machiavelli said, tyrants do not care if they
are hated, so long as those under them do not love one another. Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in Western popular
culture, but, in reality, cynicism in average people is the attitude exactly most likely to conform
to the desires of the powerful – cynicism is obedience.
Optimism, by contrast, especially optimism which is neither foolish nor silent, can be revolutionary . Where no one
believes in a better future, despair is a logical choice, and people in despair almost never change anything. Where no one
believes a better solution is possible, those benefiting from the continuation of a problem are safe.
Where no one believes in the possibility of action, apathy becomes an insurmountable
obstacle to reform. But introduce intelligent reasons for believing that action is possible, that better
solutions are available, and that a better future can be built, and you unleash the power of people to act out of
their highest principles. Shared belief in a better future is the strongest glue there is: it creates the opportunity for us to love
one another, and love is an explosive force in politics.
Great movements for social change always begin with statements of great optimism.
Recently, though, I've been getting asked a lot how it's possible to remain optimistic when the news is so
bad, and progress on problems like climate change or global poverty seems hopeless slow. These
questions started me thinking about why the tone of coverage and debate about the big issues we face is so unrelentingly grim.
Some of that darkness comes, undoubtedly, from legitimate despair: from solastalgia about the loss of the natural world or from
compassion for the horrible suffering of the millions whom our global economy has left behind. Some of it is the cynicism of
disappointed idealists, folks who've seen so much of the underside of human nature that they've abandoned hope. Some is the
narrative lure of collapse.
But I've come more and more to think that the particular dynamic we see in today's media and political debates, in both
North America and Europe, springs also from politics . That its political nature goes largely unrecognized, even by
some of that politics' fiercest partisans, may be merely a matter unexamined assumptions.
Here's what I see that politics being:
1) An explicit statement that we are incapable of actually solving the planet's most pressing
problems , and that to consider doing so is "unrealistic."
2) A mostly unstated assumption that the reason embracing bold solutions is unrealistic is because those solutions involve
unbearable costs.
3) A rarely voiced belief that "realism" ought best to be defined as "in the interests of those doing well today," and that "unbearable
costs" ought best to be defined as "any meaningful change in circumstances whatsoever."
4) A widely practiced stance that, therefore, expressions of concern and extremely modest, almost symbolic, small steps and half
measures are the appropriate course of action.
Though often combined with the politics of fear, this political stance might better be thought of as "the
politics of impossibility ." (It's as if Eeyore were running the public debate.)
Consider, instead, the politics of optimism:
1) That realism ought best to be defined as "within our capacity" and "necessary."
2) That we have the capacity to create and deploy solutions to the world's biggest problems , and the
magnitude of the consequences of failure (both for ourselves and generations to come) demands that we act immediately.
3) That it is possible to act in such a way that the prospects of most people on the planet are
improved. While certain costs will be incurred, the returns on those investments will be quite attractive, not only in ecological
stability, international security and human well-being, but in terms of plain old economic prosperity. These solutions will make the
future better than the present for the almost everyone, and greatly improve the lots of our children and grandchildren.
4) Therefore, defining our win scenarios, imagining the kind of future we want to create, describing
the solutions that will make building that future possible, and publicly committing
ourselves to success are the appropriate course of action.
Nothing about the politics of optimism needs to be naive . We can understand that people are fallible, mostly
self-motivated and sometimes even mistaken about what's in their own best interests. We can stress the importance of informed
decision-making, demand rigor and note uncertainty. We
can recognize the massive differentials in
power and wealth in our society and be clear-headed about the difficulty of opposing those
whose power and wealth is tied to planetary destruction. We can anticipate setbacks and failures,
disappointments and betrayals. We can expect corruption and demand transparency. We can freely admit the profound difficulty of
the work yet to be done, even the possibility of total failure.
We can freely acknowledge the tremendous struggle ahead of us, and yet choose to remain decidedly optimistic, and to work from a
fundamental belief in the possibilities of the future. When we do that, we liberate ourselves from some of the burden of despair and
powerlessness we've all been saddled with at the dawn of the 21st Century.
But when we do it in public -- when we stand up and refuse to accept the idea that failure is preordained and action is
unrealistic -- we
strike right down to the heart of the political conflict we really face: the conflict between
our party of the future and their party of the past.
I'm more and more convinced that incrementalism in the absence of committed vision almost always
serves the politics of impossibility. Paradoxically, a lot of old school activism does as well. The
impossibility lobby is entirely okay with Greenpeace or whoever doing direct action to highlight the
latest dire predictions about the ruin of the Earth, because they've mostly moved on from
debating reality to defining response. They're okay with people thinking the crisis is
downright apocalyptic , so long as those same people don't think there's really
anything we can do differently .
That's why our
best hope lies in a fighting optimism , an optimism that's willing to confront the
impossibility lobby and its messengers and make very clear that a feeble, halting response is not the rational or responsible
response, but a corrupt and morally bankrupt response.
Every time we explain how a better future might be built, we redraw the boundaries of the
possible. We show that the realm of choice available to us is actually quite large, and even includes
paths that might, for instance, harm the interests of rich old guys who own big chunks of coal companies
or the petrochemical industry but improve the prospects of pretty much everyone else.
We need to accelerate innovation and magnify vision. We need to school ourselves in the possible, share
ideas, imagine outcomes, weigh options. We need to figure out how best to transform the
systems we've built. I definitely don't have the answers personally, but Worldchanging aims to be a useful tool for people
undertaking that exploration.
Ultimately, though, we need
something more than better answers. We need millions of people who are willing to
teach the teachable, comfort the disheartened and confront the scoundrels. We
need to take our politics public
and take on the whole culture of cynical defeatism . On some days, I think we need an optimism
uprising .
The ballot should explicitly affirm a radically optimistic vision of the social world--
-the aff’s radically pessimistic picture of civil society and social life is not a
necessary truth but rather a product of their very representations. Social life is
endlessly malleable and every social order is contingent---our vision of futurity can
radicalize notions of reform and progress that have previously constrained social
change
Marcus Morgan 16, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Sociology Department, and a
Fellow & College Lecturer at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, “The
Responsibility for Social Hope,” Thesis Eleven: Critical Theory and Historical Sociology, Vol.
136, No. 1, p. 107-123
Alongside a recent revival of interest in the significance of the principle of hope in the social sciences (Dinerstein, 2014; Holloway,
2014; Miyazaki, 2004; Swedberg, 2007; Thompson & Žižek, 2013; Zournazi, 2003), this article makes the distinctly
pragmatic argument that sociologists have an ongoing social responsibility to draw out
emergent strands of hope from their analyses; to counter Gramsci’s ‘pessimism of the intellect’ with
a consistent and simultaneous ‘optimism of the will’. This is because representations of social life are
not separate from the worlds they aspire to capture, but immanent to those worlds, and
therefore both influenced by, and capable of performatively affecting them. As producers of such
representations, sociologists are therefore automatically and unavoidably responsible for
considering the performative consequences that their projections are capable of engendering.
Through a comparison of Rorty, Levitas, and Unger’s different theorisations of social hope, it argues for a form of hope
that is rooted in an empirical conception of the past and present, but, alive to the
transcendent possibilities of the emerging future, refuses to be restrained by this
conception. On the one hand, it recognises the ideologically critical role played by fictional utopias produced within the
imaginative arts. However, it argues that sociology’s empirical basis places it in a stronger position than these idealist visions to
produce socially-embedded, material, and emergent narratives of hope. On the other hand, in opposition to the
attenuated version of the subject offered by structuralist and poststructuralist social theory, the
understanding of hope defended here stresses the capacity for subjects to transcend the
circumstances that constitute and bring them into being, and therefore against the notion of
path-dependency, the possibility of the future presenting genuine, subjectively-determined
novelty.
A comparison of three theorisations of social hope
We need history, certainly, but we need it for reasons different from those for which the idler in the garden of knowledge needs it …
We need it, that is to say, for the sake of life and action, not to turn comfortably away from life and action
- Fredrich Nietzsche
Men [sic] make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by
themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead
generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living
- Karl Marx, 1978: 439; 595.
We are made wise not by the recollection of the past, but by the responsibility for our future
- George Bernard Shaw, [1921] 1987.
Rorty’s pragmatism emphasises the importance of adopting an historical perspective in considering viable hopes for the future. In
other words, he stresses that reflection upon the future must be seen through a lens that is ground and shaped by a consideration of
how we have come to arrive at the present. He writes that pragmatists ‘are entirely at home with the idea that political theory should
view itself as suggestions for future action emerging out of recent historical experience, rather than attempting to legitimate the
outcome of that experience by reference to something ahistorical’ (1999: 272). He looks to historical narratives as a condition of
hope, because, he claims, ‘social and political philosophy has always been and always ought to be parasitic on such narratives’ (ibid.:
231).1 Hope, for Rorty, is therefore not exclusively about the future, but also about looking to the past in order to show ‘what we
might reasonably hope could happen in the future’ (ibid.: 232).
Rorty is critical of examinations of the past that stop short of considering their implications for imagining what form the future
might take, but at the same time insists that insights into the future gleaned through historical analysis must not be interpreted
deterministically, and this absence of determination can be seen in his refusal to prophesy. In this, as Thompson notes, his
understanding of hope resembles Ernst Bloch’s in that ‘the world is not something found but “in becoming” and what it becomes is
dependent on what we make of it’ (2008). Rorty calls this approach to the emergent possibilities of the future a kind of ‘deliberate
fuzziness’ (1999: 28), which he contrasts with metaphysics – the doomed attempt to get at something clear, non-human and eternal.
His ‘criterionless hope’ therefore offers a pragmatic substitute for the role that Truth plays in metaphysical philosophy, suggesting
that ‘philosophers became preoccupied with images of the future only after they gave up the hope of gaining knowledge of the
eternal’ (1995: 199). In this, Rorty draws upon Dewey (1938), who understood the purpose of philosophical enquiry as not to
discover the essential Truth of a matter (something which he saw as impossible to identify), but instead to meet the temporary
demands of the problem that had given rise to the need for enquiry in the first place.
In distinction to Rorty’s relative emphasis on the past, our second thinker, Ruth Levitas, instead emphasises the
importance of bringing imagined futures into the present . Taking her inspiration for thinking about
the future from Bloch’s discussion of the ‘spirit of utopia’ ([1964] 2000), she examines how ‘hope’ might be thought of as
a property which does not in fact properly belong to the future, but is best understood as
instead belonging to the present. Though Bloch was more critical of process philosophy than the pragmatists were (e.g.
Bloch, [1958] 1995: 201-2), Levitas shows how he refused— alongside process philosophers—to distinguish between the reality of the
present and the unreality of the future, instead pointing out how ‘the world is always in process, essentially
unfinished, so that anticipated futures are themselves part of the real, and the real always
necessarily includes imagined and possible (as well as impossible) futures’ (Levitas, 2004: 271).3
Levitas presents her utopian method as ‘not just about the projection of a desired object to
meet our needs, but a projected subject, ourselves , in some sense redeemed’ (2005: 12). In the first
instance at least, she therefore understands the value of utopian thinking as lying in its capacity to affect a change in subjects’
imaginations by appealing to their ability to picture what it might be like to live in a radically different manner. However, unlike
other contemporary sociological utopians (e.g. Wright, 2010), Levitas refuses to identify utopia with any particular time or place,
and though this decision may appear to place her work outside the utopian tradition altogether, it in fact demonstrates a greater
fidelity to the word’s original Greek meaning: ou (no/not) topos (place) – ‘no place’ (OED). In distinction to the orthodox Marxist
understanding of an eventual reconciliation of the societal dialectic, the utopian hope that Levitas discusses is never-ending;
incapable of finding satisfaction in some future telos. This position is shared by the post-Marxist political theorists Laclau and
Mouffe who draw upon Derrida’s notions of ‘undecidability’ and ‘democracy to come’ to argue that democratic perfection must be
seen as an ultimately impossible, yet simultaneously crucial, project:
it is vital to abandon any reference to the possibility of a consensus that, because it would be grounded on justice or on rationality,
could not be destabilised. To believe in the possibility of such a consensus ... is to transform the pluralist democratic ideal into a
“self-refuting ideal”, since the very moment of its realisation would coincide with its destruction (Mouffe, 1996: 11; also Laclau and
Mouffe, 2002: 123-8).
One consequence of Levitas’s particular understanding of future possibilities as real and acutely
necessary components of the present, involves substituting the notion of utopia as a goal, for the notion
of ‘ utopia as a method’ . Drawing upon H. G. Wells’s suggestion that “the creation of utopias—and their exhaustive
criticism—is the proper and distinctive method for sociology” she argues that ‘by thinking about utopia as a method we can address
more effectively major problems that confront us’ (2005: 8; 9). This project, which Levitas has more recently elaborated into a
book-length exploration (Levitas, 2013), demands some degree of specificity in outlining
visions of the good society , and she suggests that although it was chased out of the discipline during its
development in the twentieth century, there are some promising signs of its recent reemergence (2013: 127-50).
One thinker who Levitas takes as representative of this recent revival, and the final thinker to be considered here, is Roberto
Unger, whose conception of hope’s relationship to different temporalities is congruent with aspects of both Rorty and Levitas. Like
Levitas, he sees potential futures as integral aspects of the present, but uses this insight to
radicalise the historicising aspects of the pragmatic tradition’s attention to the past that Rorty
stresses. Therefore, whilst paying respect to the contingency of the present upon the past, and the future upon
the present, he stresses the ever-attendant possibility of the future transcending these
conditions.
Unger (1987a) counsels us to examine the past closely both in order to learn likely future outcomes of a present left uninterrupted,
and also in order to revive those subversive memories from the past that offer implicit critiques of the present. However, Unger’s
attention to the formative contexts of the past—what pragmatists call ‘contingency’—at the same time objects
to any understanding of this past that extrapolates from it a ‘false necessity’ into the
emerging future . Such understandings are found across the political spectrum from
deterministic faiths in immanent ‘historical necessity’, through to Hegelian ‘end of history’ theses that understand Western liberal
all such positions
democratic capitalism as the historical juncture beyond which nothing else lies. For Unger,
cripple[ restrain] rather than inspire agents’ capacities to act in the world by
robbing humans of what most defines them: their ‘negative capability’ or capacity for
transcendence from the past (Unger, 1987a: 277-312).
In arguing that ‘the roots of a human being lie in the future rather than in the past’ (2007: 238), Unger’s version of hope, like Bloch’s
([1958] 1995: 45), sees futurity not as a matter of choice but as a phenomenological component of the human condition.
Nevertheless—pushing beyond the traces of Bergson that remain in Rorty and James—he believes this feature can become extended
by human will so as to become a conscious endeavour: ‘futurity’, he writes, ‘should
cease to be a predicament
and should become a programme: we should radicalise it to empower ourselves’ (ibid.:
41). ‘Empowerment’ here means something more far-reaching than the management of
inevitabilities because Unger argues that by self-consciously acting and thinking towards a future
becoming, humans are to some degree able to escape, or transcend path-dependent historicity and create
situations of genuine novelty , ‘things that are really new, in the sense that they do not just make real a possibility that
had been backstage to the actual world, awaiting the events that would serve as its cue to step onto the stage of actuality’ (ibid.: 34).
This radicalised conception of the transcendent promises built into the fabric of the present was expressed by Fanon too, who
claimed that we should always understand ‘the present in terms of something to be exceeded’ (Fanon, [1952] 2008: 6). From this
perspective, the past itself is seen as never entirely complete, not just in the trivial sense that time is continually passing and ‘waits
for no one’, but in the more hopeful sense that the constraining sway of the past remains open to the transcendent possibilities of the
present. Unger’s vision for hope therefore shares something with Said’s plea that we treat ‘the past itself as still unresolved, still
being made, still open to the presence and the challenges of the emergent, the insurgent, the unrequited, and the unexplored’ (2004:
26). Combining elements found in both Rorty’s and Levitas’s models, he argues that although the past weighs down
heavily upon the present, by wilfully directing ourselves towards images of the future there
always remains the possibility of shaking-off the burden of history. Rather than closing the
future down before it has happened (by seeing it as necessarily conforming to the past) Unger’s
vision therefore leaves the coming horizon open to the possibility of being recaptured by
human hope, suggesting one way in which the minimal liberal and democratic implications of
pragmatism (Morgan, 2013), might begin to be refashioned in a more radicalised form.
 Case
The Aff is detached from material realities - the ACA can be a part of the move to
redeploy the welfare state for queer emancipation
Jack Jackson 16, Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at Whitman College, April
2016, “Neoliberalism, the Jurisprudence of Obamacare, and the Welfare-State Left,”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/614371#f45
Power at the site of production may be an object of Left politics, but the pluralization of
emancipatory politics during the previous forty years has also multiplied the sites of political
struggle and opened the doors to claims of justice and visions of political freedom not tied
primarily to capitalism. As noted earlier, the pluralization of emancipatory visions has informed the proliferating critiques
of a variety of welfare state policies. But this can also be reversed: new political movements also provide new
justifications for welfare state distributions that are not about emancipation from or within production.¶ An opening
move of the democratic age involved disentangling the connected knots of a) one’s particular place within the family b) the family’s
particular place in society and c) the familial society as coterminous with the political and social constitution. It is why Alexis de
Tocqueville zeroed in on the abolition of primogeniture as the key to American democracy: a kind of equality was introduced into the
family at the same time the family became less prominent as an actor in society. The family was not abolished but rather privatized.
This left the ‘individual’ both more and less dependent upon the family: more dependent as the individual was now more isolated in
the social world, and less dependent as the market society of competition engulfed the old society of inherited rule.69¶ Queer
politics has long had to wrestle with this two-fold move of deepened and withdrawn dependency
upon the family. Young people who do not conform to gender and/or sexuality norms often face
abandonment and abuse by their biological (or adoptive) family, and thus queer politics involves
crafting the social and material conditions of emancipation from the biological family. Cuts in
welfare state programs disproportionately impact queer youth, as queer youth are
disproportionately without familial support: one rough measurement estimates that 10% of
youth are LGBT, but LGBT youth constitute 20% of homeless youth in the nation because “their
parents or other family was unaccepting of their sexuality or because of abuse.”70 So, the gap
between family and market during the period between childhood and adulthood is one that the
welfare state should work to fill. Establishing universal access to health care opens the future to
many queer youth and cuts the chain of dependency to hostile families.¶ Important components
of the US welfare state have both presumed and reinforced a heteropatriarchal order. The welfare
state has often been imagined as necessary only as a “safety net” when privatized care systems fail catastrophically. As a result,
heterosexually gendered divisions of care/market (with only the latter afforded the dignity of “work”) and public/private (with only
the former designated as the proper realm for “freedom”) have become the norm while welfare state provision figures as the
exception. Such an order privileges the heterosexual biological reproductive couple at the same time it masks both the domination
within that unit and the dependent relationship that the “market” and “public realm” have upon those naturalized demarcations and
inequalities.71 Married women who labor in the home receive no wage from either the market or the state, but widows may be
entitled to meager subsidies from the state. Even today there remains not only a presumption of privatized care but also the
conjunction of care with the reproductive bond. Anna Marie Smith describes the 1996 neoliberal welfare reform engineered under
the rubric of common sense and consensus politics as “paternafare”:¶ the State is broadcasting the message that a mere biological tie
constitutes a sufficient basis for fatherhood, that women with children should be dependent upon the children’s father, and that the
father ought to provide for the children. The idea that the biological father is the appropriate source of material support for children
carries with it, in our bourgeois context, an implicit presumption: the one who pays is the one who should govern.72¶ The welfare
state can either buttress the one who governs or facilitate self-government for those who have historically been governed. It is an
issue for political contestation.¶ The
Affordable Care Act makes important , if halting and still incomplete,
contributions to self-government by socializing health insurance. One particular component of
the ACA rejects the normative thrust of paternafare and offers one possible vision for queering
the family and the state: the expansion of Medicaid to those who graduate out of foster care.
Queer kids are overly represented in the foster care system,73 but even self-identified straight
kids in foster care are in a queer relation to the normativity of the biological family. There are over
400,000 youth living in foster care in the United States and they lack the familial connection to access the ACA provision that allows
parents to extend coverage to their children until the age of 26. The ACA created a “parallel provision” that grants Medicaid coverage
to those who leave foster care at age 18 and covers them until the age of 26. Importantly, Medicaid will be provided to
this group even if their income exceeds the normal income limit imposed on Medicaid and the
law makes no requirement that they track down their biological family prior to or after receiving
the benefit (in contrast to “paternafare”).74¶ The welfare state is never without norms, but its
disciplinary mechanisms may be both loosened and redirected towards queerer understandings
of freedom. Almost unnoticed, the ACA has done more for queer emancipation than any other
contemporary federal government program or provision.75 While the mainstream LGBT-rights
organizations have embraced the ideal of middle class normality, the material lives of many
suffer from orders of distribution and entitlement that do not match the realities of their lives.
The ACA is but a step in closing the gap. Consequently, there is no possibility for a queer politics of freedom
without resistance to neoliberalism and its relentless logic of ahistorical and decontextualized individualism. It is why the queer Left
has been attentive to the catastrophe of neoliberalism when so many others have heard only wedding bells.¶ 4. Conclusion¶ The
passage of the Affordable Care Act marks an important challenge to the policies and logics of neoliberalism. In writing as a friend of
the law, however, I do not intend to suggest that the statute is without failures, omissions, or exclusions: its exclusions of the
undocumented is a crime in xenophobic times, its continuation of the Hyde Amendment’s prohibition of federal monies for abortion
is in contradiction to the meaning (even if not the current jurisprudence) of equal protection of the laws, and its fragmentation of
distribution weakens basic principles of solidarity. But the vices of the law are not necessarily born from its
many virtues and, indeed, the latter may well provide cure for the former. As example, the exclusion
produced by the Hyde Amendment is cognizable only because of the existence of the Medicaid
program, and the repair of the injury both presumes and demands the public distribution or
subsidy of health care. This is inclusion born of socialized material expansion rather than liberal
inclusion into a right of competition, inequality, and market-based reward.¶ Any reading of the
ACA must take note of its flaws, but those flaws should not blot out the ways in which the law
potentially abolishes job lock and unbinds opportunities in life from the inheritances of the
biological family. And more generally, Justice Ginsburg’s eloquent reminder that the welfare state can be the
assertion of democracy’s primacy over the so-called “market” by those who labor in it should
today compel a reconsideration of the theoretical bifurcation witnessed in multiple traditions of
political thought between “welfare” and “freedom.”

Their arg assumes aggression is intractable --- that’s wrong – we’re not overly
optimistic, but rather think it’s important to hold individuals accountable
Lear 2000 Jonathan Lear, Philosophy Professor at the University of Chicago, 2000 Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of
Life, Page 131-132
By 1920 Freud is ready to break up what he has come to see as a fantasized unity of mental functioning. The mind can no longer be
understood in terms of the pleasure principle, but instead of living with the gap, he posits a “beyond.” It is in this way that Freud
takes himself to be explaining aggression. Aggression is now interpreted as the death drive diverted
outward. It is precisely this move which locks us into an inescapably negative teleogy. Let us
just assume (for the sake of argument, though I think it true) that humans are aggressive animals, and that dealing with human
aggression is a serious psychological and social problem. The question remains: how might one deal with it? But if, as
Freud does, one interprets aggression as the most obvious manifestation of one of the two
primordial forces in the universe, the answer would seem to be: there is no successful way. My first inclination
is to say that this leads to a pessimistic view of the human condition; but this isn’t really the issue. My second
inclination is to say it leads to a limited view of the human condition; but even this doesn’t get to the heart of the
problem. The point here is not to endorse an ontic optimism – that if we didn’t adopt this view, we
could shape life in nonaggressive ways – but to confront an ontological insight: that Freud’s
interpretation is an instance of bad faith. The metaphysical basicness of the death drive implies
a kind of metaphysical intractability to the phenomenon of human aggression. As a matter of empirical
fact, humans may be aggressive animals – and the fact of human aggression may be difficult to deal with. It may be experienced as
intractable.
But to raise this purported intractability to a metaphysical principle is to obliterate the
question of responsibility. And it is to cover over – by precluding – what might turn out to be a
significant empirical possibilities.
There’s no duality between future and past---you can endorse action that
understands the past and the status quo but also understands the responsibility
towards the future
Berber Bevernage 15 , Assistant Professor, History, University of Ghent, October 2015, The Past is
Evil/Evil is Past: On Retrospective Politics, Philosophy of History, and Temporal Manichaeism, History
and Theory Volume 54, Issue 3, pages 333–352
Torpey is certainly not the only intellectual expressing these worries. According to historian
Pieter Lagrou, “our contemporary societies, for lack of future projects, shrink into a ‘passeist’
culture.”12 In European public discourse, he argues, the focus on crimes of the distant past has
become so strong that it tends to marginalize claims of victims of contemporary crimes and
human rights violations. Therefore, Lagrou argues, “a commemorative discourse of victimhood
is very much the opposite of a constructive and dynamic engagement with the present, but
rather a paralyzing regression of democratic debate.”13 Lagrou's argument closely resembles
many others that turn against retrospective politics and “victim culture” such as Ian Buruma's
warning about the peril of minorities defining themselves exclusively as historical victims and
engaging in an “Olympics of suffering”14 and Charles Maier's claims about a “surfeit of
memory.”15
These warnings about the perils of a retrospective politics outweighing or even banning politics
directed at contemporary injustices or striving for a more just future should be taken seriously.
Yet the alternative of an exclusively present- or future-oriented politics disregarding all historical injustice is not desirable either.
Contemporary injustice often manifests itself in the form of structural repetition or continuity of
injustices with a long history. Moreover, totalitarian versions of progressivist politics have frequently abused the idea of a
struggle for a more just future in order to justify past and present suffering. It could even be argued that the rise of dominant
restrospective politics has been initiated partly on the basis of disillusionment with the exculpatory mechanisms of progressivist
ideology.16 Some indeed claim that much of present-day retrospective politics and the “setting straight” of historical injustices
would be unnecessary had totalitarian progressivist politics focused less exclusively on the bright future and shown more sensitivity
to the contemporary suffering of its day. This claim certainly makes sense if one thinks of extreme examples such as Stalin's five-year
plans and Mao's Great Leap Forward. Yet, as Matthias Frisch rightly argues, the risk of the justification of past and present suffering
lurks around the corner wherever progressive logics of history or promises of bright and just futures are not counterbalanced by
reflective forms of remembrance.17¶ Therefore, we should resist dualist thinking that forces us to choose
between restitution for historical injustices and struggle for justice in the present or the future.
Rather, we should look for types of retrospective politics that do not oppose but complement or
reinforce the emancipatory and utopian elements in present- and future-directed politics—and
the other way around: present- and future-oriented politics that do not forget about
historical injustices.¶ In this paper I want to contribute to this goal by focusing on the issue of retrospective politics and
by analyzing how one can differentiate emancipatory or even utopian types of retrospective politics from retrospective politics that I
classify here as anti-utopian. I argue that the currently dominant strands of retrospective politics indeed do
tend to be anti-utopian and have a very limited emancipatory potential. Moreover, I claim that currently
dominant retrospective politics do not radically break with several of the exculpatory intellectual mechanisms that are typically
associated with progressivist politics but actually modify and sometimes even radicalize them. In that restricted sense, and only in
this sense, it can be argued that currently dominant retrospective politics do not represent a
fundamentally new way of dealing with historical evil and the ethics of responsibility.

Political engagement isn’t just queer assimilation – it radically changes the terms
of the political itself. The social order is NOT inevitably exclusive to queers –
working through the political process can and does produce not just a better but a
different social order for queers.
John Brenkman 2, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the
CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College, 2002, Narrative, Vol. 10, No. 2, p. 188-189
Innovation is a crucial concept for understanding the gay and lesbian movement, which emerged
from within civil society as citizens who were stigmatized and often criminalized for their sexual
lives created new forms of association, transformed their own lifeworld, and organized a political
offensive on behalf of political and social reforms. There was an innovation of rights and freedoms,
and what I have called innovations in sociality. Contrary to the liberal interpretation of liberal
rights and freedoms, I do not think that gays and lesbians have merely sought their place at the
table. Their struggle has radically altered the scope and meaning of the liberal rights and freedoms
they sought, first and foremost by making them include sexuality, sexual practices, and the
shape of household and family. Where the movement has succeeded in changing the laws of the
state, it has also opened up new possibilities within civil society. To take an obvious example,
wherever it becomes unlawful to deny housing to individuals because they are gay, there is set in
motion a transformation of the everyday life of neighborhoods, including the lives of heterosexuals
and their children. [End Page 188] Within civil society, this is a work of enlightenment, however
uneven and fraught and frequently dangerous. It is not a reaffirmation of the symbolic and
structural underpinnings of homophobia; on the contrary, it is a challenge to homophobia and a
volatilizing of social relations within the nonpolitical realm.

Refusal of homo-nationalist critique to engage the state recreates neoliberal

ideology by falsely staticizing the state as always violent---tactical engagement is
better than pure rejection
Nikita Dhawan 15, Professor of Political Science (Political Theory and Gender Studies) and
Director of the Research Platform Gender Studies: "Identities – Discourses – Transformations"
at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, Homonationalism and State-phobia: The Postcolonial
Predicament of Queering Modernities, Academia.edu
As Foucault himself warns state-phobia is deeply inscribed in liberal and neo-liberal ideas of civil society.
The wickedness of the state is juxta- posed against the inherent goodness of civil society, so that the aim is the ‘whithering away of the state’. This anti-
state-centric approach to political power, locates radical politics in extra-state space of innovation. This is why Puar and others reject pragmatic
politics of same-sex marriage or anti-discrimination legislations. In
contrast they support civil society campaigns like
pink-watching that increasingly deploy the strategy of surveillance for shaming states into good
behavior. Even as one critiques the harnessing of gender and sexuality by neo-liberal capitalism, the rejection of all feminist-
queer politics oriented towards the state as part of a biopolitical agenda is disingenuous state-
phobic rhetoric.
Postcolonial-queer-feminists are caught in an ambivalent, double-bind vis-à-vis the state: On
the one hand, the state has historically been the source of violence and repression through the
criminalization and pathologization of non-normative sexual practices. And yet, queer strategies seek to instru-
mentalize the state to promote sexual justice. Even as the state is known to perpetuate
heteronormative ideologies, which are founding myths of nations, the hope is that the state
can function as a site of redress of gender and sexual inequality. Despite the problematic track-record
with regard to sexual politics of all nation-states, whether European or non-European, it is dangerous to
disregard the immense political implications of state-phobic positions, which are
increasingly popular in radical discourses in the West.
As the recent re-criminalization of homosexuality in Uganda, India and Nigeria demonstrate, negotiations with state are indispensable and imperative
for emancipatory queer politics in the global South. This
is not a plea for statism; rather, one must be aware of the
dangers of the replacement of state with non-state actors as motors of justice. Against this background,
the recent anti-statist stance within postcolonial queer scholarship is alarming, as it ignores the
importance of the state for those citizens who do not have access to transnational counterpublic
spheres to address their grievances.
Decolonization, whether in USA, Israel or India, cannot be achieved merely through a
strategy of shaming the state. Rather in the Gramscian- Spivakian sense, it is imperative to enable
vulnerable disenfranchised indi- viduals and groups to access the state (Dhawan 􀀲􀀲􀀲􀀲).
Accordingly, instead of a for or against position vis-à-vis the state, the more
challenging question is how to reconfigure the state, given that its institutions and policies
are the mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities . Thus the chal- lenge is
how to pursue a non-statephobic queer politics that at the same time neither
rationalizes the biopolitical state project nor makes the queer bodies governable. In
postcolonial contexts, the state is like a pharmakon , namely, both poison and medicine.
Postcolonial queer politics must explore strategies of converting poison into counterpoison (Spivak
􀀲􀀲􀀲􀀲: 􀀲􀀲).
Herein the
ambivalent function of the state must be addressed. As Pharmakon, the inherent
condradictions must be engaged with: Violence and justice, ideology and emancipation, law and
discipline. If, following Foucault, the state has no stable essence, then it is marked by undecidability or
doubleness. The sole focus on the negative aspects of the Pharmakon, namely the destructive
and repressive traits, neutralizes and ignores the enabling and empowering aspects .
Thus postcolonial-queer-feminist poli- tics must transform poison into remedy and formulate
critique of the state beyond state-phobia. A challenging task, but anything else would be
too risky!

Legal control over subjectivity is inevitable but so are strategic demands on the
law—radical queer anti-statist politics are possible within the law
Peter Campbell 13, faculty member in the Program in Composition, Literacy, Pedagogy, and
Rhetoric at the University of Pittsburgh, JUDICIAL RHETORIC AND RADICAL POLITICS:
SEXUALITY, RACE, AND THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT,
https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/45352/Peter_Campbell.pdf?sequence=
1
But—following Matsuda—I think that Butler seems to miss an important point. Given the material force of the
fantasy of legal sovereignty in the margins, “‘at the point[s]’” where power is “‘completely
invested in its real and effective practices,’” 31 I argue that resistance to the idea of legal
sovereignty must not preclude what Cathy Cohen might call a “practical”32 understanding of the presently
inevitable reality of the sovereign rhetorical operations of the law. The political
project of resistance to the performative sovereignty of judicial rhetoric in the United States
must not deny (as Matsuda and Richard Delgado said in 1987 to the “crits” of Critical Legal Studies) the need to
construct strategically informed and tactically sound responses to those “formal”
structures of law that already act as and with the material power of sovereign
authority ––authority over the constraints that legal forms of subjectivity already
impose on personhood.33 As Butler herself acknowledges in 2004,34 the absolute critique of legal
sovereign performatives does not adequately consider how the effects of the fantasy of
legal sovereignty are most often (and most often most terribly) felt by “those who
have” actually “seen and felt the falsity of the liberal promise”35 of the U.S. judiciary as a shield
against domination.¶ My experience of the law has occurred through my own participation in and observation of judicial sovereignty––both
from a majoritarian perspective. I teach argumentation in a prison, a setting that emphasizes the paradoxical and simultaneous vitality and uselessness
of rhetorical and argumentative interaction with those persons charged with enforcing the reasoned justification of judicial decision through coercive
violence. In our present democratic state of laws, the production of legitimacy for judicial sovereignty through argument, and the production of
legitimacy through force, work together in explicit and mutually supportive fashion. More happily, I was recently invited by two friends to officiate their
wedding, at a ceremony in Rehoboth, Massachusetts. I agreed, and asked whether I should purchase an ordination online, so that I could legally
perform the ceremony. There was no need— Massachusetts is unusual among U.S. states in maintaining a category of officiant called a “solemnizer.”
Any person, with little qualification, can apply to be a solemnizer. The dichotomy between the “republican style”36 of the application process, and the
quotidian ease with which I was granted the certificate made me think about the “sovereign performative”37 that I would stage in Rehoboth. The “I do”
statement in a marriage ceremony is one of Austin’s core examples38 of an “illocutionary” performative, an utterance which “has a certain force” in the
“saying” of it,39 but this example itself performs an interesting elision of the role of a state representative in a civil marriage ceremony. In Rehoboth,
my friends would not be married until I pronounced them so publicly. That pronouncement would of course require other performative statements (“I
do”) from my friends as a pre-requisite to its validity.40 But on the date and in the location specified by the solemnization certificate, I had, as a feature
of the designation “solemnizer” bestowed on me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, absolute power over whether they would be married or not—
on that date and in that location. In the narrow context of the two possible realities of my friends becoming married or not on that day and in that
location, my role was to exercise the sovereign performative power of the Commonwealth as its judge-like representative. ¶ But in that exercise, I would
also be performing two arguments: one for the sovereign legitimacy (and successful performativity)41 of my utterances and the illegitimacy of any
others; and one for the value and significance of “married” as a position of legal subjectivity in Massachusetts and the United States. I bring up this
example to emphasize the specifically illocutionary power of the judicial rhetorical constitution of subjects before law. Austin describes illocution as “‘in
saying x I was doing y’ or ‘I did y,’”42 but judicial illocution might more accurately be described as “in saying x I did x.” When I said that these people
were married, I made them married. The statement and the doing were one and the same.
If a judge sentences a person to death,
she does not depress the needle; the pronouncement of sentence is an illocutionary act in the
first sense (x and y). But in pronouncing the sentence, the judge does redefine the convicted (of
a death-eligible crime) person’s subjectivity before law from “convicted” and/or “criminal” and/or “felon”
and/or “murderer” and/or “traitor” to, more primarily, “condemned.” This is an illocutionary act in the second sense (x and
x).¶ If a judge rules that it is unconstitutional to require a trans* person’s passport to list their
gender contrary to that person’s “self-understanding,”43 this is a “perlocutionary” act (where the
utterance effectively causes something to happen)44 in that the ruling enables the person who is
trans* to change the official designation of their gender. But it is also an x and x illocutionary act in the context
of the petitioner’s subjectivity before law—the utterance of the ruling has changed their self-
understanding of their own identity from “not real” to “real” in the eyes of the law. This would be even
more evident if the ruling did not merely realize the truth of a trans* person’s self-understanding as male or female, but went so far as to create, in the
moment of the utterance itself, a legally recognized trans* identity category. ¶ All of these examples are performatives enabled by the fantasy of the
sovereign location of power in law. When asked, I considered (given my own views on marriage as an institution) declining to perform the ceremony—
even in Massachusetts, whose marriage laws mean that the sexual orientation identity of the two people I married cannot be discerned from this story. I
understood that my performative and the discourse of the ceremony surrounding it would contribute in a small way to the sovereign power of the state
over human relational and sexual legitimacy. But this refusal would not have made the present sovereignty of the state over the determination of legally
Petitions to the law are inevitable; they will be
legitimate and illegitimate forms of relation any less inevitable.¶

made, often by people with no other recourse to save their life, or to preserve their
life's basic quality. As Butler demonstrates, any such petition will have performative effect. I do not
offer this brief critique of Butler’s theory of “sovereign performatives” to dispute the facticity of her arguments. I begin this project with the stipulation
that politics of resistance to the “sovereign performative” must include actions of resistance to
statist law itself—that is, the specific articulation of opposition, within progressive social
movements, to strategies that privilege appeals for help from judges . But these politics
must also acknowledge that those who undertake such strategies do not always do so without
knowledge of the sovereign performative function of their actions—“recourse to the law” does
not always or even usually “imagine” the law “as neutral.”45 These radical politics must also be undertaken with
knowledge of the effects of the petitions to law-as-sovereign that will inevitably be made —and particularly
with knowledge of the effects that flow from the (also performative and also inevitable) judicial rhetorical
responses to these inevitable petitions. ¶ Austin teaches us that it is in the nature of performatives to not always work, and to
produce effects in excess of their explicit ones. The judicial rhetorical constitution of subject and abject forms of being-in-relation to law operates
through legal performatives that contain the possibilities for their own future “infelicity.”46 My project is an attempt to explore some future
possibilities for the counter-sovereign articulation of subjectivity before U.S. law—possibilities that are both foreclosed and engendered in the
argumentative justifications for judicial decisions. Specifically, I examine some key Supreme Court cases relating to sexual practice, race in education
policy, and marriage. I perform a legal rhetorical criticism of critic-constructed “meta”-texts47 that form argumentative frameworks through which
judges apply various legal doctrines to questions of sexual, racial, educational, and relational freedom. ¶ Following Perelman, I understand judicial
argument to be the explanatory justifications offered for judges’ authoritative interpretive application of legal doctrine to problems of public concern––
problems that have been framed as legal, either by jurists themselves, petitioners to the courts, or both. In
the United States, judicial
arguments about constitutional interpretation have the privileged function of delimiting the
grounds on which the authority of all other statist legal argument is based. Given the
overwhelming salience of constitutional legal discourse in U.S. everyday life ,48 this
means that the judicial rhetoric of constitutional law plays a significant role in delimiting the
grounds on which a person can base their claim—literally49–– to existence and legitimacy in
the U.S. polity. 50 Jurists’ arguments from and about the Due Process and Equal Protection
Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution in particular perform a final arbitration
function in the ongoing and generally contentious process of the statist determination of what
forms of racialized queer identity and relation will be eligible for recognized and
legitimated status in U.S. public life. ¶ In this dissertation, I focus on the Fourteenth Amendment—due process and equal
protection—rhetoric of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. I read this rhetoric in terms of “genealogies of precedent,” or the
argumentative possibilities for queer subjectivity before law that are brought into being by the
doctrinal frameworks Kennedy and other judicial rhetors use in a given opinion. Each chapter offers a case study of
opinions in several Federal and Supreme Court cases that are foundational to Kennedy’s development of a new constitutional jurisprudence of
substantive due process and equality. I demonstrate that this jurisprudence is both productive of and violent to possibilities for practical and strategic
sexually “progressive”51 interactions with U.S. constitutional law. These
interactions, despite their practical or
strategic formulation, can be undertaken and/or framed in terms of anti-statist and institutional
radical queer political goals . Possibilities for the success of such radical framing of practical interaction are partially delimited
in the argumentative choice of U.S. judicial opinions.
 2NC
Trump is an argument for us---the election demonstrates the necessity of leftist
academics and intellectuals actively building the skills of responding to arguments
of well-prepared opponents that don’t share our political views---only our
framework creates political actors who can change the minds of Trump voters---
their approach to debate worsens and locks in societal cleavages
Charles C. Camosy 16, Associate Professor of Theology at Fordham University, 11/9/16,
“Trump won because college-educated Americans are out of touch,”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/11/09/trump-won-because-
college-educated-americans-are-out-of-touch/
As the reality of President-elect Donald Trump settled in very early Wednesday morning, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes summed up an
explanation common to many on the left: The Republican nominee pulled ahead thanks to old-
fashioned American racism .
But the attempt to make Trump’s victory about racism appears to be at odds with what
actually happened on Election Day. Consider the following facts.
Twenty-nine percent of Latinos voted for Trump, per exit polls. Remarkably, despite the near-ubiquitous narrative
that Trump would have deep problems with this demographic given his comments and position on immigration, this was a higher
percentage of those who voted for GOP nominee Mitt Romney in 2012. Meanwhile, African Americans did not turn out
to vote against Trump. In fact, Trump received a higher percentage of African American
votes than Romney did.
And while many white voters deeply disliked Trump, they disliked Democrat Hillary Clinton even more. Of those who had negative
feelings about both Trump and Clinton, Trump got their votes by a margin of 2 to 1. Votes for Trump seemed to signal a rejection of
the norms and values for which Clinton stood more than an outright embrace of Trump. He was viewed unfavorably, for instance, by
61 percent of Wisconsinites, but 1 in 5 in that group voted for him anyway.
The most important divide in this election was not between whites and non-whites. It was
between those who are often referred to as “ educated ” voters and those who are described as “ working class”
voters.
The reality is that six in 10 Americans do not have a college degree, and they elected Donald Trump.
College-educated people didn’t just fail to see this coming — they have struggled to display even a
rudimentary understanding of the worldviews of those who voted for Trump. This is an
indictment of the monolithic, insulated political culture in the vast majority our colleges and
universities.
As a college professor, I know that there are many ways in which college graduates simply know more about the world than those
who do not have such degrees. This is especially true — with some exceptions, of course — when it comes to “hard facts” learned in
science, history and sociology courses.
But I also know that that those with college degrees — again, with some significant exceptions — don’t necessarily know
philosophy or theology. And they have especially
paltry knowledge about the foundational role that
different philosophical or theological claims play in public thought compared with what is
common to college campuses . In my experience, many professors and college students don’t even realize that their
views on political issues rely on a particular philosophical or theological stance.
Higher education in the United States, after all, is woefully monolithic in its range of worldviews. In
2014, some 60 percent of college professors identified as either “liberal” or “far-left,” an increase from 42
percent identifying as such in 1990. And while liberal college professors outnumber conservatives 5-to-1,
conservatives are considerably more common within the general public . The world of
academia is, therefore, different in terms of political temperature than the rest of society, and what is
common knowledge and conventional wisdom among America’s campus dwellers can’t be taken
for granted outside the campus gates.
While some of the political differences between educated and working-class voters is based on a dispute over hard facts, the much
broader and more foundational disagreements are about norms and values. They turn on first principles grounded in the very
different intuitions and stories which animate very different political cultures. Such disagreements cannot be explained by the fact
that college-educated voters know some facts which non-college educated voters do not. They are about something far more
fundamental.
Think about the sets of issues that are often at the core of the identity of the working-class folks who
elected Trump: religion, personal liberty’s relationship with government, gender, marriage,
sexuality, prenatal life and gun rights. Intuition and stories guide most working-class communities on these issues.
With some exceptions, those professorial sorts who form the cultures of our colleges and universities have very
different intuition and stories . And the result of this divide has been to produce an educated class with an
isolated, insular political culture.
Religion in most secular institutions, for instance, is at best thought of as an important sociological phenomenon to understand —
but is very often criticized as an inherently violent, backward force in our culture, akin to belief in fairies and dragons. Professors are
less religious than the population as a whole. Most campus cultures have strictly (if not formally) enforced
dogmatic views about the nature of gender, sexual orientation, a woman’s right to choose
abortion, guns and the role of the state as primary agent of social change. If anyone disagrees
with these dogmatic positions they risk being marginalized as ignorant, bigoted, fanatical or
some other dismissive label.
Sometimes the college-educated find themselves so unable to understand a particular working-class point of view that they will
respond to those perspectives with shocking condescension. Recall that President Obama, in the midst of the 2012 election cycle,
suggested that job losses were the reason working-class voters were bitterly clinging “to guns or religion or antipathy to people who
aren’t like them.” The religious themselves, meanwhile, likely do not chalk their faith up to unhappy economic prospects, and they
probably find it hard to connect with politicians who seem to assume such.
Thus today’s college graduates are formed by a campus culture that leaves them unable to
understand people with unfamiliar or heterodox views on guns, abortion, religion, marriage,
gender and privilege. And that same culture leads such educated people to either label those with
whom they disagree as bad people or reduce their stated views on these issues as
actually being about something else , as in Obama’s case. Most college grads in this culture are simply
never forced to engage with or seriously consider professors or texts which could
provide a genuine, compelling alternative view .
For decades now, U.S. colleges and universities have quite rightly been trying to become more diverse
when it comes to race and gender. But this election highlights the fact that our institutions of higher
education should use similar methods to cultivate philosophical , theological and political
diversity .
These institutions should consider using quotas in hiring that help faculties and administrations more accurately reflect the wide
range of norms and values present in the American people. There should be systemwide attempts to have texts assigned in classes
written by people from intellectually underrepresented groups. There should be concerted efforts to protect political minorities from
discrimination and marginalization, even if their views are unpopular or uncomfortable to consider.
The goal of such changes would not be to convince students that their political approaches are
either correct or incorrect. The goal would instead be educational: to identify and understand
the norms, values, first principles, intuitions and stories which have been traditionally
underrepresented in higher education. This would better equip college graduates to
engage with the world as it is, including with their fellow citizens.
The alternative, a reduction of all disagreement to racism, bigotry and ignorance — in
addition to being wrong about its primary source — will simply make the disagreement far
more personal, entrenched and vitriolic . And it won’t make liberal values more
persuasive to the less educated, as Trump victory demonstrates .
It is time to do the hard work of forging the kind of understanding that moves beyond mere
dismissal to actual argument . Today’s election results indicate that our colleges and
universities are places where this hard work is particularly necessary.
Literally every social organization involves some judgement on ideal forms and
arguments---it is impossible to escape contestation, so you should make it as
effective as possible at the outset
Lea Ypi 16, Professor in Political Theory in the Government Department, London School of
Economics, 2016, “Political realism and the ethics of activism,” in The Trouble with Democracy:
Political Modernity in the 21st Century, ed. Rosich & Wagner
If we take seriously the unavoidability of conflict thesis we will come up with two different
interpretations of legitimacy demands compatible with norms internal to it.9 One interpretation leads to the
idea that since politics is by its nature inherently coercive and ill--‐suited to promote a variety of ends, we
should seek to contain its reach by theorizing alternative associations (economic, cultural, religious) where
individuals can pursue their interests and act together in a more spontaneous form.10 Thus, if we limit our
ambitions to the attempt to secure order rather than guarantee justice, we will contain the potential for abusing
power in seeking to realise the latter. But the problem with this view is that it conflates the
statement that politics is essentially coercive with another one, which appears more controversial, namely,
that only politics is essentially coercive. Although it is plausible to say that any exercise of political power, however
noble its inspiration, is likely to result in a few elites imposing their own standards of legitimacy to the rest of the civic body, it is
naïve to suppose that only political elites are vulnerable to a similar critique. If disagreement
among individuals exists and is unavoidable, it will shape any association in which they take part. If rules
are needed to contain such disagreement, the question of who makes such rules and in what
name, will apply to all circumstances characterized by division of labour, structures of coordination,
and collective decision--‐making. Thus, not just political institutions, but also families, the
market, religious organisations (to mention but the most relevant examples) will entail some degree of
coercion in order to flourish. It is contrary to the spirit of realism to assume that they will
spontaneously guarantee the pursuit of agents’ ends free from any degree of unilateral
interference. Even more importantly, if disagreement pervades all areas of human interaction, the distinctiveness of the political
as that realm in which collective decisions must be made on the face of such disagreements seems difficult to capture.
1NR
 K
Articulating a progressive vision capable of challenging Trumpism is key to check
every form of oppression
Matthew Williams 17, Researcher, The Conflict Archives, MA in Conflict, Security, and
Development from King’s College London, 1/31/17, “Trumpian extremism will catalyse the
West's decline,” http://theconflictarchives.com/latest-articles/2017/1/27/america-first-the-
republicans-and-redcaps-will-lead-the-united-states-to-the-brink
Trumpian extremism is a hybrid of nearly two decades of misplaced policy, and may have been the
catalyst required to rudely awaken progressives from their slumber and, in some cases,
apathy. There is not only a need to fight reactively for liberal and progressive thought, but to
expand its meaning, to start its reform and revolution. Chelsea Manning, to some extent, commented
correctly that 'the one simple lesson to draw from President Obama's legacy: do not start off with
compromise. What we need is an unapologetic progressive leader.'
While politics must involve compromise and understanding the fundamental frustrations which
allowed Donald Trump to come to the most powerful position in the world, the young must stand
unapologetically for progressive thought, for a progressive future and fight every inch
of the way to prevent the West falling back towards behaviours which defined its darkest days
in history. "The great age of revolution!" Nigel Farage exclaims. "Their world is crumbling, ours is being built." Marine Le Pen
asserts. "They want to stop our movement!" states Donald Trump. The far-right and right wing are insurgencies,
they are not revolutions and the agendas they spout are a far-cry from visionary. Race war, the
threat of a clash of civilisations, Islamophobia, anti-semitism, anti-immigrant rhetoric,
nationalism, mass-deportation, xenophobia, walls, white supremacism, exceptionalism,
intimidation, and voices of violence appear more a relapse into our baser impulses and man's darkest
moments rather than a revolution. It is a volatile and dangerous form of politics: the politics of fear and
scapegoating.
The American people must act and must fight every inch against Donald Trump's presidency and most
importantly the sycophants and opportunists who surround him. If they do not they may find the United States they once knew slip
through their fingers. If the American Republic were to slip from view, it would hasten the West's decline.
Donald Trump's administration in hindsight may not be the worst, however if allowed space to push its xenophobic
agendas, it may be the beginning of worse to come and this is a crossroad which cannot be ignored
and our politicians must step up to the challenge .
 Case
Demands that the state not commit violence do not reaffirm its legitimacy---rather,
they highlight its inconsistency and use that inconsistency to improve material
conditions in opposition to state desires
Saul Newman 10, Reader in Political Theory at Goldsmiths, U of London, Theory & Event
Volume 13, Issue 2
There are two aspects that I would like to address here. Firstly, the notion of demand: making certain demands on the
state – say for higher wages , equal rights for excluded groups, to not go to war, or an end to draconian policing –
is one of the basic strategies of social movements and radical groups. Making such demands does not
necessarily mean working within the state or reaffirming its legitimacy. On the
contrary, demands are made from a position outside the political order, and they
often exceed the question of the implementation of this or that specific
measure. They implicitly call into question the legitimacy and even the sovereignty of
the state by highlighting fundamental inconsistencies between, for instance, a formal constitutional
order which guarantees certain rights and equalities, and state practices which in reality violate
and deny them.

Non-reformist reforms solve---it’s possible to keep in mind the end goal of ending
capitalist and identitarian hierarchies while pushing for incremental actions on
the way there---those incremental reforms can create iterative momentum for the
aff’s telos
Milan Rai 14, anti-war activist and Advisory Board member of the Journal of Chomskyan
Studies, “Demanding the Nearly Impossible: Non-Reformist Reform,” 2014,
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Demanding-the-Nearly-Impossible-Non-Reformist-
Reform-20140907-0044.html
“Demand the impossible,” said the Situationists. “Demand nothing, take everything,” said the Anarchists. “Demand moderate
reforms,” said the Social Democrats. “Demand something everyday but only if you’re never going to get it,” said the Trotskyists.
If you are committed to social transformation, or, in other words, to revolutionary politics, there is something
challenging about formulating demands. If a demand can easily be achieved under present
circumstances, then it may well just reinforce the existing framework of power . If
ultimate revolutionary aims are presented as immediate demands, they have no hope of
being implemented, and are effectively just another way of reinforcing the existing framework of power.
The influential community organiser Saul Alinsky believed in seeking easy wins, early on. He thought a key goal for organisers
should be to boost the confidence of demoralised communities. In his famous manual Rules for Radicals, Alinsky tells the story of
how he manipulated the first community he attempted to organise, the ‘Back of the Yards’ in Chicago. One of the demands in the
community was for infant medical services (who had been driven out years earlier by the local churches). Alinsky found out that all
that was needed to reinstate the services was a simple request. He hid this information from the community group, called an
emergency meeting, and organised a storming of the offices of the Infant Welfare Society. On his instruction, the group banged on
desks and loudly demanded a return of infant medical services, refusing to allow officials the chance to explain the procedure. The
delegation ended their tirade by saying: ‘And we will not take “No” for an answer!’ Alinsky cut off the woman official, demanding: ‘Is
it yes or is it no?’ She said: ‘Well, of course, it’s yes.’ Alinsky led the triumphant delegation home, as they digested this ‘lesson’ about
the power of protest.
Personally, I don’t agree with deceiving people, but there is an important message here about the psychology of social change. It’s
indisputable that people’s sense of themselves changes in the course of struggle, that it is in struggle
that we can overcome the psychological limitations that we place on ourselves, that have been
implanted and reinforced by existing institutions.
Alinsky’s basic point was that organisers need to nurture confidence, ‘The organizer knows, for example, that his [sic, or her] biggest
job is to give the people the feeling that they can do something, that while they may accept the idea that organization means power,
they have to experience this idea in action. The organizer's job is to begin to build confidence and hope in the idea of organization
and thus in the people themselves: to win limited victories, each of which will build confidence and
the feeling that “if we can do so much with what we have now just think what we will be able to do when we get big and strong”.’
Strategy is about selecting a sequence of ‘limited victories’ that lead in the direction of your
ultimate goal.
In 1964, French Marxist André Gorz put forward the idea of pursuing ‘structural reform’, which he also called ‘non-reformist
reform’. Gorz described this as ‘a decentralization of the decision-making power, a restriction on the powers of State or Capital, an
extension of popular power, that is to say, a victory of democracy over the dictatorship of profit’ (Strategy for Labor, emphasis in
original). Gorz pointed out that the demand for 500,000 new housing units to be built every year in France, to meet people’s housing
needs, could be either a neo-capitalist reform (if it involved public subsidies to private enterprise) or an anti-capitalist reform (if the
construction was a socialised public service on territory confiscated from landowners).
In the labour movement, Gorz argued for ‘a strategy of progressive conquest of power by the workers’, uniting ‘wage demands, the
demand for control, and the demand for self-determination by the workers of the conditions of work’. The purpose of this
progressive conquest of power was to build the ‘autonomous power’ of workers within capitalist enterprises. Non-reformist
reforms ‘assume a modification of the relations of power; they assume that the workers will take over powers or
assert a force (that is to say, a non-institutionalized force) strong enough to establish, maintain, and expand those tendencies within
the system which serve to weaken capitalism and to shake it joints’. There is always a risk that such powers could
be reabsorbed by the system and subordinated to its functioning, but Gorz argued that the risk had to be run as there
was no alternative in France at that time: ‘Seizure of power by insurrection is out of the question, and
the waiting game leads the workers’ movement to disintegration .’ Gorz argued that unions should demand,
among other things, a ‘collective output bonus’ for all, rather than bonuses for individuals. They should seek to negotiate the speed
and rhythm of work, and the qualifications required for a job. The unions should gain control of vocational training schools ‘to
ensure that they do not train robots, mutilated individuals with limited horizons and a life burdened by ignorance, but professionally
autonomous workers with virtually all-sided skills, capable of advancing in their jobs at least as fast as technological development’.

The impact is that they lock in Eurocentric state-politics as an inevitability rather

than fighting their contingency---reject the aff’s simplistic analysis
Nikita Dhawan 15, Professor of Political Science (Political Theory and Gender Studies) and
Director of the Research Platform Gender Studies: "Identities – Discourses – Transformations"
at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, Homonationalism and State-phobia: The Postcolonial
Predicament of Queering Modernities, Academia.edu
One of my main difficulties with current politics of anti-homonationalism and pink-watching is their
rejection of any engagement with the state, which is censured as a form of co-option and
appeasement. Thy almost seem to oppose the political agenda of providing non-normative sexualities with social recognition and legal
protection through rights and policies, because this would mean acknowledging the existence of other forms of violence that are not reducible to
Western racism and imperialism even as they are not entirely disconnected from them. This form of anti-statism
denies others
some of the protections postcolonial queers enjoy on the privileged side of
transnationality, who live in states where homosexuality has been decriminalized. Anyone who
addresses the issue of homophobia in minority cultures is simply racist and any talk of homophobic violence causes trouble for sexual minorities in
their communities or countries. Anyone who supports ideals of equality, freedom, or emancipation is labeled
‘Western’ or functions as a trophy for liberal and conservative forces. My response to this position is that they do not take the consequences
of colonialism seri-ously if they think decolonization is simply circumventing the legacies of modernity and the language of rights, equality, freedom
and emancipation.
While theorists like Puar rightly draw on Foucault to unpack how non-normative sexualities are deployed in the biopolitical production of different
populations in relation to one another, namely, how European queers are constituted in terms of requiring protection from the threat of homophobic
migrants at home and regressive Muslim cultures elsewhere. At the same time, one of my primary objects against Puar and the politics of
anti-homonationalism is that they tend to dehistoricize, demonize and essentialize the
state reducing it to its penal functions . In her discussions of Israeli ‘pink-washing’ or decriminalization of homosexuality
in India, Puar gives the impression ‘as if’ there is no difference between the US and Germany, or between Israel and India. Tis dangerously
disregards Foucault’s critique of state-phobia in his governmentality lectures, where he simultaneously targets Marxists,
ultra-le radicals, liberals, neo-liberals, which consider the state as predator that must be contained and ‘defanged’(refer to Dhawan 2013). Rejecting
Nietzsche’s image of the state as the ‘coldest of all cold monsters’, Foucault views the state an effect rather than
cause of governmental practices and rationalities.
Foucault’s historical investigations unfold how the experience with fascism und totalitarianism during National Socialism and Stalinism led to the rise
of state-phobia in Europe. In order to reconfigure the relation between government and society, the subsequent efforts sought to replace the despotic
state or police state through rule of law and constitutional state. According to Foucault, since the late 1970s anti-statism rapidly became the basis of
liberal and left politics in the form of critique of securitization and repressive apparatus. This translated for instance into uncritical solidarity with
soviet dissidents. Both amongst the liberals as well as amongst the left, the idea of state as threat gained traction, particularly in the context of fear of
atomic war. Foucault problematizes the state-phobia of liberal as well as left politics, in that they
fail to distinguish between
administrative state, welfare state, bureaucratic state, fascist state and totalitarian state. He distances
himself from such an inflationary form of liberal and left state- phobia. In contrast Foucault
understands the state as ‘the
mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities’ that overlap, but also contradict each
other (2008: 77).
This dynamic and ambivalent function of the state is dangerously ignored by scholars like Puar, whose critique
of the state gravitates towards state-phobia in that every attempt by queer individuals and groups to nego- tiate
with the state is denounced as homonationalism. One must bear in mind that there is a very fine line
between critique of the state and state-phobia and anti-statism. The latter is marked by a deep distrust of state
institutions per se. As Foucault compellingly argues, state-phobia forms a foundational premise for the emergence of
neoliberal governmentality and conflates critique of state and critique of domination,
with the state being characterized as the origin of all violence.
The challenge for postcolonial queer theory is to formulate critique of the state and critique of hegemonic heteronormativity without repro- ducing
state-phobia. Finally liberal and left
state-phobia is informed by a Eurocentrism, in that a particular, specific
European experience with fascism is universalized thereby erasing different historical processes of
state-formation and state-building in postcolonial contexts. Puars critique of USA, Israel und India homogenizes
very diverse anti-discrimination policies and laws simply as politics of appeasement. This
approach is risky in its simplicity. I

nterestingly states like Saudi Arabia or Mauritania, where homosexual acts are punishable with death penalty are spared in Puar’s writings. Moreover,
she equates the provisional decriminalization of same sex acts in India and invalidation of sodomy
laws in USA as examples of homonationalism, discounting the differences between two very
different historical and regional contexts. The two legal reforms are a result of complex social
and legal struggles that produce ambivalent and diverse effects, which are questionably
disregarded. If Europe universalized its norms and epistemologies through colonialism, then decolonization is incomplete
without the deuniversalization and provincialization of Euro-American experiences and
politics. This would entail a nuanced historical analysis of diverse configurations. In this context the specific
German experience with fascism and totalitarianism must not be imposed seamlessly on post-colonial contexts to promote a transnational state-phobic
queer politics. This would be disastrous.
 Progress/Time/State
At no point have we said progress is linear or inevitable---Trump’s election
obviously proves that there’s no certain outcome of political contestation.
Resistance is a terrain of constant struggle and reimagination that doesn’t follow a
linear path, but does allow opportunities to shape politics for the better, and the
aff is far too sweeping in their indicts of these opportunities.
Zadie Smith 16, former Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow at Harvard, fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature, 12/22/2016, On Optimism and Despair, The New York Review,
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/22/on-optimism-and-despair/
As my dear, soon-departing president well understood, in this world there is only incremental
progress . Only the willfully blind can ignore that the history of human existence is simultaneously the
history of pain: of brutality, murder, mass extinction, every form of venality and cyclical horror.
No land is free of it; no people are without their bloodstain; no tribe entirely innocent. But there
is still this redeeming matter of incremental progress. It might look small to those with
apocalyptic perspectives, but to she who not so long ago could not vote, or drink from the same
water fountain as her fellow citizens, or marry the person she chose, or live in a certain
neighborhood, such incremental change feels enormous.¶ Meanwhile the dream of time travel—for
new presidents, literary journalists, and writers alike—is just that: a dream. And one that only makes sense if
the rights and privileges you are accorded currently were accorded to you back then, too. If some
white men are more sentimental about history than anyone else right now it’s no big surprise:
their rights and privileges stretch a long way back. For a black woman the expanse of livable
history is so much shorter. What would I have been and what would I have done—or more to the
point, what would have been done to me—in 1360, in 1760, in 1860, in 1960? I do not say this to claim
some pedestal of perfect victimhood or historical innocence. I know very well how my West African ancestors sold and enslaved their
tribal cousins and neighbors. I don’t believe in any political or personal identity of pure innocence and
absolute rectitude .¶ But neither do I believe in time travel. I believe in human limitation, not
out of any sense of fatalism but out of a learned caution, gleaned from both recent and distant history. We
will never be perfect: that is our limitation. But we can have, and have had, moments in which
we can take genuine pride. I took pride in my neighborhood, in my childhood, back in 1999. It was not perfect but it was
filled with possibility. If the clouds have rolled in over my fiction it is not because what was perfect has been proved empty but
because what was becoming possible—and is still experienced as possible by millions—is now denied as if it never did and never
could exist.¶ I realize as I write this that I have strayed some way from the happiness that should rightly attend accepting a literary
prize. I am very happy to accept this great honor—please don’t mistake me. I am more than happy—I am amazed. When I started to
write I never imagined that anyone outside of my neighborhood would read these books, never mind outside of England, never mind
“on the continent,” as my father liked to call it. I remember how stunned I was to embark on my very first European book tour, to
Germany, with my father, who had last been here in 1945, as a young soldier in the reconstruction. It was a trip filled, for him, with
nostalgia: he had loved a German girl, back in 1945, and one of his great regrets, he admitted to me on that trip, was not marrying
her and instead coming home, to England, and marrying first one woman and then another, my mother.¶ We made a funny pair on
that tour, I’m sure: a young black girl and her elderly white father, clutching our guidebooks and seeking those spots in Berlin that
my father had visited almost fifty years earlier. It is from him that I have inherited both my optimism and my despair, for he had
been among the liberators at Belsen and therefore seen the worst this world has to offer, but had, from there, gone forward, with a
sufficiently open heart and mind, striding into one failed marriage and then another, marrying both times across various lines of
class, color, and temperament, and yet still found in life reasons to be cheerful, reasons even for joy.¶ He was, I realize now, one of
the least ideological people I ever met: everything that happened to him he took as a particular case, unable or unwilling to
generalize from it. He lost his livelihood but did not lose faith in his country. The education system failed him but he still revered it
and placed all his hopes for his children in it. His relations with women were mostly disastrous but he did not hate women. In his
mind he did not marry a black girl, he married “Yvonne,” and he did not have an experimental set of mixed-race children, he had me
and my brother Ben and my brother Luke.¶ How rare such people are! I am not so naive even now as to believe we have enough of
them at any one time in history to form a decent and tolerant society. But neither will I ever deny their existence or the possibility of
lives like his. He was a member of the white working class, a man often afflicted by despair who still managed to retain a core
optimism. Perhaps in a different time under different cultural influences living in a different society he would have become one of
the rabid old angry white men of whom the present left is so afeared. As it was, born in 1925 and dying in 2006, he saw his children
benefit from the civilized postwar protections of free education and free health care, and felt he had many reasons to be grateful.¶
This is the world I knew.
Things have changed, but history is not erased by change, and the
examples of the past still hold out new possibilities for all of us, opportunities to remake, for a
new generation, the conditions from which we ourselves have benefited. Neither my readers
nor I am in the relatively sunlit uplands depicted in White Teeth anymore. But the lesson I take
from this is not that the lives in that novel were illusory but rather that progress is never permanent, will
always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated, and reimagined if it is to survive. I
don’t claim that it’s easy. I do not have the answers. I am by nature not a political person and these are the darkest
political times I have ever known. My business, such as it is, concerns the intimate lives of people. The people who ask
me about the “failure of multiculturalism” mean to suggest that not only has a political ideology failed but that human beings
themselves have changed and are now fundamentally incapable of living peacefully together despite their many differences. ¶ In this
people who believe in
argument it is the writer who is meant to be the naive child, but I maintain that
fundamental and irreversible changes in human nature are themselves ahistorical

and naive . If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within
them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which
certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part,
on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world—and most recently in America—the
conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal
melodies in mind. Here in Germany you will remember these martial songs; they are not a very distant memory. But
there is no place on earth where they have not been played at one time or another.
Those of us who remember, too, a finer music must try now to play it, and encourage others, if we can, to sing along.