I think that this is a great public forum topic: it relates to a current event that will educate students on some of the nuanc
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Lesson 4.2 Day 3
| 13NFL1-Compulsory Voting Page 23 of 163 www.victorybriefs.com and I won’t talk about here. I’ll just raise a few topic-specific ones. First, you could argue that the resolution only requires you to talk about a single country because of the use of a meaning one, in a democracy Second, you could make arguments about how policy decisions are never made in the abstract and the resolution is a question about a certain type of policy. This would enhance your education arguments. This is just to get you started thinking in a topic-specific direction in your theory shells. General advice always rewrite or revise your generic theory shells to be specific to the topic and even the tournament you’re debating (perhaps things are different at the first tournament than the last tournament) This will give you better arguments and ones that your opponent is less likely to have generic answers to. Democracy Bad An interesting issue is which side gets democracy bad ground. Put some thought into this even if you don’t plan to run it as a case position, because it could be very strategic as turns. A democracy bad argument would have this form an argument for why democracy is morally evil and then a reason why compulsory voting either contributes or detracts from that moral evil. It makes the most sense to run these kinds of arguments under the interpretation of the resolution where we evaluate moral concerns rather than just consistency with democratic ideals. The reason is that if we just care about whether compulsory voting is consistent with democratic ideals, we don’t care about whether democratic ideals themselves are good or bad. Good authors for this kind of position might be Slavoj Zizek 8 , Chantal Mouffe 9 , Carl Schmitt 10 , or Jacques Derrida Many of these authors have fairly dense writing (with the exception of Mouffe), so if you want something shorter and easier to read I’d recommend running a Lexis Nexis search with the author’s name and keywords like democracy or the names of the books and articles footnoted below. There are ways that you could make democracy bad-esque arguments work for either side under the framework where we only care about the identity of a democracy. This is in square brackets because this kind of argument could get kind of complex, and readers looking fora more straightforward type of argument should skip it. Here’s how one such argument could go Most democracy bad argument are probably going to talk about the gap between the rhetoric espoused by liberal democracies and the way that they must exist in practice. So you could say that what we care about is the way democracies exist in practice. That existence is in fact contrary to the ideals they are supposedly based on. So if the affirmative has shown that 8 Zizek, Slavoj. "The Leninist Freedom" On Belief . London Routledge, 2007. 9 Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox . London Verso, 2000 10 Schmitt, Carl. The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy . Cambridge, MA MIT, 1985. 11 Derrida, Jacques. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason . Stanford, CA Stanford UP, 2005. |