1NC

CP

The President of the United States should engage in full deliberation before taking actions related to cyberwarfare.

Counterplan solves cred and the case

Adrian Vermeule 7, Harvard law prof - AND - Eric Posner - U Chicago law, The Credible Executive, 74 U. Chi. L. Rev. 865

*We do not endorse gendered language

The Madisonian system of oversight has not totally failed. Some- times legislators overcome the temptation to free ride; sometimes they invest in protecting the separation of powers or legislative preroga- tives. Sometimes judges review exercises of executive discretion, even during emergencies. But often enough, legislators and judges have no real alternative to letting executive officials exercise discretion un- checked. The Madisonian system is a partial failure; compensating mechanisms must be adopted to fill the area of slack, the institutional gap between executive discretion and the oversight capacities of other institutions. Again, the magnitude of this gap is unclear, but plausibly it is quite large; we will assume that it is. It is often assumed that this partial failure of the Madisonian sys- tem unshackles and therefore benefits ill-motivated executives. This is grievously incomplete. The failure of the Madisonian system harms the well-motivated executive as much as it benefits the ill-motivated one. Where Madisonian oversight fails, the well-motivated executive is a victim of his own power. Voters, legislators, and judges will be wary of granting further discretion to an executive whose motivations are un- certain and possibly nefarious. The partial failure of Madisonian over- sight thus threatens a form of inefficiency, a kind of contracting failure that makes potentially everyone, including the voters, worse off. Our central question, then, is what the well-motivated executive can do to solve or at least ameliorate the problem. The solution is for the executive to complement his (well-motivated) first-order policy goals with second-order mechanisms for demonstrating credibility to other actors. We thus do not address the different question of what voters, legislators, judges, and other actors should do about an executive who is ill motivated and known to be so. That project involves shoring up or replacing the Madisonian system to block executive dictatorship. Our project is the converse of this, and involves finding new mechanisms to help the well-motivated executive credibly distinguish himself as such. ¶ IV. EXECUTIVE SIGNALING: LAW AND MECHANISMS ¶ We suggest that the executive’s credibility problem can be solved by second-order mechanisms of executive signaling. In the general case, well-motivated executives send credible signals by taking actions that are more costly for ill-motivated actors than for well- motivated ones, thus distinguishing themselves from their ill- motivated mimics. Among the specific mechanisms we discuss, an important subset involves executive self-binding, whereby executives commit themselves to a course of action that would impose higher costs on ill-motivated actors. Commitments themselves have value as signals of benign motivations. ¶ This departs from the usual approach in legal scholarship. Legal theory has often discussed self-binding by “government” or govern- ment officials. In constitutional theory, it is often suggested that consti- tutions represent an attempt by “the people” to bind “themselves” against their own future decisionmaking pathologies, or relatedly, that constitutional prohibitions represent mechanisms by which govern- ments commit themselves not to expropriate investments or to exploit their populations.72 Whether or not this picture is coherent,73 it is not the question we examine here, although some of the relevant consid- erations are similar.74 We are not concerned with binding the president so that he cannot abuse his powers, but with how he might bind himself or take other actions that enhance his credibility, so that he can generate support from the public and other members of the government. ¶ Furthermore, our question is subconstitutional: it is whether a well-motivated executive, acting within an established set of constitu- tional and statutory rules, can use signaling mechanisms to generate public trust. Accordingly, we proceed by assuming that no constitutional amendments or new statutes will be enacted. Within these con- straints, what can a well-motivated executive do to bootstrap himself to credibility? The problem for the well-motivated executive is to credibly signal his benign motivations. In general, the solution is to engage in actions that are less costly for good types than for bad types. ¶ We begin with some relevant law, then examine a set of possible mechanisms—emphasizing both the conditions under which they might succeed and the conditions under which they might not—and conclude by examining the costs of credibility. ¶ A. A Preliminary Note on Law and Self-Binding ¶ Many of our mechanisms are unproblematic from a legal per- spective, as they involve presidential actions that are clearly lawful. But a few raise legal questions; in particular, those that involve self- binding.75 Can a president bind himself to respect particular first-order policies? With qualifications, the answer is yes, at least to the same extent that a legislature can. Formally, a duly promulgated executive rule or order binds even the executive unless and until it is validly abrogated, thereby establishing a new legal status quo.76 The legal authority to establish a new status quo allows a president to create inertia or political constraints that will affect his own future choices. In a practical sense, presidents, like legislatures, have great de facto power to adopt policies that shape the legal landscape for the future. A president might commit himself to a long-term project of defense pro- curement or infrastructure or foreign policy, narrowing his own future choices and generating new political coalitions that will act to defend the new rules or policies. More schematically, we may speak of formal and informal means of self-binding:

Executive self-restraint is the only way to solve the case

Gillian Metzger 9, prof, Columbia Law, THE INTERDEPENDENT RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL SEPARATION OF POWERS 59 Emory L.J. 423

The case in favor of internal mechanisms is in part comparative. Real limitations exist on the ability of traditional external constraints, specifically Congress and the courts, to check the power of the Executive Branch. The fundamental impediments for Congress are internal ones, in particular its need to proceed via the arduous process of bicameralism and presentment and the additional obstacles created by the operation of congressional committees and rules. n62 The ordinary burdens of the legislative process are intensified in contexts involving efforts to check presidential authority given the frequent need to overcome a presidential veto. n63 Congress does wield important investigatory and oversight powers and has other tools that may give it leverage over the President, such as control over spending or the ability to add contentious measures to must-pass legislation. n64 But the political reality of party allegiance dominating institutional interests, along with greater ideological cohesion among political parties in Congress, undermines these techniques and makes rigorous congressional constraints on presidential actions unlikely except in the context of divided government. n65 Moreover, [*438] even if Congress is willing to actually engage in oversight, its ability to do so may be significantly hampered by the Executive Branch's non-cooperation or intransigence, often in the form of assertion of executive privilege or failure to inform Congress of contentious activities. n66¶ Courts, in turn, face jurisdictional barriers that limit their ability to review Executive Branch actions. n67 Such barriers have recently surfaced in litigation challenging the government's expansion of domestic wiretapping without complying with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; the Sixth Circuit held that the plaintiffs' claims of injury from the program were too speculative to provide a basis for standing to challenge the program. n68 Even when actions are justiciable, the courts' effectiveness as a check can be significantly curtailed by their deference to reasonable Executive Branch policy [*439] determinations, particularly in the area of national security. n69 Courts are also reluctant to intervene to correct general failures in administration or prompt Executive Branch action. n70 Another major impediment is delay. Courts must wait for cases to come to them, and challenges to presidential action or policy are likely to be appealed, postponing final resolution of the underlying claims. n71 This is not to say that deference and delay necessarily undermine judicial checks; the Supreme Court's rejection of the Bush Administration's refusal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions in Massachusetts v. EPA n72 and recent decisions rebuffing broad presidential assertions of power regarding the Guantanamo Bay detainees n73 are important testaments to the contrary. Yet even in these contexts, the limits of judicial constraints are evident. For example, although the EPA proposed regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act in response to the Massachusetts decision, the White House refused to act on the proposal and no formal action toward regulating greenhouse gases was taken in the remaining year and a half of the Bush Administration. n74 The ongoing, multi-year saga of habeas challenges involving the Guantanamo Bay detention center demonstrates even more vividly that it can be years before judicial review forces a change in Executive Branch behavior. n75¶ Several bases exist for thinking that internal separation of powers mechanisms may have a comparative advantage. First, internal mechanisms [*440] operate ex ante, at the time when the Executive Branch is formulating and implementing policy, rather than ex post. As a result, they avoid the delay in application that can hamper both judicial and congressional oversight. n76 Second, internal mechanisms often operate continuously, rather than being limited to issues that generate congressional attention or arise in the form of a justiciable challenge. n77 Third, internal mechanisms operate not just at the points at which policy proposals originate and are implemented but also at higher managerial levels, thus addressing policy and administration in both a granular and systemic fashion. In addition, policy recommendations generated through internal checks may face less resistance than those offered externally because the latter frequently arise after executive officials have already decided upon a policy course and are more likely to take an adversarial form. n78 Internal mechanisms may also gain credibility with Executive Branch officials to the extent they are perceived as contributing to more fully informed and expertise-based decisionmaking. n79

DA

Voting affirmative endorses a radical limit on executive power to respond to crises---despite whatever smoke and mirrors they throw up about the aff, that’s its fundamental premise

William E. Scheuerman 2, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Minnesota, Summer 2002, “ARTICLE: CONSTITUTIONALISM IN AN AGE OF SPEED,” Constitutional Commentary, 19 Const. Commentary 353

The crisis rhetoric often exploited by would-be executive constitutional reformers is revealing. Since Machiavelli, executive power has been intimately associated with the possibility of rapid-fire agere in juxtaposition to slow-going deliberare. n75 In this spirit, Federalist 70 notes that only by placing executive authority in the hands of "one man" can unity "conducive to energy," as well as "decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch," be assured. n76 Montesquieu's observation that a plural executive conflicts with the main purpose of executive power, namely its capacity to act with "dispatch," was already well on its way to becoming dogma by the time Hamilton outlined the basic structure of the U.S. President. n77 The association of the executive with "dispatch" (or speed) remains a crucial feature of contemporary liberal democratic thinking as well. For example, in a pivotal 1936 Supreme Court decision that dramatically enhanced executive authority in foreign policy, Justice Sutherland described the President as the only institutional actor who "can energize and direct policy in ways that could not be done by either Congress or his own bureaucracy. His decision-making processes can take on degrees of speed, secrecy, flexibility, and efficiency that no other governmental institution can match." n78 [*385] Executives who aspire to undertake major constitutional reform obviously have much to gain by using, manufacturing, or even simulating crises, since emergencies cry out for rapid-fire responses and the executive is purportedly best suited to initiate such responses.

Fundamental constitutional alteration obviously represents a key aspect of constitutional change. However, constitutional norms are also adapted to social and economic acceleration in less dramatic ways. Social and economic acceleration risks transforming the executive into a privileged site for constitutional adaptation, fundamental or otherwise. Earlier in the essay I noted that the intensification of social and economic change not only requires a more-or-less permanent reinterpretation of constitutional norms, but frequent alterations to the fundamental rules of the constitutional system as well. I also suggested that social and economic acceleration makes it increasingly difficult to draw a clear line between constitutional interpretation and fundamental alteration. These points are important for understanding executive-driven constitutional change as well. If I am not mistaken, there are pressing reasons for expecting the executive to gain most from the process of social and economic acceleration. Our traditional preconceptions about executive power imply that executive-based constitutional adaptation is best suited to social and economic acceleration. If 1) the executive is institutionally best-equipped to undertake rapid-fire action, and 2) ours is a social world in which the need for rapid-fire responses to changing social and economic realities is at a premium, then 3) the executive would seem especially well-adapted to many facets of constitutional adaptation. To the extent that social and economic acceleration implies both incessant reinterpretations and frequent alterations to the constitutional system, substantial doses of executive-driven constitutional change might seem to represent a perfectly sensible institutional adaptation, notwithstanding its potential normative and political ills. Just as the distinction between interpretation and fundamental alteration so often becomes unclear in legal practice, so too the difficulty of distinguishing between the executive's reinterpretation of the constitutional "rules of the game" and its fundamental modification or alteration of those rules is likely to grow.

Only systematic empirical research can demonstrate whether social and economic acceleration actually contributes to [*386] the amplification of executive authority long observed by political scientists and legal scholars. Nonetheless, there are good reasons for suspecting that the speed-up of social and economic relations represents a neglected part of the familiar story of the growth of executive authority along with the corresponding decay of traditional legal virtues - including constancy and clarity - entailed by executive discretion. n79 Especially in foreign policy, the necessity for "dispatch" functions as a ready justification for undertaking substantial executive-driven alterations to the constitutional status quo. n80 Economic and social crises, and even the relatively ordinary tasks of economic management, also risk increasing the scope of executive prerogative, since the executive seems best equipped to provide the rapid-fire institutional responses required by the high-speed dynamics of contemporary capitalism. n81 In light of the "rapidity, scope, and intensity" of social and economic change, the traditional association of the executive with speed potentially paves the way for unparalleled exercises of executive power.

Effective executive response is key to prevent global crises --- specifically: Iranian nuclearization, North African terrorism, Russian aggression, and Senkaku conflict

Ghitis 13 (Frida, world affairs columnist for The Miami Herald and World Politics Review. A former CNN producer and correspondent, she is the author of The End of Revolution: A Changing World in the Age of Live Television. “World to Obama: You can't ignore us,” 1/22, http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/22/opinion/ghitis-obama-world)

And while Obama plans to dedicate his efforts to the domestic agenda, a number of brewing international crises are sure to steal his attention and demand his time. Here are a few of the foreign policy issues that, like it or not, may force Obama to divert his focus from domestic concerns in this new term.¶ Syria unraveling: The United Nations says more than 60,000 people have already died in a civil war that the West has, to its shame, done little to keep from spinning out of control. Washingtonhas warned that the use of chemical or biological weapons might force its hand. But the regime may have already used them. The West has failed to nurture a moderate force in the conflict. Now Islamist extremists are growing more powerful within the opposition. The chances are growing that worst-case scenarios will materialize. Washington will not be able to endlessly ignore this dangerous war.¶ Egypt and the challenge of democracy: What happens in Egypt strongly influences the rest of the Middle East -- and hence world peace -- which makes it all the more troubling to see liberal democratic forces lose battle after battle for political influence against Islamist parties, and to hear blatantly anti-Semitic speech coming from the mouth of Mohammed Morsy barely two years before he became president.¶ Iran's nuclear program: Obama took office promising a new, more conciliatory effort to persuade Iran to drop its nuclear enrichment program. Four years later, he has succeeded in implementing international sanctions, but Iran has continued enriching uranium, leading United Nations inspectors to find "credible evidence" that Tehran is working on nuclear weapons. Sooner or later the moment of truth will arrive. If a deal is not reached, Obama will have to decide if he wants to be the president on whose watch a nuclear weapons race was unleashed in the most dangerous and unstable part of the world.¶ North Africa terrorism: A much-neglected region of the world is becoming increasingly difficult to disregard. In recent days, Islamist extremists took American and other hostages in Algeria and France sent its military to fight advancing Islamist extremists in Mali, a country that once represented optimism for democratic rule in Africa, now overtaken by militants who are potentially turning it into a staging ground for international terrorism.¶ Russia repression: As Russian President Vladimir Putin succeeds in crushing opposition to his increasingly authoritarianrule, he and his allies are making anti-American words and policies their favorite theme. A recent ban on adoption of Russian orphans by American parents is only the most vile example. But Washington needs Russian cooperation to achieve its goals at the U.N. regarding Iran, Syria and other matters. It is a complicated problem with which Obama will have to wrestle.¶ Then there are the long-standing challenges that could take a turn for the worse, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Obama may not want to wade into that morass again, but events may force his hand.¶ And there are the so-called "black swans," events of low probability and high impact. There is talk that China and Japan could go to war over a cluster of disputed islands.¶ A war between two of the world's largest economies could prove devastating to the global economy, just as a sudden and dramatic reversal in the fragile Eurozone economy could spell disaster. Japan's is only the hottest of many territorial disputes between China and its Asian neighbors. Then there's North Korea with its nuclear weapons.¶ We could see regions that have garnered little attention come back to the forefront, such as Latin America, where conflict could arise in a post-Hugo Chavez Venezuela.¶ The president -- and the country -- could also benefit from unexpectedly positive outcomes. Imagine a happy turn of events in Iran, a breakthrough between Israelis and Palestinians, the return of prosperity in Europe, a successful push by liberal democratic forces in the Arab uprising countries, which could create new opportunities, lowering risks around the world, easing trade, restoring confidence and improving the chances for the very agenda Obama described in his inaugural speech.¶ The aspirations he expressed for America are the ones he should express for our tumultuous planet. Perhaps in his next big speech, the State of the Union, he can remember America's leadership position and devote more attention to those around the world who see it as a source of inspiration and encouragement.¶ After all, in this second term Obama will not be able to devote as small a portion of his attention to foreign policy as he did during his inaugural speech.¶ International disengagement is not an option. As others before Obama have discovered, history has a habit of toying with the best laid, most well-intentioned plans of American presidents.

1NC

a. Interpretation and violation---the affirmative should defend topical action grounded in the resolution

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. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred. The entire debate is about whether 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.

A general subject isn’t enough—debate requires a specific point of difference

Steinberg & Freeley 8 *Austin J. Freeley is a Boston based attorney who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, AND **David L. Steinberg , Lecturer of Communication Studies @ U Miami, Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making pp45-

Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a difference of opinion or a conflict of interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a tact or value or policy, there is no need 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 on issues, there is no debate. In addition, 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 are 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? Docs 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? I low 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 can!, 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 must be stated clearly. Vague understanding results in unfocused deliberation and poor decisions, frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the failure of the United States Congress to make progress on the immigration debate during the summer of 2007.¶ Someone disturbed by the problem of the 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 something 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.¶ 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 "homelessness" or "abortion" or "crime'* or "global warming" we are likely to have an interesting discussion but not to establish profitable basis for argument. For example, the statement "Resolved: That the pen is mightier than the sword" is debatable, yet fails to provide much basis for clear argumentation. If we take this statement to mean that 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.¶ 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, or what? What does "effectiveness" mean 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 Liurania 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 treatv 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.

b. Vote neg

1. Preparation and clash—changing the topic post facto manipulates balance of prep, which structurally favors the aff because they speak last and permute alternatives—strategic fairness is key to engaging a well-prepared opponent

Topical fairness requirements are key to effective dialogue—monopolizing strategy and prep makes the discussion one-sided and subverts any meaningful neg role

Galloway 7—Samford Comm prof (Ryan, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28, 2007)

Debate as a dialogue sets an argumentative table, where all parties receive a relatively fair opportunity to voice their position. Anything that fails to allow participants to have their position articulated denies one side of the argumentative table a fair hearing. The affirmative side is set by the topic and fairness requirements. While affirmative teams have recently resisted affirming the topic, in fact, the topic selection process is rigorous, taking the relative ground of each topic as its central point of departure.¶ Setting the affirmative reciprocally sets the negative. The negative crafts approaches to the topic consistent with affirmative demands. The negative crafts disadvantages, counter-plans, and critical arguments premised on the arguments that the topic allows for the affirmative team. According to fairness norms, each side sits at a relatively balanced argumentative table.¶ When one side takes more than its share, competitive equity suffers. However, it also undermines the respect due to the other involved in the dialogue. When one side excludes the other, it fundamentally denies the personhood of the other participant (Ehninger, 1970, p. 110). A pedagogy of debate as dialogue takes this respect as a fundamental component. A desire to be fair is a fundamental condition of a dialogue that takes the form of a demand for equality of voice. Far from being a banal request for links to a disadvantage, fairness is a demand for respect, a demand to be heard, a demand that a voice backed by literally months upon months of preparation, research, and critical thinking not be silenced.¶ Affirmative cases that suspend basic fairness norms operate to exclude particular negative strategies. Unprepared, one side comes to the argumentative table unable to meaningfully participate in a dialogue. They are unable to “understand what ‘went on…’” and are left to the whims of time and power (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). Hugh Duncan furthers this line of reasoning:¶ Opponents not only tolerate but honor and respect each other because in doing so they enhance their own chances of thinking better and reaching sound decisions. Opposition is necessary because it sharpens thought in action. We assume that argument, discussion, and talk, among free an informed people who subordinate decisions of any kind, because it is only through such discussion that we reach agreement which binds us to a common cause…If we are to be equal…relationships among equals must find expression in many formal and informal institutions (Duncan, 1993, p. 196-197).¶ Debate compensates for the exigencies of the world by offering a framework that maintains equality for the sake of the conversation (Farrell, 1985, p. 114).¶ For example, an affirmative case on the 2007-2008 college topic might defend neither state nor international action in the Middle East, and yet claim to be germane to the topic in some way. The case essentially denies the arguments that state action is oppressive or that actions in the international arena are philosophically or pragmatically suspect. Instead of allowing for the dialogue to be modified by the interchange of the affirmative case and the negative response, the affirmative subverts any meaningful role to the negative team, preventing them from offering effective “counter-word” and undermining the value of a meaningful exchange of speech acts. Germaneness and other substitutes for topical action do not accrue the dialogical benefits of topical advocacy.

2. Substantive constraints on the debate are key to actualize effective pluralism and agonistic democracy

John Dryzek 6, Professor of Social and Political Theory, The Australian National University, Reconciling Pluralism and Consensus as Political Ideals, American Journal of Political Science,Vol. 50, No. 3, July 2006, Pp. 634–649

A more radical contemporary pluralism is suspicious of liberal and communitarian devices for reconciling difference. Such a critical pluralism is associated with agonists such as Connolly (1991), Honig (1993), and Mouffe (2000), and difference democrats such as Young (2000). As Honig puts it, “Difference is just another word for what used to be called pluralism” (1996, 60). Critical pluralists resemble liberals in that they begin from the variety of ways it is possible to experience the world, but stress that the experiences and perspectives of marginalized and oppressed groups are likely to be very different from dominant groups. They also have a strong suspicion ofliberal theory that looks neutral but in practice supports and serves the powerful.

Difference democrats are hostile to consensus, partly because consensus decisionmaking (of the sort popular in 1970s radical groups) conceals informal oppression under the guise of concern for all by disallowing dissent (Zablocki 1980). But the real target is political theory that deploys consensus, especially deliberative and liberal theory. Young (1996, 125–26) argues that the appeals to unity and the common good that deliberative theorists under sway of the consensus ideal stress as the proper forms of political communication can often be oppressive. For deliberation so oriented all too easily equates the common good with the interests of the more powerful, thus sidelining legitimate concerns of the marginalized. Asking the underprivileged to set aside their particularistic concerns also means marginalizing their favored forms of expression, especially the telling of personal stories (Young 1996, 126).3 Speaking for an agonistic conception of democracy (to which Young also subscribes; 2000, 49–51), Mouffe states:

To negate the ineradicable character of antagonism and aim at a universal rational consensus— that is the real threat to democracy. Indeed, this can lead to violence being unrecognized and hidden behind appeals to “rationality,” as is often the case in liberal thinking. (1996, 248)

Mouffe is a radical pluralist: “By pluralism I mean the end of a substantive idea of the good life” (1996, 246). But neither Mouffe nor Young want to abolish communication in the name of pluralism and difference; much of their work advocates sustained attention to communication. Mouffe also cautions against uncritical celebration of difference, for some differences imply “subordination and should therefore be challenged by a radical democratic politics” (1996, 247). Mouffe raises the question of the terms in which engagement across difference might proceed. Participants should ideally accept that the positions of others are legitimate, though not as a result of being persuaded in argument. Instead, it is a matter of being open to conversion due to adoption of a particular kind of democratic attitude that converts antagonism into agonism, fighting into critical engagement, enemies into adversaries who are treated with respect. Respect here is notjust (liberal) toleration, but positive validation of the position of others. For Young, a communicative democracy would be composed of people showing “equal respect,” under “procedural rules of fair discussion and decisionmaking” (1996, 126). Schlosberg speaks of “agonistic respect” as “a critical pluralist ethos” (1999, 70).

Mouffe and Young both want pluralism to be regulated by a particular kind of attitude, be it respectful, agonistic, or even in Young’s (2000, 16–51) case reasonable.Thus neither proposes unregulated pluralism as an alternative to (deliberative) consensus. This regulation cannot be just procedural, for that would imply “anything goes” in terms of the substance of positions. Recall thatMouffe rejects differences that imply subordination. Agonistic ideals demand judgments about what is worthy of respect and what is not. Connolly (1991, 211) worriesabout dogmatic assertions and denials of identity that fuel existential resentments that would have to be changed to make agonism possible. Young seeks “transformation of private, self-regarding desires into public appeals to justice” (2000, 51). Thus for Mouffe, Connolly, and Young alike, regulative principles for democratic communication are not just attitudinal or procedural; they also refer to the substance of the kinds of claims that are worthy of respect. These authors would not want to legislate substance and are suspicious of the content of any alleged consensus. But in retreating from “anything goes” relativism, they need principles to regulate the substance of what rightfully belongs in democratic debate.

Constraints on deliberation are necessary to re-found the political---an untamed agon eviscerates political action and judgment skills

Dana Villa 96—prof of political science, Amherst, Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the Aestheticization of Political Action, Political Theory, Vol. 20, No. 2 (May, 1992), pp. 274-308

The representative thinking made possible by disinterested judgment is Arendt‘s Kantian version of Nietzsche's perspectival objectivity, the objectivity born of using “more" and “differ-em" eyes to judge/interpret a thing.” There is, however, an obvious and crucial difference between perspectives represented through the free play of imagination and the “perspective seeing" that Nietzsche describes. For Nietzsche, the ability to view the world aesthetically presupposes liberation from any residual sense that the link between signifier and signified is in any way nonarbitrary. Having “more” and “different” eyes simply means the ability to relativize all accepted meanings, to dissolve their apparent solidity in the free play of signifiers.135 In Kant and Arendt, on the other hand, the free play of the imagination, the capacity for representative thought, has the effect of focusing the judging agent's attention on the publicly available aspects of the representation.'‘‘‘’ The representative nature of judgment enables the transcendence of "individual limitations" and “subjective private conditions,” thereby freeing us for the purely public aspect of the phenomenon.

The difference between genealogical "objectivity" and representative judgment, between the kind of aesthetic distance endorsed by Nietzsche and [hat endorsed by Kant and Arcndt, is summed up by the contrast between Nietzsche’s trope of “seeing things from another planet" and the Kantian] Arendtian appeal to “common sense,” the sensus communis.m Nietzschean aestheticism, in the form of perspectivism, has the effect of either placing one beyond any community of interpretation (the genealogical standpoint) or denying that a viable “background consensus" exists, thereby robbing the public realm of its fundamental epistemological precondition. There can be no arena of common discourse, no genuinely public space, whcn the “death of God” leads to the advent of Weber's “waning gods."Us Lyotard expresses a similar thought when he links the discovery of an irreducible plurality of incommensurable language games to the decline of the legitimizing metanarratives of modernity . in such a situation, judgment and interpretation are inevitably aestheticized: we are left, in Nietzsche's phrase, with the "yay and nay of the palate.""°

For Kant, the significance and implications of aesthetic distance are quite opposite. As noted previously, he is struck by the public character of the beautiful, despite the nonobjective quality of aesthetic t’ntpel'ience.“I The impartiality of detached aesthetic judgment, while not pretending to truth, guarantees that the object or ground of aesthetic satisfaction will be communicable. This in turn reveals a quality of taste as judgment, which is obscured by Nietzsche, and our own subjectivist notion of taste. Taste judgments of the disinterested sort are characterized by a peculiar claim: the pure judgment of taste "requires the agreement of everyone, and he who describes anything as beautiful claims that everyone ought to give approval to the object in question and describe it as beautiful?” The communicability of taste judgments leads Kant to posit the existence of a common sense, a common “feeling for the world." Indeed, Kant describes taste itself as “a kind of sensus communism“

The aesthetic distance achieved by representative thought thus points to the “grounding” of judging insight in common sense, a point that Arendt emphasizes. "Common sense,” she writes, “discloses to us the nature of the world insofar as it is a common world; we owe to it the fact that our strictly private and "subjective" five senses and their sensory data can adjust themselves to a nonsubjective and “objective” world which we have in common and share with others.“'“ The significance of Kanl’s theory oftaslejudgmcm for politics is that it shows how a nonfoundationalist theory of judgment can in fact serve to strengthen rather than undermine our sense of a shared world of appearances. Kant's analysis of taste judgment reveals how, in Arendt's words, “judging is one, if not the most, important activity in which this sharing-the-world-with-others comes to pass?"5 It does so by highlighting the public-directed claim implicit in all pure judgments of taste, by showing how the expression of approval or disapproval, satisfaction or dissatisfaction appeals to the common sense of one‘s judging peers. In matters of taste, one “expects agreement from everybody else.”"" Oriented toward agreement, relying on common sense, taste judgment emerges, contra Nietmhe, as the activity through which the public world presences itself as appearance, as the activity through which a community “decides how this world, independently of its utility and all our vital interests in it, is to look and sound, what we will see and what men will hear in

Kant‘s theory of judgment thus opens a space between the false objectivism of Plato (political judgment as a kind of episteme, as determinative judgment) and the subjectivism that accompanies Nietzsche’s endorsement of perspectival valuation. Taste judgments are valid, but their “specific validity“ is to be understood precisely in opposition to the "objective universal validity" that marks cognitive or practical judgments in the Kantian sense. As Arendt says, “its claims to validity can never extend further than the others in whose place the judging person has put himself for his considerations?“ Taste judgments are crucially dependent on perspective, the "it appears to me," on “the simple fact that each person occupies a place of his own from which he looks upon and judges the world.”"° Nevertheless, they constantly return us to a world of appearances “common to all its inhabitants. “Kant’s notion of taste judgment provides the perfect model for political judgment, in Arendt’s opinion, because it preserves appearance and perspective without abolishing the world.

We can sum up the achievement of Kant’s theory of judgment by saying that it removes the spectre of the subjectivism of perspectivism of taste, yet without recourse to objective or cognitive grounds of validation. Lacking an objective principle, taste judgments are necessarily difficult, and where their validity is questioned, it can be redeemed only by persuasive means. As Arendt says in “The Crisis in Culture”: taste judgments (unlike demonstrable facts or truths demonstrated by argument) “share with political opinions that they are persuasive; the judging person — as Kant says quite beautifully -can only ‘woo the consent of everyone else’ in the hope of coming to an agreement with him eventually.”"°

Taste judgments are, in a word, redeemed deliberatively. Kant's conception of aesthetic judgment—departing from the exchange of viewpoints necessary for representative thinking and culminating in the persuasive exchange that accompanies the rendering of each judgment—is thus, for Arendt, political through and through.‘51 It requires an ongoing process of exchange and deliberation, one "without criteria," as Lyotard would say)“

This is yet another reason why Kantian taste judgment is the appropriate model for Arendt’s account of political judgment, the “receptive side” of virtuoso action. It reasserts the intersubjective nature of both appearances and judgment while severing the links between the common or public and the universal. Our capacity for judgment rests on our feeling for the world, and this requires neither a transcendental ground for appearances nor universally valid criteria of argumentative rationality. Practical questions emphatically do not admit of truth.‘” Yet political judgment seen as a kind of taste judgment nevertheless helps to tame the agon by reintroducing the connection between plurality and deliberation, by showing how the activity of judgment can, potentially, reveal to an audience what they have in common in the process of articulating their differences. And what they have in common, contra Aristotle and contemporary oommunitarians, are not purposes per se but the world. Debate, not consensus, constitutes the essence of political life, according to Arcndtf" The conception of taste judgment proposed by Kant reopens the space of deliberation threatened by an overly agonistic aestheticization of action but in such a way that consensus and agreement are not the Isles of action and judgment but, at best. a kind of regulative ideal.

The turn to Kant thus enables Arendt to avoid the antipolitical tendencies encountered in the actor-centered version of agonistic action. The meaning creative capacity of nonsovereign action becomes importantly dependent on the audience, conceived as a group of deliberating agents exercising their capacity for judgment. The judgment of appearances or the meaning of action is seen by Arcndt as predicated on a twofold “death of the author”: the actor does not create meaning as the artist does a work1 nor can the audience redeem the meaning of action through judgment unless the individuals who constitute it are able to forget themselves. This is not to say that Arendt’s conception of political action and judgment extinguishes the self; rather, it is to say that self-coherence is achieved through a process of self-disclosure that is importantly decentered for both actor and judge, for the judging spectator is also engaged in the "sharing of words and deeds” in his capacity as a deliberating agent. As Arendt reminds us, “By his manner of judging, the person discloses to an extent also himself, what kind of person he is, and this disclosure, which is involuntary, gains in validity to the degree that it has liberated itself from merely individual idiosyncrasiesm’

The agon is tamed, then, not by retreating from the aestheticization of action but by following its anti-Platonic impulse through to the end. The "completion" of the theory of action by a Kant-inspired theory of judgment retains the focus on action as something heroic or extraordinary, as beyond

good and evil. It does so, however, by shifting the emphasis from world- and self-creation to the world-illuminating power of “great" words and deeds, to [he beauty of such action. As a public phenomenon, the beautiful can only be confirmed in its being by an audience animated by a care for the world. The difference between Arendt’s aesthcticization of politics and Nietzsche's aestheticizatjon of life is nowhere clearer than in the connection that Arendt draws between greatness and beauty in "The Crisis in Culture":

Generally speaking, culture indicates that the public realm, which is rendered politically secure by men ofaction, offers its space of display to those things whose essence it is to appear and to be beautiful. In other words. culture indicates that an and politics. their conflicts and tensions notwithstanding. are interrelated and even mutually dependent. Seen against the blckground of political experiences and of activities which, if left to themselves, come and go without leaving any trace in the world, beauty is the manifestation ofimpcrishability. The fleeting greatness of word and deed can endure to the extent that beauty is bestowed upon it Mthout the beauty, that is, the radiant glory in which potential immortality is made manifest in the human world, all human life would be futile and no greatness could endure.

Arendtian aestheticism, an aestheticism predicated on a love of the world and which admires great action because it possesses a beauty that illuminates the world, is critically different from Nietzschean aestheticism, the aestheticism of the artist. A persistent theme in Arendt's writing, one parallel to her emphasis on the tension between philosophy and politics, concerns the conflict between art and politics.157 This conflict does not emerge out of the phenomenology of art versus that of political action; as we have seen, Arendt thinks both are importantly similar. Rather, the conflict centers on the mentality of the artist versus that of the political actor. The artist is, according to Arendt, a species of homo faber, who characteristically views the world in terms of means and ends. He is unable to conceive praxis independently of poiesis: the work always retains priority over the activity itself. The result is that performance is denigrated, action misconceived.

Nietzsche, of course, has even less use for homo faber than Arendt, who takes pains to voice her criticism not against making as such but against the universalization ol'a particular attitude. Nevertheless, if we take an Arendtian perspective, it is clear that N ictzsche, the artist-philosopher, must be counted among those who “fall into the common error of regarding the state or govemmenl as a work of art,” as an expression of a form-giving will to power)” The Republic stands as the initiator of the state as “collective masterpiece," as artwork, trope. The fact that Plato launched this metaphor in terms of what Lacoue-Labarthe calls a “mimetology,” while Nietzsche

repudiates again and again all metaphors of correspondence or adequation, does not alter their fundamental agreement: both regard action not as essentially performance but as making.I59 Poiesis has a radically different connounion for Nietzsche, to be sure, but the activity of self-fashioning and self-overcoming does not overturn the Platonic paradigm so much as bring it to closure. Nietzsche may explode the notion of telos in its classical sense, but the model of the work retains its significance. Thus despite the importance of his anti-Platonism to the project of dcconstructing the tradition’s model of action, his contribution to the thinking of plurality and difference in apolitical way is subject to a crucial limitation. Thought essentially in terms of an “aesthetics of existence," in terms of a project of self-fashioning freed from any telos, the positively valorized notion of difference proposed by Nietzsche remains poetic. Like the activity of the artist, it “must be isolated from the public, must be sheltered and concealed from it“ if it is to achieve adequate expression.“J The poetic, ultimately anti theatrical framework assumed by Nietzsche prohibits the Arendtian thought that under certain very specific conditions, it is precisely the public realm which is constituted by plurality and which enables the fullest, most articulated expression of difference.

CONCLUSION

Arendt resists the Habermasian temptation to seek quasi-transcendental standards of agreement in a “polytheistic" disillusioned age However, it is important to realize that her appeal to a Kantian notion of taste and the sensus communis is not tantamount to an endorsement of the Aristotelian view of political community and judgment (her comments linking tastejudgments to phroncsis notwithstanding).'°‘ Arendt’s Kantian, aeslheticizing turn has, unsurprisingly, confused commentators, who note the highly attenuated character of community and the depoliticizcd notion of judgment in Kant.‘M Arendt chooses Kantian formalism over Aristotelian concretencss because, while she wants to focus on the shared world of appearance that is the public realm, she has no desire whatever to frame “what we have in common” in terms of purposes or ends. In this regard, the problem with the Aristotelian notion of koinoru'a, as defined in book 3 of the Politics, is that it creates not a stage fot action but a vehicle for teleological fulfillment."u Arendt’s appeal to the sensus oommunis self-consciously avoids the overly substantive, local character of koinonia or Sittlichlteit. At the same time, it denies the false universalism of moralitat. Arendt‘s theory of judgment points not to the determinancy of phronesis, with its emphasis on context and local practices, but to "the free reflexive discovery of rules in light of indeterminate, transcendent ideas of community”

The critique of Aristotelian/oommunitarian thinking is also applicable to the kind of postmodern relativism that we find in a thinker like Lyotard. Like Arendt, Lyotard's conception of judgment is a curious mixture of Nietzschean, Aristotelian, and Kantian elements)” However, the postmodern "incredulity towards metanarratives” serves not only to deny the possibility of any overarching metadiscourse that might render diverse language games commensurable but to deny the possibility of a public space of discourse, at least insofar as this space claims, implicitly, to synthesize perspectives and distance interests. For Lyotard, discourse is essentially fragmented: “All we can do is gaze in wonderment at the diversity of discursive species, just as we do at the diversity of plant or animal speities."166 It is also incducibly interested: “to speak is to fight, in the general sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistic:s."'67 Given these assumptions, it is not surprising that Lyotard feels that Kant has left our ability to judge "hanging,” as it were, and turns to the will to power as an explanation of this faculty.“8 What we find in Lyotard is the false Nietzschean dichotomy between a universal, metaphysically grounded metadiscourse and a fragmented, postmetaphysical discursive realm in which “public” discourse/judgment reflects either local habit or the agonistic ability to create new moves, impose new interpretations, generate new criteria— all in the name of the will to power.“ Arendt's appeal to taste judgment and a shared feeling for the world may be immensely problematic, but it does serve to underline the falseness of this dichotomy.

One may grant that Arendl's aesthcticism avoids the trope of the fiction du polin'que, universalism, and postmodern pluralism. yet still feel that her “solution" is of dubious relevance to our situation. True, there is a distance and alienation built into the Kantian idea of a community of taste that may make the Arendtian response to Enlightenment universalism more palatable to a postmodern sensibility than the oven Aristotelianism of a Maclntyre or a Gadamer. Nevertheless, the “withering away of common sense" in the modern and postmodern ages would appear to relegate Arendt's modification of Nietzschean aestheticism t0 the status of a rearguard action. The fragmentation of contemporary life renders the idea of a “common fooling for the world" more paradoxical, and possibly less viable, than a recovery of ethos or the legislation of a proceduralist rationality.

"Hie simple answer to this objection is mat Arendt completely agrees. Her work stands not only as a comprehensive rethinking of the nature and meaning of political action but as an extended mediation on how the energies

of modernity have worked to dissipate our feeling for the world, to alienate us from the worlti The last part of The Human Condition equates modernity with world alienation: the reduction of Being to process, the subjeclification of the real, and finally, the triumph of a laboring mentality all work to alienate man not from himself but from the world."’° “Worldliness,” presupposed by the sensus communis, is not a distinguishing characteristic of the animal laboranst Similarly, Arendt would entirely agree with the postmodernist who questions the possibility of circumscribing a particular realm of phenomena in a world where boundaries are increasingly blurred. in her analysis of "the rise of the social” in the modern age, Arcndt identifies this blurring as the central movement of modernity."l Her work departs from the strongest possible conviction that our reality is one in which stable boundaries and distinctions have been dissolved and rendered virtually impossible.

The postmodernist will object that Arendtian aestheticism. unlike Nietzsche's, mourns the loss of the world as an articulated, bounded whole. Nietzschean aestheticism is an affirmation of the Dionysian capacity to destroy fixed identities, to dissolve Apollonian slampings into flux. Postmodern theory affirms this aestheticism, exaggerating the immanent tendencies of postmodern reality in the pursuit of an active (i.e., creative) nihilism: it has no time for guilty nostalgia. Arendtian aestheticism, in contrast, stakes its hopes entirely on the rethematization of certain ontological dimensions of human experience (action, the public world, and self), which this blurring obscures, denatures, and makes increasingly difficult to articulate. The fetishistic quality of her distinction making, her Kantian finickincss in delimiting the political: these attest to a deeply rooted desire to preserve the possibility of meaning created by political action and redeemed by political judgment.

The impact outweighs—deliberative debate models impart skills vital to respond to existential threats

Christian O. Lundberg 10 Professor of Communications @ University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Tradition of Debate in North Carolina” in Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century By Allan D. Louden, p. 311

The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are not limited to speech—as indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking, analysis of public claims, informed decision making, and better public judgment. If the picture of modem political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific and technological change outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interest- and money-driven politics, it is a puzzling solution, at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate. If democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of modern political life proliferate, the citizenry's capacities can change, which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of democracy such as Ocwey in The Public awl Its Problems place such a high premium on education (Dewey 1988,63, 154). Debate provides an indispensible form of education in the modem articulation of democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be informed about policy decisions that impact them, to sort through and evaluate the evidence for and relative merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly information-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies toward policies that matter the most to them.

The merits of debate as a tool for building democratic capacity-building take on a special significance in the context of information literacy. John Larkin (2005, HO) argues that one of the primary failings of modern colleges and universities is that they have not changed curriculum to match with the challenges of a new information environment. This is a problem for the course of academic study in our current context, but perhaps more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a citizenry that will need to make evaluative choices against an increasingly complex and multimediated information environment (ibid-). Larkin's study tested the benefits of debate participation on information-literacy skills and concluded that in-class debate participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their ability to navigate academic search databases and to effectively search and use other Web resources:

To analyze the self-report ratings of the instructional and control group students, we first conducted a multivariate analysis of variance on all of the ratings, looking jointly at the effect of instmction/no instruction and debate topic . . . that it did not matter which topic students had been assigned . . . students in the Instnictional [debate) group were significantly more confident in their ability to access information and less likely to feel that they needed help to do so----These findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among students who participated in (debate).... These results constitute strong support for the effectiveness of the project on students' self-efficacy for online searching in the academic databases. There was an unintended effect, however: After doing ... the project, instructional group students also felt more confident than the other students in their ability to get good information from Yahoo and Google. It may be that the library research experience increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic databases. (Larkin 2005, 144)

Larkin's study substantiates Thomas Worthcn and Gaylcn Pack's (1992, 3) claim that debate in the college classroom plays a critical role in fostering the kind of problem-solving skills demanded by the increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity. Though their essay was written in 1992 on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the Internet as a medium, Worthcn and Pack's framing of the issue was prescient: the primary question facing today's student has changed from how to best research a topic to the crucial question of learning how to best evaluate which arguments to cite and rely upon from an easily accessible and veritable cornucopia of materials.

There are, without a doubt, a number of important criticisms of employing debate as a model for democratic deliberation. But cumulatively, the evidence presented here warrants strong support for expanding debate practice in the classroom as a technology for enhancing democratic deliberative capacities. The unique combination of critical thinking skills, research and information processing skills, oral communication skills, and capacities for listening and thoughtful, open engagement with hotly contested issues argues for debate as a crucial component of a rich and vital democratic life. In-class debate practice both aids students in achieving the best goals of college and university education, and serves as an unmatched practice for creating thoughtful, engaged, open-minded and self-critical students who are open to the possibilities of meaningful political engagement and new articulations of democratic life.

Expanding this practice is crucial, if only because the more we produce citizens that can actively and effectively engage the political process, the more likely we are to produce revisions of democratic life that are necessary if democracy is not only to survive, but to thrive. Democracy faces a myriad of challenges, including: domestic and international issues of class, gender, and racial justice; wholesale environmental destruction and the potential for rapid climate change; emerging threats to international stability in the form of terrorism, intervention and new possibilities for great power conflict; and increasing challenges of rapid globalization including an increasingly volatile global economic structure. More than any specific policy or proposal, an informed and active citizenry that deliberates with greater skill and sensitivity provides one of the best hopes for responsive and effective democratic governance, and by extension, one of the last best hopes for dealing with the existential challenges to democracy [in an] increasingly complex world.

Guidelines for dialogue are intersubjectively possible and desirable---they are necessary to cultivate democratic habits and political judgment---the affirmative’s rejection of normative constraints goes too far

Heimonet 9—Professor of French, American Catholic U (JEAN-MICHEL, THE SACRED: MYSTICISM AND PRAGMATISM, THE MAJOR TRENDS IN CONTEMPORARY THEORY, http://www.crvp.org/book/Series07/VII-6/chapter-6.htm)

Beginning with Foucault these were concerned with carrying out an archeology of knowledge with a view to deciphering the potential for restrictions native to, andreproduced by, Western culture since the classical age. Following the same movement, through the concept of différence, Derrida (and at the same time Lacan) pointed out the internal division of the subject between two contrary existential tendencies: the one, centrifugal and directed towards loss and death; the other, centripetal and directed towards conservation and power. Then, in introducing his Leçon at the Collège de France, Barthes proclaimed the explosive slogan: "All language is fascist." By this he meant that syntactical and grammatical conventions constitute a constricting structure from which the writer could escape only by "cheating the language" in order to go beyond orthodox usage. What is essential in the text is no longer the content or manifest sense, but the structure of musical and psychological associations which, like a slip of the tongue, manifest the deepest orientations of the writer — generally referred to as a Freudian or pleasure slip. This literary kamasutra or "science of the pleasures of language" — which Barthes already had developed in Le plaisir du texte — complements on the level of rhetoric the work of Deleuze and Guatari on the psychoanalytic level. Strongly influenced by the Nietzschean idea of "culture," the authors of L’Anti-Oedipe call "writing" that "terrible alphabet" or "cruel system of signs" engraved in the flesh of man who, by that very fact, loses his privileges as the ego scriptor and become a "Desiring machine."1 In this context Jean Baudrillard’s prediction of the subjection of man to the position of a thing gains in force. In Les strategies fatales Baudrillard writes: the subject was beautiful only in itspride andarbitrariness, its limitless willful power, its transcendence as subject of power and of history, or in the drama of its alienation. Without this one is pitiably deficient, the pawn of his own desires or image, incapable of forming a clear representation of the universe and sacrificing himself in an attempt to revive the dead body of history.2 In sum, the insight which would give birth to the revolt of May 1968 destroyed in one stroke the related ideas of conscience, will and autonomy which had constituted the contribution of the Enlightenment; that is, the ability of a subject, besieged by the irrational forces of myth and religion, to give focus to a world in terms of his understanding and will. It is this heritage of the Enlightenment which today is being reaffirmed. The urgency of this return to enlightened reason under the auspices of the Kantian philosophy of the subject provides the principal themes for the last books of Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut. In La pensée 68: essai sur l’anti-humanisme contemporain3 and Heidegger et les modernes,4 the intention is to warn against the dangerously metaphysical process by which the thinkers of the last decade have practiced — often without being aware of it — a systematic anti-humanism. Ironically, under the pretext of eliminating once and for all the metaphysics of reason centered upon the subject, Foucault andDerrida have found themselves caught in the spiral of metaphysical hyperbole. For the a priori identity they suppose between knowledge and power leads them to place the human ideal beyond all kinds of meaning and in so doing to make it inaccessible, in relation to which the individual can only renounce his or her autonomy. In other words, in the end the excess of thought fascinated by the absolute becomes a form of regression. Dispossessed of his attributes as a subject (that is, of knowledge and will) on both the speculative and the practical levels, and thus incapable of acting upon "the world," the modern man is subjected to the transcendentalism of another lay, non theological religion, which leads him to search his salvation no longer in the truth or efficacity of a satisfying answer, but in the effort and tension of an endless questioning. It is as reaction to (in the chemical sense) and against (in the political sense) this metaphysical hyperbole that one should interpret the desire of Ferry and Renaut to search for the conditions of a "non-metaphysical humanism" capable of "conferring coherent philosophical status upon the promise of freedom contained in the requirements (of the term humanism)."5 In a parallel manner Jürgen Habermas wishes to restore to philosophy its true place and function as the "guardian of rationality." Rejecting the erroneous association between reason and power, the author of Morale et communication6 attempts to show that the normative rules of linguistic communication, inasmuch as they provide a universal basis for intersubjective exchanges, constitute the best defense against an abuse of power. Although Barthes deduces a fascist character for language from its normative function, Habermas tries to show that this same function is, on the contrary, presupposed intuitively by every subject who takes part in a process of communication. This permits him to state the ethical principle of dialogue: "only those norms can claim validity which are accepted . . . by all the persons participating in a practical discussion."7 Nonmetaphysical humanism and the ethics of communicative action agree that human activities and relationships must be perceived no longer in terms of an ideal of inaccessible purity, but from the pragmatic point of view where conditions of efficacity and utility are understood on the basis of results in daily life.

Debate inevitably involves exclusions---making sure that those exclusions occur along reciprocal lines is necessary to foster democratic habits and critical thinking---this process outweighs the content of the aff

Anderson 6—prof of English at Johns Hopkins (Amanda, The Way We Argue Now, 25-8)

25¶ Whether such a procedural approach actually helps to yield any substantive normative guidance is an issue of debate. Habermas has sought to justify communicative ethics through appeal to the principles of respect and reciprocity that he claims are inherent in linguistic practices geared toward reaching understanding. Attempting to redress the overwhelmingly negative forms of critique characteristic of both the Frankfurt School and poststructuralist traditions, he argues that the logocentrism of Western thought and the powerful instrumentality of reason are not absolute but rather constitute “a systematic foreshortening and distortion of a potential always already operative in the communicative practice of everyday life.” The potential he refers to is the potential for mutual understanding “inscribed into communication in ordinary language.” 7 Habermas acknowledges the dominance and reach of instrumental reason—his project is largely devoted to a systematic analysis of the historical conditions and social effects of that dominance—yet at the same time he wishes to retrieve an emancipatory model of communicative¶ ¶ 26¶ reason derived from a linguistic understanding of intersubjective relations. As Benhabib argues, this form of communicative action, embodied in the highly controversial and pervasively misunderstood concept of the “ideal speech situation,” entails strong ethical assumptions, namely the principles of universal moral respect and egalitarian reciprocity (SS, 29).¶ Habermas has famously argued that he does not believe any metaphysical grounding of such norms is possible; he insists instead that we view the normative constraints of the ideal speech community as “universal pragmatic presuppositions” of competent moral actors who have reached the postconventional stage of moral reasoning. Habermas’s theory combines a “weak transcendental argument” concerning the four types of validity claims operative in speech acts with an empirical reconstruction of psychosocial development derived from Lawrence Kohlberg. Benhabib, though she, too, appeals to socialization processes, distinguishes her position from Habermas’s “weak transcendental argument” by promoting a “historically self-conscious universalism” that locates the ethical principles of respect and reciprocity as “constituents of the moral point of view from within the normative hermeneutic horizon of modernity” (SS, 30). Benhabib’s work thus constitutes, like Habermas’s, a strong defense of specific potentialities of modernity. She differs from him in two key respects, besides the emphasis already outlined. First, she believes that Habermas’s emphasis on consensus seriously distorts his account of communicative ethics. Like others who have argued against the conflation of understanding and consensus, Benhabib champions instead a discourse model of ethics that is geared toward keeping the conversation going:¶ When we shift the burden of the moral test in communicative ethics from consensus to the idea of an ongoing moral conversation, we begin to ask not what all would or could agree to as a result of practical discourses to be morally permissible or impermissible, but what would be allowed and perhaps even necessary from the standpoint of continuing and sustaining the practice of the moral conversation among us. The emphasis now is less on rational agreement, but more on sustaining those normative practices and moral relationships within which reasoned agreement as a way of life can flourish and continue. (SS, 38)8¶ ¶ 27¶ The second significant difference between Habermas and Benhabib is that Benhabib rejects Habermas’s rigid opposition between justice and the good life, an opposition that effectively relegates identity-based politics to a lower plane of moral practice, and that for Benhabib undercuts our ability to apprehend the radical particularity of the other. While she believes in the importance of self-reflexive interrogations of conventional identities and roles, she strongly opposes any ethics or politics that privileges the unencumbered or detached self over the concrete, embodied, situated self. She argues in particular against those liberal models that imagine that conversations of moral justification should take place between individuals who have bracketed their strongest cultural or social identifications and attachments. Instead she promotes what she calls an “interactive universalism”:¶ Interactive universalism acknowledges the plurality of modes of being human, and differences among humans, without endorsing all these pluralities and differences as morally and politically valid. While agreeing that normative disputes can be settled rationally, and that fairness, reciprocity and some procedure of universalizability are constituents, that is, necessary conditions of the moral standpoint, interactive universalism regards difference as a starting point for reflection and action. In this sense, “universality” is a regulative ideal that does not deny our embodied and embedded identity, but aims at developing moral attitudes and encouraging political transformations that can yield a point of view acceptable to all. Universality is not the ideal consensus of fictitiously defined selves, but the concrete process in politics and morals of the struggle of concrete, embodied selves, striving for autonomy. (SS, 153) ¶ This passage encapsulates the core of Benhabib’s position, which attempts to mediate between universalism and particularism as traditionally understood. On the one hand, universalism’s informing principles of rational argumentation, fairness, and reciprocity adjudicate between different positions in the ethicopolitical realm, enabling crucial distinctions between those notions of the good life that promote interactive universalism and those that threaten its key principles. It insists, in other words, that there is a specifiable moral standpoint from which—to take a few prominent examples—Serbian aggression, neo-Nazism, and gay bashing can be definitively condemned. On the other hand, universalism “regards difference as a starting point.” It understands identity as “embodied and embedded” and promotes encounters with otherness so as to nurture the development of a moral attitude that will “yield a point of view acceptable to all.”¶ Of course it must simultaneously be recognized that the “all” here cannot coherently include those who have, according to universalism’s own principles, forfeited their place as equal participants in the ethicopolitical¶ ¶ 28¶ community. Ironically, then, Benhabib’s redefinition of universalism insists on inevitable exclusion, but not in the sense that many poststructuralist and postmodernist cultural critics do, as the hardwired effect of universalism’s false claims to inclusiveness, and as victimizing those disempowered by race, class, gender, or sexuality. Against naive conceptions of inclusiveness and plurality, which ultimately prove self-undermining in their toleration of communities, individuals, and practices that exclude others arbitrarily, interactive universalism claims that certain exclusions are not only justified, but indeed required by the principles of recognition and respect that underpin democratic institutions and practices.

1NC

Their strategy of opening up to radical uncertainty goes too far in decentering provisional communal identities necessary for politics in a world of speed---minimal guidelines don’t stifle becoming or entrench predictability---they are necessary to help pluralism flourish

David McIvor 10, research associate at the Kettering Foundation, The Politics of Speed: Connolly, Wolin, and the Prospects for Democratic Citizenship in an Accelerated Polity, Polity (2011) 43, 58–83

So, what is the point? Connolly does not describe or define it in this essay. However, judging by the rest of Connolly's work, we might say that the point is akin to the “moment” in Nietzsche's description of the rift in time,57 or Arendt's “present” in her re-telling of Kafka's parable in Between Past and Future.58 The “point” is the conjunctive of a fraught struggle between the forces of fundamentalization and pluralization; it is the joint or center of a “tense balance” between “the claims of regularity, predictability, and commonality” and “those of experimentalism, artistry, and becoming.”59 Speed becomes dangerous, then, when it tilts us against ethico-political interventions on behalf of individual and collective plurality. When the world moves so fast that we cannot resist nostalgia or overcome ressentiment, we are past this “point,” and will henceforth require more intense micro-political efforts to recalibrate our attentiveness to becoming and flux.

Yet there is another and perhaps a more damning way in which Connolly might be missing the point. As quoted above, Connolly finds that those who “recoil from speed” are nostalgic for a slower temporality and find themselves supporting frozen hierarchies in the pursuit of a predictable, slow world. Yet it is also possible to level similar charges against Connolly himself: those who recoil from slow time may align themselves with a tendency in late-modern capitalism that tears asunder the possibilities of democratic negotiations born from attachment to place, vocation, and familiar others.60 This goes well beyond the decline of social capital and the chilling specter of the lone bowler. It is by now well known that rapid vocational mobility leads to lower rates of political and civic participation.61 Yet these declines are themselves part of a growing skepticism towards public institutions as such, a trend that feeds demand for exclusive and positional goods and further entrenches class-based inequalities.62 Moreover, Sheldon Wolin's worry about the normalization of incessant change is that increasing restraints on personal freedom and public life will be accepted by a society habituated to adaptation (“becoming”?). Connolly's recoil from the normalizing pressures of democratic collective identity may perversely support what Wolin calls the “triumph of contemporaneity and of its accomplice, forgetting or collective amnesia.”63 The sobering implication is not only that democratic practices and habits will desiccate, but that their loss will not be recognized or mourned.

Connolly's recoil from collective identity also keeps him from fully appreciating the implications of his calls for “self-experimentation” on “virtual registers” via “fugitive experiences of unconscious performance.”64 Connolly provides two examples of this virtual register: a “violinist who escapes … the slowness of consciousness by getting lost in the imperatives of performance” and a “point guard clearing his mind of clutter as he dribbles down the middle of the court so the ball can be delivered to a shooter at the right instant with exactly the right bounce in a movement too fast and precise to be entrusted to the slow time of consciousness.”64 However, while these rapid maneuvers may take place in “fast time,” they are absolutely dependent on extensive training and practice (i.e. slow time). Maybe Dylan had it right: “the slow one now will later be fast.” Connolly acknowledges this fact but does not seem to recognize how it compromises (or at the very least complicates) his larger argument about speed and democracy.65 Again, recent work on flexible capitalism has shown that “success” in late-modernity (i.e. economic advancement) is negatively correlated with attachment to one's company, locality, or craft.66 Yet this same work has shown that success within these parameters leaves individuals less capable of accepting ambiguity and generously relating to others—the very foundations of Connolly's normative model for agonistic citizenship.67 This in turn feeds the demand for positional and exclusive goods as consumers prefer flexible accommodations and products to the arduous labors of collective negotiation and public action.

Perhaps, then, we are already past the point when social acceleration yielded beneficent consequences for democratic politics. It seems that theorists who care about the prospects of democracy in late-modernity must insist that certain habits are important enough to be cultivated and practiced in slow time. For just as it takes training to become a violinist or point guard, so, too, is training required to become a citizen of a complex, multilayered, and temporally desynchronized polity. Connolly downplays the possibility that slow time practices and habits may in fact serve pluralization; in the process he has overestimated the salutary impact of speed and obscured the difficulties of negotiating these accelerated tempos without a foot (or more) in slow time. While Connolly accuses Wolin and other “self-proclaimed democrats” of “freezing actors into stone,” his work threatens to leave us endlessly spinning and dancing like a toy top: moving fast but going nowhere.

Wolin: Democratic Citizenship as a Fugitive Experience

A society … caught in the frenzy of rapid change has difficulty knowing how to think about the consequences of loss, especially of things widely shared … rapid change not only blunts the collective conscience but dims the collective memory.

—Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated

Connolly argues that we should embrace speed for the work it does on our cultural/political selves. Sheldon Wolin, on the other hand, has argued that to adopt the accelerated rhythms of culture and economy would be to accept an anti-political ethos inherent to those systems, and turn democratic praxis into largely irrelevant shadow boxing.68 The dispute over speed and democracy, however, conceals another (more fundamental) disagreement between Connolly and Wolin. Unlike Connolly and Shapiro, who posit an ontological and political tendency towards settled identity, which then aggressively protects itself against the threat of its own denied difference, Wolin argues that commonality is “fugitive and impermanent.”69 For Connolly, political identities are always occupied territories, which are justly subject to disruption. For Wolin, it is difference that is stable, and democracy is concerned not with the disturbance but the discovery of “artificial” commonality. Political identities are fleeting phenomena, and similarity is not (only) a violent imposition on becoming but a pre-condition for democratic power and justice.70 Put slightly differently, if Connolly's philosophy seems unconsciously indebted to Freud's pleasure principle, then Wolin's unstated political ontology more closely resembles the death drive.

Democratic power, then, is fugitive, but it is still possible for ephemeral moments of collective action to protest the limits of the institutional order and reveal possibilities for new modes of political practice and being. This action takes place despite intransigent heterogeneity—different constituencies valuing different outcomes at different times through different means. Fugitive democracy (“the carrier of commonality”) is the temporary suspension of this heterogeneity in the interests of collective power.71 These exceptional points in time—Wolin identifies the early months of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley as paradigmatic—disrupt a managed system of elite rule on behalf of widely-shared grievances.72 Whereas Connolly values democratic theory and praxis insofar as they disrupt and pluralize homogenous and hegemonic conceptions of time, culture, and place, Wolin values a “discordant” democracy that “affirms the value of limits.”73 Wolin certainly locates discourses of political identity in desperate need of disturbance—specifically those that emphasize an a-political model of “managed democracy” and a de-mobilized citizenry content with the pursuit of commodious living in a glaringly inegalitarian polity.74 His anxiety about postmodern discourses of disturbance is that they align with a certain tendency within “inverted totalitarianism” that thrives on a perpetually mobile—yet never mobilized—populace. Wolin therefore dismisses the “flashy but empty” discordance of “latter-day Nietzscheans” because it affirms pure becoming rather than a space of appearances in which common problems can find redress through the concerted efforts of ordinary men and women.75

Democratic citizenship, on the other hand, is a “discordant” but limit-affirming experience that compels individuals to identify and address problems they share in common with others. As Wolin puts it, “being a citizen involves doing the best one can to take part in common tasks, the deliberations that define them, and the responsibilities that follow. As a way of existence it lives in the ebb-and-flow of everyday activities, responsibilities, and relationships.”76 Wolin refers to the experience of membership in a democratic assemblage as “incorporation,” which suggests that one becomes “an integral part of some stable grouping and accept(s) it as the principle identity of individuals and the primary object of their loyalty.”77 However, it is crucial to note that Wolin's model of incorporation does not imply the elimination of differences within the body politic. Some differences may be bracketed in the interests of collective power, but Wolin does not imagine that these differences will thereby fail to matter or exist. For him, citizenship practices are the means by which we come into contact with different viewpoints, preferences, and lifestyles. The model here is less that of Rousseau's general will than a will to generality, an aspiration of “commonality amid difference.”77

Case

Virilio’s basic assumption is flawed. Speed of tech doesn’t ruin the political—Opposite is true (based on particular not universal)

Grove ‘8

Jairus Victor Grove is a Ph.D. candidate at Johns Hopkins University in International Relations and Political Theory. His research focuses on the new materialities of politics and warfare. He studies the effects of new forms of warfare on soldiers and civilian populations in urban settings.

Chapter 1: A Schmittian Century?: From Nuclear Leviathan to Nuclear-Sovereign-Assemblage – March 17, 2008 – http://becomingwar.blogspot.com/2008/03/chapter-1-schmittian-century-from.html

Initially nuclear weapons seemed to solidify even complete the decisionistic model of sovereignty once and for all. In Virilio’s reading of Schmitt’s the state of emergency became permanent and democracy ended once it became possible for a single individual to decide to got to war and to finish that war in 30 minutes. At first glance Virilio’s apocalyptic diagnosis seems accurate. Nuclear weapons at their current numbers could destroy the entire planet and given the structure of the United States nuclear command any Congressional or popular attempt to stop the war would be in vain. This is the backbone of Virilio’s argument. Politics and a democratic balance of power require time. Time to react, time to respond, time to debate, time to strategize, time to implement and ICBMS nullify time. But Virilio is wrong. The threat of the extreme case has obscured the actual or present case that presents new opportunities for intervention. Politics, whether micro or macro, does not begin and end with the sovereign decision; the sovereign decision (both expressively and in its enactment) emerges from a relay of forces, connections, and other previous decisions, resonances, forces, and actants that are presupposed in each subsequent iteration of the sovereign decision, and layered in multiple streams of time. Even an increasingly automated nuclear arsenal requires the participation of literally millions of people and countless networks, objects, tectonic stability, stable solar flare activity and on and on. The decision only appears singular when Virilio truncates time to the moment the president ‘pushes the button.’ We are not as of yet in that moment so other temporal rhythms abound and each part of the nuclear assemblage follows a different temporal course. Certainly the sovereign decision is a powerful, expressive, performative act of individuation for the sovereign and highly affective in mobilizing populations, but it is not self-constituted or self-causal. The process of individuation and mobilization necessitates a field of relations and resonances from which the sovereign decision emerges. The decision is also not decisive. Instead it territorializes the relations from which it emerges through its resonant modulation. The enunciation of a sovereign decision (a distinct inquiry from the ‘making of a decision. Certainly no less emeshed but nonetheless ought to remain analytically different) is something like a refrain, the sovereign—in so far as it is constituted by the enunciation of decisions—is a condensation point for national ethos, affect, and institutional identity making. Each decision is constitutive not of the ‘sovereign’ as is the case in Schmitt’s analysis but of a sovereign point of identification or reified, dogmatic consistency which can be recognized but need not remain static or immobile. Again however such a node is only possible because of its attachments whether physical or resonant (both material) to the complex system of tradition, culture, wires, telephones, satellites, nuclear silos, television cameras, previous sovereign decisions, personal affective characteristics, character, etc. This list is not exhaustive by any measure however it gestures in the direction of what I am trying to get at. The sovereign is not an individual, at best it is an iterative series of moments of performative or expressive individuation resulting from a complex interface with machines, networks, affective fields. The assemblage has a life of its own that cannot and should not be reduced to a single point simply because that is most consistent with our common sensibilities. In some sense the sovereign is a prosthesis or interface to be worn by whoever is elected to office. (President as first-person-shooter?) This does in part explain why there is so little transition time between each sovereign and so little variation in war powers. It is reference point or index for a history of actions and events made more complex by the function it is meant or believed to serve. It is the titular focal point of an assemblage that if recognized as such would undermine its own function. An assemblage that function because it can inspire belief in it is unity not its dispersed and multivalent organization. The irony is that the development of miles of fiberoptic networks, new technological interfaces and mobility was supposed to save the centralized and hierarchical sovereign form from its obvious strategic liability—that of being an easy target. However in increasing its ‘survivability’ it has also opened innumerable points of access to the supposed center. Each access point whether it be technological, affective, or economic that can recenter, or reterritorialize the sovereign assemblage. I do not want to make this sound ‘easy’ or ‘painless’ however as this ‘dispersed’ or redundant network system has become ‘everyday’ increasingly the President has been unaware of exactly who is in control or even at how many levels the Nuclear-sovereign-assemblage can be engaged or reterritorialized.

Speed is good—it’s key to democratic deliberation.

Connolly 2k — William E. Connolly, Professor and Chair of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, 2000 (“Speed, Concentric Cultures, and Cosmopolitanism,” Political Theory, Volume 28, Number 5, October, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via JSTOR, p. 596-597)

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Paul Virilio to comprehension of the effects of speed on the late-modern condition. When speed accelerates, space is compressed. And everything else changes too: the ability to deliberate before going to war, the priority of civilian control over the military, the integrity of the territorial politics of place, the capacity to think with concepts in relation to images, the ability to escape the eye of surveillance, and so on and on. Not only does Virilio chart the multiple effects of speed, he develops an arresting vocabulary to fix these effects in our minds: the war machine, the unspecified enemy, the nonplace of speed, the negation of space, the perpetual state of emergency, the miniaturization of action, the disappearance of the present, and the integral accident. These pithy formulations encapsulate in their brevity the compression of time they represent, giving us a double dose of the phenomenon Virilio warns against.

And the danger is great. Little doubt about that. If you treat the war machine as the paradigm of speed, as Virilio does, it seems that sometime during the 1960s, the ability to deliberate democratically about military action was jeopardized by the imperative to automatize split-second responses to preemptive strikes a minute or less away from their targets. My concern, nonetheless, is that Virilio allows the military paradigm to overwhelm all other modalities and experiences of speed. Virilio remains transfixed by a model of politics insufficiently attuned to the positive role of speed in intrastate democracy and cross-state cosmopolitanism. He underplays the [end page 596] positive role speed can play in desanctifying closed and dogmatic identities in the domains of religion, sensuality, ethnicity, gender, and nationality, and he remains so committed to the memory of the nation as the place where democratic deliberation occurred that he dismisses the productive possibilities (I do not say probabilities) of cosmopolitanism in the late-modern time.

No impact to speed.

Thrift 5 — Nigel Thrift, Head of the Division of Life and Environmental Sciences and Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, 2005 (“Panicsville: Paul Virilio and the Esthetic of Disaster,” Cultural Politics, Volume 1, Issue 3, November, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via SocINDEX, p. 357)

Than take speed. I have shown in numerous papers, as have many commentators now, that any serious historical analysis of the impact of increasing speed on society demonstrates that its impact is much more variegated than Virilio credits, and does not add up to any particular tendency (such as that sad old chestnut, the "time-space compression" story). I, like many other commentators, have demonstrated this over and over again, pretty well to distraction - and largely to no avail it has to be said. The idea that increasing speed somehow has causality is an urban myth so deeply engrained in Western individuals' idea of themselves and how they are that it is probably not dislodgeable—but that doesn't mean that philosophers have to power it up.

Virilio is historically wrong—space-time compression is a myth.

May and Thrift 1 — Jon May, Lecturer in Geography at Queen Mary, University of London, and Nigel Thrift, Professor of Geography at the University of Bristol, 2001 (“Introduction,” TimeSpace: Geographies of Temporality, Published by Taylor & Francis, ISBN 0203360672, p. 10)

First, we would suggest that in reducing changes in the experience of time and space to simple feelings of acceleration and dissolution the standard accounts of time-space compression are not a little under-developed. To some considerable extent, this under-development is a consequence of too heavy an emphasis being placed upon developments in transport and communication technologies and not enough upon developments elsewhere both in the field of technology (or what we prefer to call the domain of instruments and devices) as well as across a number of the other domains through which the experience of TimeSpace is rendered. When these more numerous developments are considered, and the connections between each traced, the picture is less of any simple acceleration in the pace of life or experience of spatial ‘collapse’ than of a far more complex restructuring in the nature and experience of time and space reaching through the nineteenth and in to the early decades of the twentieth centuries. With these changes space is seen to both expand and to contract, time horizons to both foreshorten but also to extend, time itself to both speed up but also slow down and even to move in different directions.

Speed solves totalitarianism better

Connolly 2k — William E. Connolly, Professor and Chair of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, 2000 (“Speed, Concentric Cultures, and Cosmopolitanism,” Political Theory, Volume 28, Number 5, October, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via JSTOR, p. 598)

Speed can be dangerous. At a certain point of acceleration, it jeopardizes freedom and shortens the time in which to engage ecological issues. But the crawl of slow time contains injuries, dangers, and repressive tendencies too. It may be wise therefore to explore speed as an ambiguous medium that contains some positive possibilities. The positive possibilities are lost to those who experience its effects only through nostalgia for a pristine time governed by the compass of the centered nation, the security of stable truth, the idea of nature as a purposive organism or a set of timeless laws, and the stolidity of thick universals.

Today, ironically, the most virulent attempts to slow things down take the form of national and religious fundamentalisms that deploy media sound bites and military campaigns of ethnic cleansing to reinstate a slow, centered world. Indeed, the ambiguity of speed finds its most salient manifestation in the paradoxical contest taking place before our eyes between the pluralization and the fundamentalization of public cultures. The politics to pluralize culture along several dimensions and the politics to fundamentalize hegemonic identities form two contending responses to late-modem speed. Each propensity intensifies under the same temporal conditions. As this contest proceeds, it also becomes clear why democratic pluralists must embrace the positive potentialities of speed while working to attenuate its most dangerous effects.

The aff forecloses the benefits of speed

Connolly 2k — William E. Connolly, Professor and Chair of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, 2000 (“Speed, Concentric Cultures, and Cosmopolitanism,” Political Theory, Volume 28, Number 5, October, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via JSTOR, p. 597-598)

But what if the compression of distance through speed has effects Virilio records while some of those effects also improve the prospects for democratic pluralization within the state and a cosmopolitanism across states that speaks affirmatively to issues of ecology, peace, indigenous minorities, the legitimation of new identities and rights, and the protection of old rights? Then acceleration would carry positive possibilities as well as dangers. And a single-minded attack on its dangers would forfeit access to its positive possibilities. Thus, to summarize for now a few contentions: First, the contemporary accentuation of tempo in interterritorial communications, entertainment, tourism, trade, and population migration exposes numerous settled constituencies to the historical basis of what they are and the comparative contestability of faiths and identities they have taken to be universal or incontestable. Second, the acceleration of accident and surprise, listed by Virilio as [end page 597] effects of speed, can also function over time to disrupt closed models of nature, truth, and morality into which people so readily become encapsulated, doing so in ways that support new paradigms of natural science and careful reconsideration of the injuries to difference supported by dogmatic conceptions. Third, Virilio's identification of the territorial nation as repository of democratic unity and of slowness as the temporal condition of national deliberation depreciates the value of a more expansive practice of pluralism that speaks generously to the multidimensional diversity of life already operative on most territories today.

2NC

2NC McIvor / AT K of Predictability

Extend the 1nc McIvor evidence --- it is phenomonoally specific to the affirmatives strategy ---

Speed is an inevitable aspect of democracy, but we should CREATE SITES OF DELIBERATION that occur at SLOW TIME – ie predictability and limits – in order to cultivate democratic practices to help us better cope with that speed --- affirming the value of limits is necessary to prevent flux from turning into a top that moves fast but ultimately goes nowhere --- this straight turns the warrant in their evidence that “citizens are always docile” because their framework creates a populace that is perpetually mobile, but never MOBILIZED --- a pure strategy of flux and becoming is a symptom of modern capitalism --- pluralism can only be ACTUALIZED when there are things like clash because otherwise we’re talking past each other

Debates about state-policy don’t flatten or exclude difference---they help foster political advocacy and critical habits necessary for navigating inevitable differences in democracy---the affirmative’s emphasis on flux makes negotiating plurality impossible

David McIvor 10, research associate at the Kettering Foundation, The Politics of Speed: Connolly, Wolin, and the Prospects for Democratic Citizenship in an Accelerated Polity, Polity (2011) 43, 58–83

In some ways Wolin's description of revolution seems to converge with Connolly's emphasis on speed as a means of creating a pluralistic ethos and ultimately political change. Yet Connolly, as I have argued above, has elided the intense requirements of slow time practice that support the possibility of successful, “rapid” change. Furthermore, Wolin finds that the tempos of frenetic agitation have “not vanished … [but] simply switched location.” The rise of corporate-driven capitalism has appropriated the revolutionary tempo through the “troika effect,” which unites capital, technology and science:

By enlisting technological innovation and scientific discovery and joining them with its own impulses, capital has produced an unprecedented form of power. The combination has quickened the rate of change throughout the world … . Globalized capital … may be said to monopolize agitation … thus corporate capital is the agitator, the exemplar of permanent revolution, of normalized agitation.85

Speedy agitation has been co-opted by corporate capital, which in turn “encourages change, elevates fashion to a norm, and … instructs an agitated populace that virtually every job and habitat are temporary.”86 This emphasis on flux and change disrupts the attachments that normally develop over time, including those related to vocation or community (and, by extension, those which lead to agitation). For Wolin, a hopeful politics today depends on whether or not “agitation … can find its bearings.”86 In order for this to occur the “appropriate tempo” of democratization must be identified. Since Wolin identifies this tempo as the slower one found at the local level of state, county, and municipality, we must wonder if he has not fallen into the nostalgic shackles that Connolly has already fit for him. Far from it. While recognizing the difficulty of frenetic agitation in a hurrying, racing world, Wolin thinks that such agitation can emerge from and alter the slower tempos of small-scale deliberation and debate occurring in local politics. Agitation can “educate … and energize” particularism, leading it to “challenge the center” in changed times. Democratic agitation “takes time” in that it must be nursed by patient deliberation, but it also “takes time” when, energized by such micro-political activities, it alters the status quo in powerful, lasting ways.

Again, Wolin does not look to slow time practices and local sites of action in order to flatten or exclude difference. According to Wolin, a leisurely pace and deliberation are “conditioned by the presence of differences and the attempt to negotiate them.”87 Democratic theory that emphasizes speed and dislocation, on the other hand, mimics the temporal rhythms of contemporary culture and economy at the expense of the tempos of deliberation and reflection that are important in themselves and insofar as they make possible the politics of a quicker pace. Some habits and practices are fundamental to the honoring and negotiating of plurality.

In order to develop these habits, Wolin wants to direct attention away from the state and towards localities with their particularities, peculiarities, and irregularities. On Wolin's reading, national politics is little more than a spectacle, and the citizen's role within that spectacle is often only as “a rooter limited to choosing sides.”88 Localities, on the other hand, remain venues that promise robust participation. As individuals slowly develop the habits related to participation—interpreting and coming to know one's environment and its other inhabitants, its multiple histories and overlapping concerns—their very being changes. “Politicalness” marks our capacity “to develop … into beings who know and value what it means to participate in and be responsible for the care and improvement of our common and collective life.”89 By nurturing this politicalness we begin to feel a tug of loyalty towards a common reality that had not heretofore existed. Wolin, in describing the early stages of the Free Speech Movement, referred to this experience as the “revival of a sense of shared destiny, of some common fate which can bind us into a people we have never been.”90 Of course, these assemblages are subject to the same “thousand natural shocks” to which all flesh is heir. Publics rise and fall; democratic moments remain momentary. Yet those who are honed by these experiences and who are dedicated to their recovery become what Wolin calls a “multiple civic self … one who is required to act the citizen in diverse settings: national, state, city or town, neighborhood, and voluntary association.”91 This is “perhaps the most complex conception of citizenship ever devised” yet “we have no coherent conception of it.”91 The multiple civic self is not modeled along republican or representative lines, which reduce participation to occasional ratification or refusal, and which filter popular power through elite-managed institutions. Nor, however, is it based on the radical democratic conception of citizenship as direct sharing in power. The complexities of what Wolin calls “the megastate” and the sheer size of the United States exceed what an Athens-styled radical democracy could manage. The multiple civic self is one capable of participating not simply in his/her locality but “intellectually and passionately in the controversies surrounding the megastate” in order to “reclaim” public space and insist upon “widened debate.”92 Wolin is not (only) a localist. Rather, he thinks that the skills and habits best acquired by consistent participation in our particular localities lay the groundwork for a form of citizenship attuned to the plural layers of political action and struggle in late-modern America. Moreover, the multiple civic self promotes the dispersal of power between local, state, and national bodies.93 Such diffusion re-establishes a separation of powers that forces slow-time negotiations upon the impatient megastate.94 The slowly developed habits of participation make possible a more robust form of democratic citizenship and, perhaps, fugitive democratic moments. These moments, in turn, can help to slow the world down.

Political theorists and social actors inspired by Wolin's example and worried about the inegalitarian consequences of social acceleration should look to start from his (so far underdeveloped) idea of the multiple civic self. Instead of refurbishing federal institutions or romanticizing the consequences of speed, we ought to attend primarily to what Wolin calls the “recurrent aspiration” of democracy: “to find room in which people can join freely with others to take responsibility for solving their common problems and thereby sharing the modest fate that is the lot of all mortals.”95 By pursuing solutions to mutual problems through concerted action, we as citizens can hone the craft of democratic participation—broadening our notions of self and learning to honor the differences we encounter within a shared space.96

The differences drawn above between Wolin and Connolly—and the choice that they seem to offer, Connolly or Wolin—may seem exaggerated, given the broad convergence between their normative interests and political concerns.97 Perhaps, then, a critical synthesis can be located between Wolin's efforts at nurturing democratic identity and Connolly's recent emphasis on generating a positive political resonance machine capable of promoting the use of inclusive goods while remaining attentive to difference and dissonance. For Connolly, the success of such movements will depend on cultivating the democratic virtues of what he calls “agonistic respect” and “critical responsiveness.” In fact, it is the latter two qualities, first articulated together in Neuropolitics, that form Connolly's recent conception of “bicameral citizenship,” which might be seen as a response or friendly rejoinder to Wolin's idea of the multiple civic self.98 Bicameralism comes from a “decent respect for the persistent diversity of the human condition” and results in a tolerance of ambiguity in our relationships and contestability in our creeds.99 The stubborn opacity of the world and the agonistic nature of political life can both become, on Connolly's reading, the basis for a generous acceptance of disagreement and difference. But the acceptance of such opacity would not necessarily come at the expense of a search for spaces of convergence or commonality—what Wolin calls the “sense of shared destiny.”

The dispositions of agonistic respect and critical responsiveness can clearly resonate with and reinforce the care and concern for the common that Wolin puts at the center of fugitive democracy. Yet these efforts, I would argue, need to be situated within a praxis whereby (seemingly anachronistic) habits of participation and engagement are nurtured in spite of the pressures of an accelerated society. For outside of these practices, what will inspire a commitment to the virtues relevant to democratic flourishing? What will make Connolly's virtues more compelling than resentment about the “illegible” social relations in “liquid” modernity? Connolly's under-theorization of the bonds of democratic identification and commitment seems a symptom of his sanguinity about the connection between speed and pluralism (“the acceleration of speed, though it contains counterpressures, amplifies trends towards diversity among multiple dimensions of being”).100 We ought to remain slightly skeptical, therefore, when Connolly writes, “acceleration prepares us for bicameralism” or asserts “it takes massive energy to turn us against pluralism.”101 We ought to ask whether this sanguine attitude is really justified by our understanding of the world around us. After all, since the fifteenth century, nearly 4,000 human languages have died out, and there have been similar crashes in biodiversity and methods of agricultural production since the rise of the steam engine. It seems that diversity of political, cultural, and ecological life is far from a given; one might say rather that it requires “massive energy” in order to persist.

AT Predictability Bad---Armstrong

Breaking down predictability is self-defeating and impossible---creativity inevitably depends upon constraints, the attempt to wish away the structure of predictability collapses the very structure their aff depends on---it’s better to retain predictability and be creative within it

Armstrong 2K – Paul B. Armstrong, Professor of English and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Winter 2000, “The Politics of Play: The Social Implications of Iser's Aesthetic Theory,” New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 1, p. 211-223

Such a play-space also opposes the notion that the only alternative to the coerciveness of consensus must be to advocate the sublime powers of rule-breaking. 8 Iser shares Lyotard's concern that to privilege harmony and agreement in a world of heterogeneous language games is to limit their play and to inhibit semantic innovation and the creation of new games. Lyotard's endorsement of the "sublime"--the pursuit of the "unpresentable" by rebelling against restrictions, defying norms, and smashing the limits of existing paradigms--is undermined by contradictions, however, which Iser's explication of play recognizes and addresses. The paradox of the unpresentable, as Lyotard acknowledges, is that it can only be manifested through a game of representation. The sublime is, consequently, in Iser's sense, an instance of doubling. If violating norms creates new games, this crossing of boundaries depends on and carries in its wake the conventions and structures it oversteps. The sublime may be uncompromising, asocial, and unwilling to be bound by limits, but its pursuit of what is not contained in any order or system makes it dependent on the forms it opposes. [End Page 220]

The radical presumption of the sublime is not only terroristic in refusing to recognize the claims of other games whose rules it declines to limit itself by. It is also naive and self-destructive in its impossible imagining that it can do without the others it opposes. As a structure of doubling, the sublime pursuit of the unpresentable requires a play-space that includes other, less radical games with which it can interact. Such conditions of exchange would be provided by the nonconsensual reciprocity of Iserian play.

Iser's notion of play offers a way of conceptualizing power which acknowledges the necessity and force of disciplinary constraints without seeing them as unequivocally coercive and determining. The contradictory combination of restriction and openness in how play deploys power is evident in Iser's analysis of "regulatory" and "aleatory" rules. Even the regulatory rules, which set down the conditions participants submit to in order to play a game, "permit a certain range of combinations while also establishing a code of possible play. . . . Since these rules limit the text game without producing it, they are regulatory but not prescriptive. They do no more than set the aleatory in motion, and the aleatory rule differs from the regulatory in that it has no code of its own" (FI 273). Submitting to the discipline of regulatory restrictions is both constraining and enabling because it makes possible certain kinds of interaction that the rules cannot completely predict or prescribe in advance. Hence the existence of aleatory rules that are not codified as part of the game itself but are the variable customs, procedures, and practices for playing it. Expert facility with aleatory rules marks the difference, for example, between someone who just knows the rules of a game and another who really knows how to play it. Aleatory rules are more flexible and open-ended and more susceptible to variation than regulatory rules, but they too are characterized by a contradictory combination of constraint and possibility, limitation and unpredictability, discipline and spontaneity.

Decision-Making Impact

Social acceleration can have positive or negative effects on liberal institutions---this disproves their claim that politics is so hopelessly constrained that affirming the topic is impossible

William E. Scheuerman 2, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Minnesota, Summer 2002, “ARTICLE: CONSTITUTIONALISM IN AN AGE OF SPEED,” Constitutional Commentary, 19 Const. Commentary 353

These concluding observations raise numerous unanswered questions, not the least of which concerns the difficulty of achieving reasoned and well-considered deliberation in an era of high-speed communications technology. n87 But they also point to [*390] the prospect that social and economic acceleration contains positive implications for liberal democracy neglected in the story recounted above. Although social and economic acceleration risks disabling democratic modes of constitutional adaptation and contributing to the decay of constancy and clarity in constitutional law, it may also open up new possibilities for renewing liberal democratic constitutionalism. If liberal democracy is to become a progressive and forward-looking "vital force" as Dewey hoped in 1935, we will need to think hard about how the age of speed not only threatens constitutionalism, but potentially points the way to its revitalization as well.

Decision Making KT Ethics

Rational decision making is an essential framework for including others into your decision calculus---it’s an ethical process that we can learn in debate to SUPPLEMENT ethical theories we come up with outside of the game

Hooker 8—Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University (John, Ethics as Rational Choice, http://web.tepper.cmu.edu/ethics/rationalchoice.pdf)

Ethics can be viewed as rational choice. A decision must have a consistent rationale behind it, or else it is not an ethical decision. Rationality may not be a sufficient criterion for ethical choice, but it is necessary. It is useful as well. It can provide an objective guide for decision making in business situations and everyday life. Although rational choice is popularly identified with rational self-interest, the ethical literature has developed a broader point of view. Neglecting the interests of others is irrational—not because it may eventually damage your own interests—but because it is logically inconsistent. ¶ This essay presents three specific conditions that a decision must satisfy in order to be logically consistent. They might be viewed as three Laws of Ethics, analogous to Newton’s Laws in physics. They help explain our intuitions as to what is right and wrong. More importantly, they are useful for resolving cases in which our intuitions are unclear. ¶ There are several advantages to viewing ethics as rational choice in this broader sense. It provides a conceptual framework that allows you to analyze complex business decisions that involve multiple stakeholders (as nearly all do). It offers a style of argument that can appeal to all parties, since rational choice, by definition, considers all points of view. It provides a vocabulary with which you can articulate an ethical position and defend yourself from pressure to compromise. ¶ Learning to Make Rational Choices ¶ Making rational choices is a skill, and like any skill, it requires practice. Reading this essay is only the beginning. You should work through “Ethical Analysis of Mini-cases” and make sure you follow the arguments. It is impossible to understand the ideas discussed here until you apply them to real ethical dilemmas. Additional exercises will be provided in class and as homework. ¶ Finally, you should practice analyzing cases in other courses, as well as decisions on the job, from an ethical point of view. Psychological research shows that the key to developing expertise in any endeavor is prolonged, continuous, intelligent practice. 1 This goes for ethical decision making in particular. ¶ Even with practice, intellectual analysis alone won’t make your decisions for you. You can’t just turn a crank and get the right answer. As in any field, judgment and experience are indispensable, and good decisions come from the heart as well as the mind. Yet wisdom must be built on a foundation of rigorous analysis and clear thinking.

The idea that debate can effectively posit answers to questions of subjectivity or ethics is a narcissistic assumption that links harder to all their offense about instrumental thought---it’s better to use debate as an intellectual testing ground than to try to answer contextless ethical questions

Anderson 6—prof of English at Johns Hopkins (Amanda, The Way We Argue Now, 22)

“Neither does this volume address,” Butler goes on, “the ‘theory wars,’ for as a group, we toil in the domain of philosophy and its critique, and in that way dwell within a presupposed sense that theoretical reflection matters” (FC, 132). Butler culminates her indictment of this club, which includes her as a member, by insisting that one cannot really consider this volume as constituting a “debate” on the value or viability of “modernity,” “the subject,” “progressive history,” or “the transcendental norm”; the question is simply whether such terms can serve as “grounds” for political struggle (FC, 132). And the answer, for Butler, is simply no. Butler thereby scores one of her sharpest points against critical theory and against Benhabib: politics truly occurs only when such terms are struggled over in more concrete historical and institutional contexts. The kind of debate that tries to resolve such issues “philosophically” is engaged in the insidious practice that imagines one can decide such matters by mere reflection, in advance of actual struggles: “This urge to have philosophy supply the vision that will redeem life, that will make life worth living, this urge is the very sign that the sphere of the political has already been abandoned” (FC, 131).

Overview

Debate is a game where the ballot makes provisional judgments on the quality of debating without casting a final judgment on the positions themselves—the resolution exists not as a final consensus on speed or war powers, but rather a mandate to defend testable propositions against a well-prepared opponent—

Very little of their offense applies because this is neither a policymaking good arg nor a rules or jurisdiction claim—it’s not that you should defend a topical plan so you can change Congress, it’s that you should defend a topical plan in provisional settings for the purpose of clash against a well-prepared opponent—you can vote negative to endorse all the normative content of the 1ac because this is a floor not a ceiling for what they should advocate—3 net benefits

1. Educational testing—the resolution exists to ensure a balance of ground that’s fair at least in the sense that there are good arguments on both sides and a debate to be had—the fact that they have a better starting point is the LINK because it means the topic can be changed post hoc to avoid the possibility of being flawed—this means their method relies on the negative as the technocratic villain as a condition for its existence and that the affirmative cannot be improved or instrumentalized because it’s not thoroughly tested—this is a no solvency argument because it’s impossible to achieve liberation if you do so through a functional monologue, that’s Steinberg, Galloway, Dryzek, and Villa

The external impact to this is skill development—Lundberg says a deliberative model that doesn’t presume to know what the best form of activism is but rather makes people defend flawed positions for the sake of identifying strength and weaknesses develops skills like opportunity cost assessment and the ability to appeal to others with whom you disagree, whether it be a landlord or a zoning commission or the professors asking why my paper is late next Tuesday—

2. The 2ac COMPLETELY overlooked the Holmes card—guidelines for dialogue are not metaphysical statements of truth or a desire for certainty, but rather are necessary for dialogue to have any benefit that couldn’t be achieved through monologue---intersubjectivity can create community consensus on what the resolution means and how to debate it---any of their offense links to itself because they ultimately rely on the same procedures of rationality, literalism, etc that they say our framework results in

Anderson – debate inev involves exclusions – ie they exclude neg – question is recip lines

Flips hierarchy bc aff always predict neg strat

3. Fairness is an impact in and of itself---debate is only a game and both sides are here to win---games need some boundaries or else they are stupid and we can't win. A game in which only one side can win is reason enough to vote neg---any other claim means that the aff is arguing in bad faith---they can’t win that debate shapes our political subjectivity because BoSu literally went for neolib all of last year and Suo INTERNED AT GOLDMAN!

AT: Should Indicates Futurity

This is just bizarre---the definition of should on their webpage says nothing about futurity---we’ll enter the whole thing into the debate---whichever meaning of “should” they think connotes futurity will clearly be grammatically distinct from its use in the resolution, which indicates the relative correctness or lack thereof of a decision---that means the topic evaluates the desirability of government action

OED 11 (http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/should?region=us)

verb (3rd sing. should)

1used to indicate obligation, duty, or correctness, typically when criticizing someone’s actions:

he should have been careful

I think we should trust our people more

you shouldn’t have gone

indicating a desirable or expected state:

by now students should be able to read with a large degree of independence

used to give or ask advice or suggestions:

you should go back to bed

what should I wear?

(I should) used to give advice:

I should hold out if I were you

2used to indicate what is probable:

$348 million should be enough to buy him out

the bus should arrive in a few minutes

3 formal expressing the conditional mood.

(in the first person) indicating the consequence of an imagined event:

if I were to obey my first impulse, I should spend my days writing letters

referring to a possible event or situation:

if you should change your mind, I’ll be at the hotel

should anyone arrive late, admission is likely to be refused

4used in a clause with “that” after a main clause describing feelings:

it is astonishing that we should find violence here

5used in a clause with “that” expressing purpose:

in order that training should be effective it must be planned systematically

6(in the first person) expressing a polite request or acceptance:

we should be grateful for your advice

7(in the first person) expressing a conjecture or hope:

he’ll have a sore head, I should imagine

“It won’t happen again.” “I should hope not.”

8used to emphasize to a listener how striking an event is or was:

you should have seen Marge’s face

(who/what should —— but) emphasizing how surprising an event was:

I was in this store when who should I see across the street but Toby

Should means desirable

AC 99 (Atlas Collaboration, “Use of Shall, Should, May Can,” http://rd13doc.cern.ch/Atlas/DaqSoft/sde/inspect/shall.html)

'should' is weaker. It describes something that might not be satisfied in the final product, but that is desirable enough that any noncompliance shall be explicitly justified. Any use of 'should' should be examined carefully, as it probably means that something is not being stated clearly. If a 'should' can be replaced by a 'shall', or can be discarded entirely, so much the better. Examples: # "C++ code should be ANSI compliant." A good example. It may not be possible to be ANSI compliant on all platforms, but we should try. # "Code should be tested thoroughly." Bad example. This 'should' shall be replaced with 'shall' if this requirement is to be stated anywhere (to say nothing of defining what 'thoroughly' means).

AT: Resolve = Reduce by Mental Analysis

This definition is of “resolve” not of the past-tense “resolved”---it’s an entirely separate meaning.

They chopped off the end of the definition---the full context is “resolve---to reduce by mental analysis, often followed by into”---as in, take the number 64 and resolve it into its square root---clearly an entirely different meaning than the topic.

This also doesn’t disprove our interp---you should reduce by mental analysis the desirability of Federal Government action.

Resolved is legislative

AOS 4, Army Officer School, 5-12, “# 12, Punctuation – The Colon and Semicolon”, http://usawocc.army.mil/IMI/wg12.htm)

The colon introduces the following: a. A list, but only after "as follows," "the following," or a noun for which the list is an appositive: Each scout will carry the following: (colon) meals for three days, a survival knife, and his sleeping bag. The company had four new officers: (colon) Bill Smith, Frank Tucker, Peter Fillmore, and Oliver Lewis. b. A long quotation (one or more paragraphs): In The Killer Angels Michael Shaara wrote: (colon) You may find it a different story from the one you learned in school. There have been many versions of that battle [Gettysburg] and that war [the Civil War]. (The quote continues for two more paragraphs.) c. A formal quotation or question: The President declared: (colon) "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." The question is: (colon) what can we do about it? d. A second independent clause which explains the first: Potter's motive is clear: (colon) he wants the assignment. e. After the introduction of a business letter: Dear Sirs: (colon) Dear Madam: (colon) f. The details following an announcement For sale: (colon) large lakeside cabin with dock g. A formal resolution, after the word "resolved:" Resolved: (colon) That this council petition the mayor.

“Resolved” implies a policy or legislative decision

Jeff Parcher, former debate coach at Georgetown, Feb 2001 http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200102/0790.html

Pardon me if I turn to a source besides Bill. American Heritage Dictionary: Resolve: 1. To make a firm decision about. 2. To decide or express by formal vote. 3. To separate something into constiutent parts See Syns at *analyze* (emphasis in orginal) 4. Find a solution to. See Syns at *Solve* (emphasis in original) 5. To dispel: resolve a doubt. - n 1. Firmness of purpose; resolution. 2. A determination or decision. (2) The very nature of the word "resolution" makes it a question. American Heritage: A course of action determined or decided on. A formal statement of a decision, as by a legislature. (3) The resolution is obviously a question. Any other conclusion is utterly inconceivable. Why? Context. The debate community empowers a topic committee to write a topic for ALTERNATE side debating. The committee is not a random group of people coming together to "reserve" themselves about some issue. There is context - they are empowered by a community to do something. In their deliberations, the topic community attempts to craft a resolution which can be ANSWERED in either direction. They focus on issues like ground and fairness because they know the resolution will serve as the basis for debate which will be resolved by determining the policy desirablility of that resolution. That's not only what they do, but it's what we REQUIRE them to do. We don't just send the topic committee somewhere to adopt their own group resolution. It's not the end point of a resolution adopted by a body - it's the preliminary wording of a resolution sent to others to be answered or decided upon. (4) Further context: the word resolved is used to emphasis the fact that it's policy debate. Resolved comes from the adoption of resolutions by legislative bodies. A resolution is either adopted or it is not. It's a question before a legislative body. Should this statement be adopted or not. (5) The very terms 'affirmative' and 'negative' support my view. One affirms a resolution. Affirmative and negative are the equivalents of 'yes' or 'no' - which, of course, are answers to a question.

AT: USFG is the People

This definition is from some grade school kid’s homework. COME. ON. It’s just a description of Jeffersonian democracy, in which the government’s made up of citizens. Obviously. That doesn’t mean literally every citizen constitutes the USFG.

The Federal Government is the national governing structure---not its component parts---even citizens

Central government

AHD 92 (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, p. 647)

federal—3. Of or relating to the central government of a federation as distinct from the governments of its member units.

Clash KT Advocacy/Turns Case

Clash and in-depth deliberation create more effective decision making and advocacy skills---ensures that the aff’s advocacy is improved and more effectively carried out

Galloway 7—Samford Comm prof (Ryan, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28, 2007)

In addition to the basic equity norm, dismissing the idea that debaters defend the affirmative side of the topic encourages advocates to falsely value affirmative speech acts in the absence of a negative response. There may be several detrimental consequences that go unrealized in a debate where the affirmative case and plan are not topical. Without ground, debaters may fall prey to a siren’s call, a belief that certain critical ideals and concepts are axiological, existing beyond doubt without scrutiny. Bakhtin contends that in dialogical exchanges “the greater the number and weight” of counter-words, the deeper and more substantial our understanding will be (Bakhtin, 1990). The matching of the word to the counter-word should be embraced by proponents of critical activism in the activity, because these dialogical exchanges allow for improvements and modifications in critical arguments. Muir argues that “debate puts students into greater contact with the real world by forcing them to read a great deal of information” (1993, p. 285). He continues, “[t]he constant consumption of material…is significantly constitutive. The information grounds the issues under discussion, and the process shapes the relationship of the citizen to the public arena” (p. 285). Through the process of compreh

ensive understanding, debate serves both as a laboratory and a constitutive arena. Ideas find and lose adherents. Ideas that were once considered beneficial are modified, changed, researched again, and sometimes discarded altogether. A central argument for open deliberation is that it encourages a superior consensus to situations where one side is silenced. Christopher Peters contends, “The theory holds that antithesis ultimately produces a better consensus, that the clash of differing, even opposing interests and ideas in the process of decision making…creates decisions that are better for having been subjected to this trial by fire” (1997, p. 336). The combination of a competitive format and the necessity to take points of view that one does not already agree with combines to create a unique educational experience for all participants. Those that eschew the value of such experience by an axiological position short-circuit the benefits of the educational exchange for themselves, their opponents, as well as the judges and observers of such debates.

2NC T Version

Requiring the affirmative to anchor their analysis of social acceleration around specific institutional policy reforms is key to solve the case---liberal institutions are inevitably making decisions that affect our ability to cope with speed---only analysis of how policymakers should respond makes debate’s political subjectivity relevant and effective

William E. Scheuerman 4, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Minnesota, 2004, Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time, p. 225-227

Social acceleration places many familiar legal and political concerns in a fresh light. A proper understanding of traditional liberal democratic institutional aspirations, including the separation of powers, deliberative representative legislatures, constitutionalism, and the rule of law, requires us to pay careful attention to their temporal presuppositions. Many widely discussed institutional trends—the rise of the executive, dramatic shifts in the separation of powers, threats to traditional visions of constitutionalism and rule of law, a general speed-up of legislation, the ongoing globalization of law—can be fruitfully reinterpreted, at least in part, as institutional adaptations to social acceleration. Social acceleration also forces us to think creatively about liberal democracy's prospects in the new century. Might we successfully reconfigure liberal democracy for a temporal context distinct from that in which its eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century defenders first hinted at the possibility of its realization? Can we revive traditional liberal democratic ideals of "government by discussion " the closely related notion of a freewheeling deliberative legislature, the separation of powers, constitutionalism, and the rule of law? A substantial dose of institutional imagination is called for if we are to update liberal democracy to make it mesh with the dictates of speed. Although my own contribution here to a revitalization of liberal democracy has undoubtedly been a modest one, I hope at the very least to encourage others to confront the difficult unanswered questions posed by changes in the temporality of contemporary society for political life. Thus far, it has generally been anthropologists, geographers, and sociologists who have dealt with questions of social temporality. It is now time for political and legal scholars—as well as citizens and policy makers—to situate the problem of social speed at the top of their agenda.

Perhaps it is fitting that my discussion of reflexive law tentatively raised the issue of transnational democracy. For no more basic intellectual and political challenge of social speed faces us than the need to consider the possibility of extending liberal democracy beyond national borders. As I hinted at earlier, the prospect of achieving reflexive law within global economic regulation may ultimately depend on institutionalizing effective transnational forms of liberal democratic state authority. Reflexive law as a possible paradigm for tackling the legal challenges of social acceleration can only take an initial step toward grappling with the broader and more demanding enterprise of achieving transnational liberal democracy. One striking implication of the compression of space generated by high-speed social activity is a long-term trend by which key social and economic activities arc "stretched" and intensified across preexisting political boundaries. For those of us committed to liberal democracy, the "shrinking" of the world via speed probably calls for the advancement of liberal democracy on the transnational arena as well as within the boundaries of existing nation-states. At the same time, social acceleration threatens to undermine even modest attempts to establish transnational liberal democratic institutions (e.g., the rule of law). Speed cries out for transnational governance while simultaneously undermining normatively acceptable forms of it.

Fortunately, a formidable body of scholarly literature shows that many scholars are already busy at work on the difficult normative and institutional questions posed by the possibility of transnational forms of liberal democracy.' Unless the concept of social acceleration plays a pivotal role in that debate, however, its participants are likely to misconstrue many core issues at hand. Only by placing the concept of social acceleration at the center of their analyses can they successfully shift thinking about globalization and liberal democracy onto fruitful terrain. For example, it is surely inadequate simply to extend existing liberal democratic institutions to the transnational level because, as I have argued, these institutions are already plagued by serious faults that derive from social acceleration. It is incumbent on those who defend the idea of a "cosmopolitan democracy," for example, to explain exactly how their oftentimes provocative proposals can help counteract the deeply rooted anti-liberal and antidemocratic developmental trends thematized here. How might the invigoration of international supranational political bodies manage the challenge of social acceleration more effectively than the existing nation-state? What evidence exists that they might provide a better basis for regulating an increasingly high-speed capitalism?

If I am not mistaken, much more than the deepening of (existing) liberal democratic institutions on the global level will be necessary if we are to ward off the more worrisome features of social acceleration. It is probably no less mistaken to see the growing impotence of many elected legislatures as a relatively sudden and even unprecedented development resulting from the ongoing transnationalization of capitalist production and financial markets, unparalleled movements of immigrants and refugees, and cross-border environmental problems. The recent losses of democratic sovereignty lamented by many scholars of globalization are simply the latest chapter in a long-term erosion of democratic legitimacy directly linked to the revolutionary implications of social acceleration long evident within nation-state-based capitalist liberal democracy. The defensive tone of even relatively critical recent contributions to the debate on globalization and democracy is probably misplaced. In his recent essays on globalization, for example, Habermas at times seems primarily concerned with the task of preserving the existing constellation of welfare state liberal democracy in the face of transnational pressures to weaken liberal democracy and dismantle social programs.2 Alas, this preoccupation obscures the seriousness of the ills plaguing existing liberal democratic institutions. We undoubtedly should strive to ward off irresponsible attacks on the welfare state, and the sad liberal democratic status quo is preferable to the technocratic political fantasies of some contemporary defenders of laissez-faire. But we also need to devote more attention to a question whose significance Habermas and many other analysts of the impact of globalization on liberal democracy downplay: how can we refigure liberal democratic institutions so that they have a real chance of successfully confronting the awesome problems posed by social acceleration?

AT We’re T Enough/Reasonability i

Close, well not really, but no cigar --- there’s a different between saying “unitary executive bad” and beign topical --- they advocate no USFG action, no statutotry or judicial restrictions, nothing about war powers authority, and not even a specific OCO capability.

Tangential relationship to the topic is the WORST OF ALL WORLDS because it allows the aff the self-serving benefits of picking the parts of the topic that bolster their ground while minimizing neg ground the most---they're only-ever tangentially related in ways that give the neg CONCESSIONARY ground---there’s a moral hazard for the aff to pick moral-truismslike <murder bad> and avoid hard mechanism questions, which means you have to hold the line

It builds ARTIFICIAL POLITICAL TRAINING - its stupid to set up a model where we get to pick and choose what we want to defend while just wishing away relevant objections becasue we don't want to be responsible for defending anything.

The aff's always a step ahead of the neg in this world - it makes us accountable not only for preparing a negative to everything IN the topic, we also have to prepare a neg for everything that could be related to the topic---six degrees of Kevin Bacon proves that's literally infinite.

This is a bad reasonability argument that they can’t win because

1) they haven’t counterdefined any words in the resolution

2) It’s arbitrary because we can never know which affs are tangential enough---proves that being “in the direction of the topic” is just as bad as not being topical at all. Their interpretation means the aff can randomly pick and choose parts of the topic and assert they’re the core---why wouldn’t an aff about the word “restriction” and Delezian becoming be topical under this?

Seriously, you have to think about the affs bosu will inevitably read if you accept a loose interpretation of the topic

A DG war-machine aff about war-powers

A Derrida democracy to come aff about exec authority

A metaphorical reading of the topic

An aff about Trayvon because he was “targeted”

An aff about the prison system because it’s sort of like ‘indefiniite detention’

A positive peace aff critiquing executive definitions of “war powers”

A gender aff about how authority is a masculine construct

That list really does just go on and on and on because the post-modern carnival never sleeps

Means that competing interpretations is the only way to objectively evaluate debates and stop random judge intervention---all magnified by vague K affs

1NR

2NC McIvor / AT K of Predictability

Extend the 1nc McIvor evidence --- it is phenomonoally specific to the affirmatives strategy ---

Speed is an inevitable aspect of democracy, but we should CREATE SITES OF DELIBERATION that occur at SLOW TIME – ie predictability and limits – in order to cultivate democratic practices to help us better cope with that speed --- affirming the value of limits is necessary to prevent flux from turning into a top that moves fast but ultimately goes nowhere --- this straight turns the warrant in their evidence that “citizens are always docile” because their framework creates a populace that is perpetually mobile, but never MOBILIZED --- a pure strategy of flux and becoming is a symptom of modern capitalism --- pluralism can only be ACTUALIZED when there are things like clash because otherwise we’re talking past each other

Debates about state-policy don’t flatten or exclude difference---they help foster political advocacy and critical habits necessary for navigating inevitable differences in democracy---the affirmative’s emphasis on flux makes negotiating plurality impossible

David McIvor 10, research associate at the Kettering Foundation, The Politics of Speed: Connolly, Wolin, and the Prospects for Democratic Citizenship in an Accelerated Polity, Polity (2011) 43, 58–83

In some ways Wolin's description of revolution seems to converge with Connolly's emphasis on speed as a means of creating a pluralistic ethos and ultimately political change. Yet Connolly, as I have argued above, has elided the intense requirements of slow time practice that support the possibility of successful, “rapid” change. Furthermore, Wolin finds that the tempos of frenetic agitation have “not vanished … [but] simply switched location.” The rise of corporate-driven capitalism has appropriated the revolutionary tempo through the “troika effect,” which unites capital, technology and science:

By enlisting technological innovation and scientific discovery and joining them with its own impulses, capital has produced an unprecedented form of power. The combination has quickened the rate of change throughout the world … . Globalized capital … may be said to monopolize agitation … thus corporate capital is the agitator, the exemplar of permanent revolution, of normalized agitation.85

Speedy agitation has been co-opted by corporate capital, which in turn “encourages change, elevates fashion to a norm, and … instructs an agitated populace that virtually every job and habitat are temporary.”86 This emphasis on flux and change disrupts the attachments that normally develop over time, including those related to vocation or community (and, by extension, those which lead to agitation). For Wolin, a hopeful politics today depends on whether or not “agitation … can find its bearings.”86 In order for this to occur the “appropriate tempo” of democratization must be identified. Since Wolin identifies this tempo as the slower one found at the local level of state, county, and municipality, we must wonder if he has not fallen into the nostalgic shackles that Connolly has already fit for him. Far from it. While recognizing the difficulty of frenetic agitation in a hurrying, racing world, Wolin thinks that such agitation can emerge from and alter the slower tempos of small-scale deliberation and debate occurring in local politics. Agitation can “educate … and energize” particularism, leading it to “challenge the center” in changed times. Democratic agitation “takes time” in that it must be nursed by patient deliberation, but it also “takes time” when, energized by such micro-political activities, it alters the status quo in powerful, lasting ways.

Again, Wolin does not look to slow time practices and local sites of action in order to flatten or exclude difference. According to Wolin, a leisurely pace and deliberation are “conditioned by the presence of differences and the attempt to negotiate them.”87 Democratic theory that emphasizes speed and dislocation, on the other hand, mimics the temporal rhythms of contemporary culture and economy at the expense of the tempos of deliberation and reflection that are important in themselves and insofar as they make possible the politics of a quicker pace. Some habits and practices are fundamental to the honoring and negotiating of plurality.

In order to develop these habits, Wolin wants to direct attention away from the state and towards localities with their particularities, peculiarities, and irregularities. On Wolin's reading, national politics is little more than a spectacle, and the citizen's role within that spectacle is often only as “a rooter limited to choosing sides.”88 Localities, on the other hand, remain venues that promise robust participation. As individuals slowly develop the habits related to participation—interpreting and coming to know one's environment and its other inhabitants, its multiple histories and overlapping concerns—their very being changes. “Politicalness” marks our capacity “to develop … into beings who know and value what it means to participate in and be responsible for the care and improvement of our common and collective life.”89 By nurturing this politicalness we begin to feel a tug of loyalty towards a common reality that had not heretofore existed. Wolin, in describing the early stages of the Free Speech Movement, referred to this experience as the “revival of a sense of shared destiny, of some common fate which can bind us into a people we have never been.”90 Of course, these assemblages are subject to the same “thousand natural shocks” to which all flesh is heir. Publics rise and fall; democratic moments remain momentary. Yet those who are honed by these experiences and who are dedicated to their recovery become what Wolin calls a “multiple civic self … one who is required to act the citizen in diverse settings: national, state, city or town, neighborhood, and voluntary association.”91 This is “perhaps the most complex conception of citizenship ever devised” yet “we have no coherent conception of it.”91 The multiple civic self is not modeled along republican or representative lines, which reduce participation to occasional ratification or refusal, and which filter popular power through elite-managed institutions. Nor, however, is it based on the radical democratic conception of citizenship as direct sharing in power. The complexities of what Wolin calls “the megastate” and the sheer size of the United States exceed what an Athens-styled radical democracy could manage. The multiple civic self is one capable of participating not simply in his/her locality but “intellectually and passionately in the controversies surrounding the megastate” in order to “reclaim” public space and insist upon “widened debate.”92 Wolin is not (only) a localist. Rather, he thinks that the skills and habits best acquired by consistent participation in our particular localities lay the groundwork for a form of citizenship attuned to the plural layers of political action and struggle in late-modern America. Moreover, the multiple civic self promotes the dispersal of power between local, state, and national bodies.93 Such diffusion re-establishes a separation of powers that forces slow-time negotiations upon the impatient megastate.94 The slowly developed habits of participation make possible a more robust form of democratic citizenship and, perhaps, fugitive democratic moments. These moments, in turn, can help to slow the world down.

Political theorists and social actors inspired by Wolin's example and worried about the inegalitarian consequences of social acceleration should look to start from his (so far underdeveloped) idea of the multiple civic self. Instead of refurbishing federal institutions or romanticizing the consequences of speed, we ought to attend primarily to what Wolin calls the “recurrent aspiration” of democracy: “to find room in which people can join freely with others to take responsibility for solving their common problems and thereby sharing the modest fate that is the lot of all mortals.”95 By pursuing solutions to mutual problems through concerted action, we as citizens can hone the craft of democratic participation—broadening our notions of self and learning to honor the differences we encounter within a shared space.96

The differences drawn above between Wolin and Connolly—and the choice that they seem to offer, Connolly or Wolin—may seem exaggerated, given the broad convergence between their normative interests and political concerns.97 Perhaps, then, a critical synthesis can be located between Wolin's efforts at nurturing democratic identity and Connolly's recent emphasis on generating a positive political resonance machine capable of promoting the use of inclusive goods while remaining attentive to difference and dissonance. For Connolly, the success of such movements will depend on cultivating the democratic virtues of what he calls “agonistic respect” and “critical responsiveness.” In fact, it is the latter two qualities, first articulated together in Neuropolitics, that form Connolly's recent conception of “bicameral citizenship,” which might be seen as a response or friendly rejoinder to Wolin's idea of the multiple civic self.98 Bicameralism comes from a “decent respect for the persistent diversity of the human condition” and results in a tolerance of ambiguity in our relationships and contestability in our creeds.99 The stubborn opacity of the world and the agonistic nature of political life can both become, on Connolly's reading, the basis for a generous acceptance of disagreement and difference. But the acceptance of such opacity would not necessarily come at the expense of a search for spaces of convergence or commonality—what Wolin calls the “sense of shared destiny.”

The dispositions of agonistic respect and critical responsiveness can clearly resonate with and reinforce the care and concern for the common that Wolin puts at the center of fugitive democracy. Yet these efforts, I would argue, need to be situated within a praxis whereby (seemingly anachronistic) habits of participation and engagement are nurtured in spite of the pressures of an accelerated society. For outside of these practices, what will inspire a commitment to the virtues relevant to democratic flourishing? What will make Connolly's virtues more compelling than resentment about the “illegible” social relations in “liquid” modernity? Connolly's under-theorization of the bonds of democratic identification and commitment seems a symptom of his sanguinity about the connection between speed and pluralism (“the acceleration of speed, though it contains counterpressures, amplifies trends towards diversity among multiple dimensions of being”).100 We ought to remain slightly skeptical, therefore, when Connolly writes, “acceleration prepares us for bicameralism” or asserts “it takes massive energy to turn us against pluralism.”101 We ought to ask whether this sanguine attitude is really justified by our understanding of the world around us. After all, since the fifteenth century, nearly 4,000 human languages have died out, and there have been similar crashes in biodiversity and methods of agricultural production since the rise of the steam engine. It seems that diversity of political, cultural, and ecological life is far from a given; one might say rather that it requires “massive energy” in order to persist.

Case

Obama believes he is constrained by statute – won’t circumvent

Saikrishna Prakash 12, professor of law at the University of Virginia and Michael Ramsey, professor of law at San Diego, “The Goldilocks Executive” Feb, SSRN

We accept that the President’s lawyers search for legal arguments to justify presidential action, that they find the President’s policy preferences legal more often than they do not, and that the President sometimes disregards their conclusions. But the close attention the Executive pays to legal constraints suggests that the President (who, after all, is in a good position to know) believes himself constrained by law. Perhaps Posner and Vermeule believe that the President is mistaken. But we think, to the contrary, it represents the President’s recognition of the various constraints we have listed, and his appreciation that attempting to operate outside the bounds of law would trigger censure from Congress, courts, and the public.

No circumvention – review mechanism distributes power and insulates from pressure

Siegel 12 - Senior Editor for UCLA Law Review, UCLA Law Review, April, 2012, 59 UCLA L. Rev. 1076Reconciling Caperton and Citizens United: When Campaign Spending Should Compel Recusal of Elected Officials, Samuel P. Siegel

BIO: * AUTHOR Samuel P. Siegel is a Senior Editor for UCLA Law Review

The influence of campaign expenditures is further lessened when an adjudicatory decision is made by a group of executive officials, even if each of those officials is directly accountable to the elected official. For example, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States - comprised of top-ranking officials from various executive departments n258 - is a body authorized by Congress to screen and investigate foreign-investment proposals "to determine the effects of the transaction on the national security of the United States," n259 negotiate mitigation agreements with foreign investors to minimize national security concerns, n260 and, should mitigation efforts fail, recommend to the president that she block the [*1119] deal, n261 powers that are "like individual adjudications (or quasi-adjudications)." n262 Yet the very fact that a committee, rather than a single officer, exercises this adjudicatory power insulates its decisions from presidential control: "With a single agency, the President could credibly threaten to remove or otherwise pressure or discipline that agency's Secretary or Administrator. But there is strength in numbers." n263 Thus, even within a unitary executive, such a structure would likely temper the influence that campaign expenditures would have on the outcome of an adjudication.

Impact D

Cyberwar isn’t an existential threat --- best studies prove

Healey 13 Jason, Director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, "No, Cyberwarfare Isn't as Dangerous as Nuclear War", 3/20, www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/world-report/2013/03/20/cyber-attacks-not-yet-an-existential-threat-to-the-us

America does not face an existential cyberthreat today, despite recent warnings. Our cybervulnerabilities are undoubtedly grave and the threats we face are severe but far from comparable to nuclear war. ¶ The most recent alarms come in a Defense Science Board report on how to make military cybersystems more resilient against advanced threats (in short, Russia or China). It warned that the "cyber threat is serious, with potential consequences similar in some ways to the nuclear threat of the Cold War." Such fears were also expressed by Adm. Mike Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in 2011. He called cyber "The single biggest existential threat that's out there" because "cyber actually more than theoretically, can attack our infrastructure, our financial systems."¶ While it is true that cyber attacks might do these things, it is also true they have not only never happened but are far more difficult to accomplish than mainstream thinking believes. The consequences from cyber threats may be similar in some ways to nuclear, as the Science Board concluded, but mostly, they are incredibly dissimilar. ¶ Eighty years ago, the generals of the U.S. Army Air Corps were sure that their bombers would easily topple other countries and cause their populations to panic, claims which did not stand up to reality. A study of the 25-year history of cyber conflict, by the Atlantic Council and Cyber Conflict Studies Association, has shown a similar dynamic where the impact of disruptive cyberattacks has been consistently overestimated. ¶ Rather than theorizing about future cyberwars or extrapolating from today's concerns, the history of cyberconflict that have actually been fought, shows that cyber incidents have so far tended to have effects that are either widespread but fleeting or persistent but narrowly focused. No attacks, so far, have been both widespread and persistent. There have been no authenticated cases of anyone dying from a cyber attack. Any widespread disruptions, even the 2007 disruption against Estonia, have been short-lived causing no significant GDP loss. ¶ Moreover, as with conflict in other domains, cyberattacks can take down many targets but keeping them down over time in the face of determined defenses has so far been out of the range of all but the most dangerous adversaries such as Russia and China. Of course, if the United States is in a conflict with those nations, cyber will be the least important of the existential threats policymakers should be worrying about. Plutonium trumps bytes in a shooting war.¶ This is not all good news. Policymakers have recognized the problems since at least 1998 with little significant progress. Worse, the threats and vulnerabilities are getting steadily more worrying. Still, experts have been warning of a cyber Pearl Harbor for 20 of the 70 years since the actual Pearl Harbor. ¶ The transfer of U.S. trade secrets through Chinese cyber espionage could someday accumulate into an existential threat. But it doesn't seem so seem just yet, with only handwaving estimates of annual losses of 0.1 to 0.5 percent to the total U.S. GDP of around $15 trillion. That's bad, but it doesn't add up to an existential crisis or "economic cyberwar."

Cyber-attacks “burnout” --- the bigger the impact, the faster it can be corrected --- checks escalation

Ian Brown 11, Associate Director of the Cyber Security Centre @ the University of Oxford, and Peter Sommers, Professor @ the London School of Economics, Reducing Systemic Cybersecurity Risk,” OECD, 1/14, http://www.oecd.org/governance/risk/46889922.pdf

Pure cybersecurity risks tend to be localised and temporary rather than global and long - term. This is for two fundamental reasons:¶ The longer an attack persists, the greater the likelihood it will be detected, routed around, and become attributable to a specific party against whom actions can be taken (including disconnection, arrest and retribution). ¶ Larger-scale attacks result in more of the data needed to diagnose and fix system vulnerabilities, and provide a stronger incentive to system suppliers and administrators to do so (Libicki, 2009: xiv).¶ Even for the best-resourced and most determined attackers – nation states taking military action – these conditions are likely to hold. RAND Corporation recently reported to the US Air Force “operational cyberwar has an important niche role, but only that,” commenting:¶ “Investigation may reveal that a particular system has a particular vulnerability. Predicting what an attack can do requires knowing how the system and its operators will respond to signs of dysfunction and knowing the behaviour of processes and systems associated with the system being attacked. Even then, cyberwar operations neither directly harm individuals nor destroy equipment (albeit with some exceptions). At best, these operations can confuse and frustrate operators of military systems, and then only temporarily. Thus, cyberwar can only be a support function for other elements of warfare, for instance, in disarming the enemy‖ (Libicki, 2009: xiv — xv).”

Speed is good—it’s key to democratic deliberation.

Connolly 2k — William E. Connolly, Professor and Chair of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, 2000 (“Speed, Concentric Cultures, and Cosmopolitanism,” Political Theory, Volume 28, Number 5, October, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via JSTOR, p. 596-597)

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Paul Virilio to comprehension of the effects of speed on the late-modern condition. When speed accelerates, space is compressed. And everything else changes too: the ability to deliberate before going to war, the priority of civilian control over the military, the integrity of the territorial politics of place, the capacity to think with concepts in relation to images, the ability to escape the eye of surveillance, and so on and on. Not only does Virilio chart the multiple effects of speed, he develops an arresting vocabulary to fix these effects in our minds: the war machine, the unspecified enemy, the nonplace of speed, the negation of space, the perpetual state of emergency, the miniaturization of action, the disappearance of the present, and the integral accident. These pithy formulations encapsulate in their brevity the compression of time they represent, giving us a double dose of the phenomenon Virilio warns against.

And the danger is great. Little doubt about that. If you treat the war machine as the paradigm of speed, as Virilio does, it seems that sometime during the 1960s, the ability to deliberate democratically about military action was jeopardized by the imperative to automatize split-second responses to preemptive strikes a minute or less away from their targets. My concern, nonetheless, is that Virilio allows the military paradigm to overwhelm all other modalities and experiences of speed. Virilio remains transfixed by a model of politics insufficiently attuned to the positive role of speed in intrastate democracy and cross-state cosmopolitanism. He underplays the [end page 596] positive role speed can play in desanctifying closed and dogmatic identities in the domains of religion, sensuality, ethnicity, gender, and nationality, and he remains so committed to the memory of the nation as the place where democratic deliberation occurred that he dismisses the productive possibilities (I do not say probabilities) of cosmopolitanism in the late-modern time.

No impact to speed.

Thrift 5 — Nigel Thrift, Head of the Division of Life and Environmental Sciences and Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, 2005 (“Panicsville: Paul Virilio and the Esthetic of Disaster,” Cultural Politics, Volume 1, Issue 3, November, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via SocINDEX, p. 357)

Than take speed. I have shown in numerous papers, as have many commentators now, that any serious historical analysis of the impact of increasing speed on society demonstrates that its impact is much more variegated than Virilio credits, and does not add up to any particular tendency (such as that sad old chestnut, the "time-space compression" story). I, like many other commentators, have demonstrated this over and over again, pretty well to distraction - and largely to no avail it has to be said. The idea that increasing speed somehow has causality is an urban myth so deeply engrained in Western individuals' idea of themselves and how they are that it is probably not dislodgeable—but that doesn't mean that philosophers have to power it up.

Virilio is historically wrong—space-time compression is a myth.

May and Thrift 1 — Jon May, Lecturer in Geography at Queen Mary, University of London, and Nigel Thrift, Professor of Geography at the University of Bristol, 2001 (“Introduction,” TimeSpace: Geographies of Temporality, Published by Taylor & Francis, ISBN 0203360672, p. 10)

First, we would suggest that in reducing changes in the experience of time and space to simple feelings of acceleration and dissolution the standard accounts of time-space compression are not a little under-developed. To some considerable extent, this under-development is a consequence of too heavy an emphasis being placed upon developments in transport and communication technologies and not enough upon developments elsewhere both in the field of technology (or what we prefer to call the domain of instruments and devices) as well as across a number of the other domains through which the experience of TimeSpace is rendered. When these more numerous developments are considered, and the connections between each traced, the picture is less of any simple acceleration in the pace of life or experience of spatial ‘collapse’ than of a far more complex restructuring in the nature and experience of time and space reaching through the nineteenth and in to the early decades of the twentieth centuries. With these changes space is seen to both expand and to contract, time horizons to both foreshorten but also to extend, time itself to both speed up but also slow down and even to move in different directions.

Virilio’s basic assumption is flawed. Speed of tech doesn’t ruin the political—Opposite is true (based on particular not universal)

Grove ‘8

Jairus Victor Grove is a Ph.D. candidate at Johns Hopkins University in International Relations and Political Theory. His research focuses on the new materialities of politics and warfare. He studies the effects of new forms of warfare on soldiers and civilian populations in urban settings.

Chapter 1: A Schmittian Century?: From Nuclear Leviathan to Nuclear-Sovereign-Assemblage – March 17, 2008 – http://becomingwar.blogspot.com/2008/03/chapter-1-schmittian-century-from.html

Initially nuclear weapons seemed to solidify even complete the decisionistic model of sovereignty once and for all. In Virilio’s reading of Schmitt’s the state of emergency became permanent and democracy ended once it became possible for a single individual to decide to got to war and to finish that war in 30 minutes. At first glance Virilio’s apocalyptic diagnosis seems accurate. Nuclear weapons at their current numbers could destroy the entire planet and given the structure of the United States nuclear command any Congressional or popular attempt to stop the war would be in vain. This is the backbone of Virilio’s argument. Politics and a democratic balance of power require time. Time to react, time to respond, time to debate, time to strategize, time to implement and ICBMS nullify time. But Virilio is wrong. The threat of the extreme case has obscured the actual or present case that presents new opportunities for intervention. Politics, whether micro or macro, does not begin and end with the sovereign decision; the sovereign decision (both expressively and in its enactment) emerges from a relay of forces, connections, and other previous decisions, resonances, forces, and actants that are presupposed in each subsequent iteration of the sovereign decision, and layered in multiple streams of time. Even an increasingly automated nuclear arsenal requires the participation of literally millions of people and countless networks, objects, tectonic stability, stable solar flare activity and on and on. The decision only appears singular when Virilio truncates time to the moment the president ‘pushes the button.’ We are not as of yet in that moment so other temporal rhythms abound and each part of the nuclear assemblage follows a different temporal course. Certainly the sovereign decision is a powerful, expressive, performative act of individuation for the sovereign and highly affective in mobilizing populations, but it is not self-constituted or self-causal. The process of individuation and mobilization necessitates a field of relations and resonances from which the sovereign decision emerges. The decision is also not decisive. Instead it territorializes the relations from which it emerges through its resonant modulation. The enunciation of a sovereign decision (a distinct inquiry from the ‘making of a decision. Certainly no less emeshed but nonetheless ought to remain analytically different) is something like a refrain, the sovereign—in so far as it is constituted by the enunciation of decisions—is a condensation point for national ethos, affect, and institutional identity making. Each decision is constitutive not of the ‘sovereign’ as is the case in Schmitt’s analysis but of a sovereign point of identification or reified, dogmatic consistency which can be recognized but need not remain static or immobile. Again however such a node is only possible because of its attachments whether physical or resonant (both material) to the complex system of tradition, culture, wires, telephones, satellites, nuclear silos, television cameras, previous sovereign decisions, personal affective characteristics, character, etc. This list is not exhaustive by any measure however it gestures in the direction of what I am trying to get at. The sovereign is not an individual, at best it is an iterative series of moments of performative or expressive individuation resulting from a complex interface with machines, networks, affective fields. The assemblage has a life of its own that cannot and should not be reduced to a single point simply because that is most consistent with our common sensibilities. In some sense the sovereign is a prosthesis or interface to be worn by whoever is elected to office. (President as first-person-shooter?) This does in part explain why there is so little transition time between each sovereign and so little variation in war powers. It is reference point or index for a history of actions and events made more complex by the function it is meant or believed to serve. It is the titular focal point of an assemblage that if recognized as such would undermine its own function. An assemblage that function because it can inspire belief in it is unity not its dispersed and multivalent organization. The irony is that the development of miles of fiberoptic networks, new technological interfaces and mobility was supposed to save the centralized and hierarchical sovereign form from its obvious strategic liability—that of being an easy target. However in increasing its ‘survivability’ it has also opened innumerable points of access to the supposed center. Each access point whether it be technological, affective, or economic that can recenter, or reterritorialize the sovereign assemblage. I do not want to make this sound ‘easy’ or ‘painless’ however as this ‘dispersed’ or redundant network system has become ‘everyday’ increasingly the President has been unaware of exactly who is in control or even at how many levels the Nuclear-sovereign-assemblage can be engaged or reterritorialized.

Speed solves totalitarianism better

Connolly 2k — William E. Connolly, Professor and Chair of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, 2000 (“Speed, Concentric Cultures, and Cosmopolitanism,” Political Theory, Volume 28, Number 5, October, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via JSTOR, p. 598)

Speed can be dangerous. At a certain point of acceleration, it jeopardizes freedom and shortens the time in which to engage ecological issues. But the crawl of slow time contains injuries, dangers, and repressive tendencies too. It may be wise therefore to explore speed as an ambiguous medium that contains some positive possibilities. The positive possibilities are lost to those who experience its effects only through nostalgia for a pristine time governed by the compass of the centered nation, the security of stable truth, the idea of nature as a purposive organism or a set of timeless laws, and the stolidity of thick universals.

Today, ironically, the most virulent attempts to slow things down take the form of national and religious fundamentalisms that deploy media sound bites and military campaigns of ethnic cleansing to reinstate a slow, centered world. Indeed, the ambiguity of speed finds its most salient manifestation in the paradoxical contest taking place before our eyes between the pluralization and the fundamentalization of public cultures. The politics to pluralize culture along several dimensions and the politics to fundamentalize hegemonic identities form two contending responses to late-modem speed. Each propensity intensifies under the same temporal conditions. As this contest proceeds, it also becomes clear why democratic pluralists must embrace the positive potentialities of speed while working to attenuate its most dangerous effects.

The aff forecloses the benefits of speed

Connolly 2k — William E. Connolly, Professor and Chair of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, 2000 (“Speed, Concentric Cultures, and Cosmopolitanism,” Political Theory, Volume 28, Number 5, October, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via JSTOR, p. 597-598)

But what if the compression of distance through speed has effects Virilio records while some of those effects also improve the prospects for democratic pluralization within the state and a cosmopolitanism across states that speaks affirmatively to issues of ecology, peace, indigenous minorities, the legitimation of new identities and rights, and the protection of old rights? Then acceleration would carry positive possibilities as well as dangers. And a single-minded attack on its dangers would forfeit access to its positive possibilities. Thus, to summarize for now a few contentions: First, the contemporary accentuation of tempo in interterritorial communications, entertainment, tourism, trade, and population migration exposes numerous settled constituencies to the historical basis of what they are and the comparative contestability of faiths and identities they have taken to be universal or incontestable. Second, the acceleration of accident and surprise, listed by Virilio as [end page 597] effects of speed, can also function over time to disrupt closed models of nature, truth, and morality into which people so readily become encapsulated, doing so in ways that support new paradigms of natural science and careful reconsideration of the injuries to difference supported by dogmatic conceptions. Third, Virilio's identification of the territorial nation as repository of democratic unity and of slowness as the temporal condition of national deliberation depreciates the value of a more expansive practice of pluralism that speaks generously to the multidimensional diversity of life already operative on most territories today.