Arguments that annoy me: Political Capital

If the words "political capital" are present in your politics shell, you're doing it wrong.

In policy debate, the politics debate is limited by the available evidence that can be found from major news wires.  On balance, this is a good thing, as it limits the extent to which debaters can govtrack.us their politics disads, creating some level of predictability.  The one downside is that on the whole, most Beltway Journalists™  write trite and boring pieces with very little insight.  Being completely incapable of actually assessing the motives of legislators in a nuanced manner, they discuss the notion of "political capital" as though it were a thing that actually exists.  Because they frame the passage of legislation as requiring the "expenditure" of  "political capital" out of the "Scrooge McDuck Political Capital Bank LLC," policy debaters use political capital arguments in their disads.  "Hey, it's not just me, look, Joe Klein said it!"

In parliamentary debate, you are liberated from this stupidity.  Because you aren't forced to actually have "evidence" for your arguments (muahahahahaha) you can do things like analyze the motives of the specific individuals responsible for enacting a given policy, and articulate how their motives might change if the affirmative is enacted, even if you don't have a Beltway Journalist™ to glean insight from.  An example:

In late 2009-early 2010, health care reform was THE politics disad.  Sarah and I read it, primarily because I enjoyed torturing Sarah with arguments she found boring.  But our link argument actually had some nuance to it.  Remember that the bill was just barely going to pass with 60 Senators voting for it.  Well, I read about a poll that said Ben Nelson's poll numbers had dropped by 20 points after he had voted for the first version of the bill, that he would be facing re-election in the fall, and that he would be required to vote for the bill again when it came out of committee.  No more than that - just the existence of this poll and the reconciliation vote.  For our link argument, we extrapolated that Nelson would want to reverse the polling damage, but that he couldn't just flip-flop on the issue without looking like a craven hypocrite.  He needed a reason, a rationale for breaking with the liberals.  And…your well-intentioned plan, whatever it was, gave Nelson the rationale he needed to vote against health care reform.

Try and turn that.  It's not fun.  You can probably win some defense against it (in fact, a lot of defense against it) but it's so specific as to be insulated from most of the generic crap people throw at it.

And if they say "political capital high"  in response?  LOL.

Now, "political capital" can occasionally be meaningful, if, for example, one is equating "Obama's political capital" with "Obama's ability to influence the congress."  Sometimes Obama needs to call in favors, exert some level of pressure, etc.  And there may well be a limit to the amount of pressure he can exert on his own side or on the GOP.  But realize that when we talk about politics in this way, most of the metaphors that are associated with political capital are simplistic or totally irrelevant.  And when people read political capital links against XO plans?  "Today, President Barack Obama spent his whole day in closed-door meetings with President Barack Obama in order to try and persuade the President to sign the executive order on his desk.  In other news, the Secret Service is currently readying a padded room for the President at the local mental hospital."

Good politics disads resemble every other type of good straight-up argument - they talk about what human beings will do if the plan is passed, and they use our shared understanding of human behavior as the basis for warrants.

Read a book, read a book...

Most of you are probably wrapping up finals (except for my former quarter-system charges at Oregon and others elsewhere, sadface) and are eagerly anticipating freedom from academic work for a few months.

Not so fast!  Assuming you are going to be debating next year, summer is the time when you get the chance to improve.  If you weren't in the top ten overall teams last year, you probably have a significant amount of work to do over the summer if you want to have a shot at the title next year.  I have a few humble suggestions.

1. See the title. 

You have been liberated from the requirement of reading what your teachers want you to read.  Now you have three months where you can be in full control of your reading list.  If you haven't developed a reading habit, now is the time.  The most important thing is to be consistently reading books over the next three months.  If you find yourself getting stuck on one book, pick up a different one and start reading that one.  But read, every day.

Books have a way of teaching you a few concepts very, very well.  Books are repetitive - most of the time they will contain 2 or 3 major arguments, and then spend 300 pages or so applying those arguments to diverse situations.  That repetition is a good thing.  If you hear an argument once, you will easily comprehend it, but you will have a difficult time truly understanding it.  Seeing an argument applied in a myriad of ways will give you an ability to use that argument when it comes up in a debate round.

Books are also a way to become more cynical, something that is key to the success of anyone who is going to rely on winning straight-up debates.  Let's face it, at this point you've been marinated for roughly 13-15 years in progressive, hopeful ideology (unless you are lucky enough to be studying at a Christian school, in which case you've been marinated for roughly 13-15 years in a progressive, hopeful Christian ideology.)  You aren't going to be reading The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker in your critical theory class, nor will you be reading The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley or The Delinquent Teenager by Donna LaFramboise in your environmental studies class.  Your psychology class won't contain anything like Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness, or Robert Wright's The Moral Animal.  Hell, your economics professor probably forgot who Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt were, and they certainly won't include Liberalism, Economics in One Lesson, or Individualism and Economic Order in their syllabus.  Your peace studies class probably won't touch on Thomas Schelling's The Strategy of Conflict or Edward Luttwak's Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace.  And your political science class will surely ignore Taleb's The Black Swan, Mancur Olson's The Rise and Decline of Nations, and Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter.  

I try to be subtle.

2. Practice.

I'd go to policy camp, if I had the time and money to do so.  My favorite analogy for NPDA/CEDA is Japanese Baseball/Major League Baseball.  Clearly, if you were playing in the Japanese baseball, there might be some quirks about your sport that major leaguers won't understand, but if you got the opportunity to go a MLB training camp you wouldn't pass it up.  The policy community is much sounder and better at explaining theory and the K debate - if you are having trouble with those areas, policy camp is the place to be.  

Moreover, learning how to cut a card and assemble arguments is really, really useful for parliamentary debate.  When you get used to seeing different arguments as pieces on a chessboard that can be combined in different ways, as opposed to distillations of truth that come from on high, you'll do better.

If you can't go to camp, you should try and find a policy coach in your area and work with them.  I speak from personal experience when I say that this is extremely valuable.

Speed shouldn't be the priority.  I think it's important for people to know how to go faster in the abstract - I found myself frustrated by the fact that my coaching staff seemed to treat my slowness as something that was intrinsic to my debating, rather than something that can be fixed.  Most debaters now have to do a lot more work improving their word economy before they can really get anything out of physically speaking faster.

3. Anticipate and block out useful arguments.

I can tell you write now that the block "Romney and Obama are identical," if crafted properly, will be incredibly useful to you in the fall.  As will the "Romney is a diabolical demon/Romney is the coolest ever" blocks.  As will the "Greece leaves/doesn't leave the Eurozone" blocks, as well as a few others.  Think through these questions.  Read about them.  Go exploring on Wikipedia and on both sides of the pundit-osphere.  More than the writing of the blocks is the "headwork" that goes along with writing them.  The more you war game out different situations in your spare time, the less work you will actually have to do in-round to generate the arguments you need to win.

(FWIW, I'd start with Haidt, Ridley, Kahneman, and Liberalism, and then go on from there.)