Nuclear Energy Bad AC September/October 2016 Champion Briefs 213 Nuclear Energy Bad AC

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Champion Briefs
June 2022
Lincoln-Douglas Brief
Resolved: Radicalism is
preferable to incrementalism
to achieve social justice.
:

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The Evidence Standard June 2022

The Evidence Standard
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These seven statements, while simple, represent the complex notion of what it means to
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Letter from the Editor June 2022

Letter from the Editor
The 2021-2022 debate season comes to a close with a topic that is goes right to the
heart of many of our current political debates – “Resolved: Radicalism is preferable to
incrementalism to achieve social justice.” The resolution leads us to important questions about
how best to deal with concepts of injustice within society, which Champion Briefs tried to
address in varying ways. First, we looked at the concepts of radicalism and incrementalism in
terms of political theory. Next, we looked at the harms and benefits of both strategies when it
comes to the whole of society. Finally, we looked at radicalism and incrementalism through the
lens of various social justice issues to argue for preferable solutions to specific instances of
injustice.
The NSDA topic seems to be jumping headfirst into the issues that dominate America’s
“culture wars.” While these issues are not isolated to the United States and debaters shouldn’t
limit themselves to debates solely about U.S. issues, there can be no denying that the national
tournament will likely involve difficult conversation about social justice issues in our country.
It’s important to note that the topic asks both sides to provide for a moral or just solution to the
many injustices that exist in society. When looking for solutions to social justice issues in our
polarized, hyper-partisan political and media environment it can be easy to forget the actual
people who are behind some of these issues. When debating about solutions remember your
opponents all have a set of personal experiences that may include the very injustices you
discuss. Don’t allow a hypothetical to overpower respect of our common humanity. We must
remember to treat each person with the respect and dignity they are due.

Daniel ShatzkinEditor-in-Chief
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Table of Contents June 2022

Table of Contents
The Evidence Standard ....................................................................... 5

Letter from the Editor ........................................................................ 6

Table of Contents ............................................................................... 7

Topic Analyses .................................................................................. 19
Topic Analysis by Nethmin Liyanage ..................................................................................................... 20
Topic Analysis by Charles Karcher ......................................................................................................... 27
Topic Analysis by Daniel Shatzkin .......................................................................................................... 34
Topic Analysis by Sheryl Kaczmarek ...................................................................................................... 42
Frameworks Analysis by Adam Tomasi ................................................................................................. 52

Affirmative Cases ............................................................................. 59

AFF: Beloved Community AC ............................................................ 60
Radicalism is key to achieving King's ideal of the “beloved community,” which requires us to draw
connections between systemic injustices in order to achieve fundamental change. ........................... 61
Questioning the capitalist power structure through radicalism is key to achieving King. .................... 63
The ideal of the beloved community can motivate activists to keep struggling against injustice even in
the face of overwhelming state violence. ............................................................................................. 64
MLK's vision of the “beloved community” prioritizes the needs of the oppressed, and only my
framework can effectively challenge interlocking structures of oppression. ....................................... 66
The beloved community is a prerequisite to any notion of community being authentically universal
across racial lines. Radical change at the local level is key to dismantling structural racism. ............... 68
Connected to the beloved community is King's ideal of agape, or unconditional love, which entails a
radically new perspective towards empathy with others. and care---this is. ........................................ 72
Even small actions can achieve radical change, not through incrementalism but instead through
critical mass. .......................................................................................................................................... 73
King's beloved community, to be achieved, requires a spiritual revolution that transforms our values
through radical activism. ....................................................................................................................... 75
Building the “beloved community” and resisting racial injustice requires going beyond surface-level
reforms and embracing social transformation based upon love. ......................................................... 78
Achieving the beloved community requires moving beyond incremental, minor reforms to systemic
change. .................................................................................................................................................. 80
All reforms should be measured according to the standard of consistency with the beloved
community. ........................................................................................................................................... 83
Commitment to achieving the beloved community, as a vision for social justice, entails pursuing
radical yet non-violent change. ............................................................................................................. 85
Radical ends cannot be separated from radical means---the Beloved Community requires a deep
moral commitment to social transformation. ....................................................................................... 86
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AFF: Locke AC ................................................................................... 87
Individuals' basic rights to life, liberty, and property justify the right of revolution against the state
when it violates those rights. ................................................................................................................ 88
The right of revolution is especially justified when tyrannical institutions have already, by violating
rights and using violence, created a state of war. ................................................................................. 90
Locke should be understood as a radical even though what that meant in seventeenth-century
England is not the same as today. ......................................................................................................... 92
Locke's idea of the right to rebel makes radicalism preferable when the state threatens life, liberty, or
property. ............................................................................................................................................... 93
Revolution is not just a right, but a duty, when governments violate natural rights. Radicalism is key to
enforcing the social contract. ................................................................................................................ 94
John Locke's theory of natural rights provides a foundation for human rights, and the ability of our
human rights to check the power of the state. ..................................................................................... 95
Locke's theory of revolution does not entail endless rebellion over “small” issues, as the people will
only revolt against grave injustices. ...................................................................................................... 97
Defensive resistance against singular cases of injustice by government agents is morally legitimate. 98
Strategic nonviolence does not always succeed---even Black activists during the civil rights movement
armed themselves in self-defense. ..................................................................................................... 100
Government is necessary to protect our natural rights from a state of nature, but revolution is an
obligation when those natural rights are violated. ............................................................................. 101

AFF: Rawls AC ................................................................................. 102
Rawls's theory of justice as fairness connects the ideal of social justice to a shared, democratic
conception of the good life. ................................................................................................................ 103
Prefer a prioritarian standard that puts the least well-off first instead of utilitarianism, as rational
persons would only agree to a society that eliminates arbitrary disadvantages Nielsen 22. ............. 105
Climate change is a social justice issue because it disproportionately harms the least well-off in
society. ................................................................................................................................................ 107
Radicalism is preferable to incrementalism when addressing climate change, which threatens the lives
of millions---we don't have time for gradualism. ................................................................................ 109
Not only is climate change a social justice issue, it's also an important issue to tackle under Rawls's
theory of justice. ................................................................................................................................. 111
Prefer a Rawlsian framework to util---util is complicit in structural violence, while Rawls's “justice as
fairness” ensures that institutions satisfy every person's basic needs. .............................................. 112
Even though Rawls may have hedged his radicalism, the conclusion of his principles of justice would
entail a more democratic economy that is substantially different from capitalism. .......................... 116
Prefer Rawls's theory of justice over util because util fails to respect human dignity, which is based
upon the separateness of persons. ..................................................................................................... 118
“Justice as fairness” requires that we prioritize social justice above the ethic of so-called “personal
responsibility” that currently stifles effective redistribution of wealth. ............................................. 119
Even if Rawlsianism is ideal theory, it's still a useful framework for social justice. ............................ 121

AFF: Prison Abolition AC ................................................................. 123
Peaceful movements for prison reform places prison as inevitable and necessary - this fully
entrenches the prison industrial complex. .......................................................................................... 124
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The criminal justice system is irredeemable - only radical abolition solves. ....................................... 139
Incrementalism is a fantasy - a mechanism of control for otherized bodies to produce sovereignty. 154
Criminal justice reform relies on accepting carceral punishment as justifiable and moral. The aff seeks
to reframe this process by critiquing the racialization and gendering of the prison system and carceral
state as a whole. .................................................................................................................................. 159
Reforming the legal system allows reformers to create a more perfect system of domination. This
inevitably makes racialized policing worse than ever, and enables police to create systems of higher
surveillance. ........................................................................................................................................ 160
Movements for social justice are encoded by harsh systems that allow governments to measure the
value of bodies. ................................................................................................................................... 162
The most radical moves towards reform operate on discourse that comes from a place of civility. This
favors normalizing white nationalism and criminalize people who do not fit into that paradigm. This
creates eternal state sanctioned violence. .......................................................................................... 165
Courts are linked to the prison industrial complex - because any legal reform has to go through them,
it will never get passed in a way that is satisfactory. .......................................................................... 168
Digital policing makes it simple to coopt and digitize any attempted reform. ................................... 180
The humanization of police is an impossibility now - the law transforms police into hunters while
identifying otherized bodies as targets to shoot down. ...................................................................... 183
This creates more data to target black people through state sanctioned violence - justice becomes a
code for black death and exclusion. .................................................................................................... 185
Reforming the punishment system to a more acceptable level of violent is still violent - it's predictable
and makes violence acceptable and normalized. ................................................................................ 187
Prisons are fundamentally structured to subject inmates to degrading treatment and violence. ..... 189
Maintaining a prison system makes violence inevitable - reforms will always fail. ............................ 196
Challenging systems of oppression must come first - willingness to risk total extinction makes life
worth living, anything else drains value to life and risks extinction anyway. Violences of consumer
society is based on distancing ourselves from the actual occurrences of violence. ........................... 206
Acts of imagination numb perceptions of reality and creates distortion. The criminal justice system
feeds on that distortion to justify violence. ........................................................................................ 220
Our framework is key for activism to spill out in meaningful ways that doesn't recreate the harms of
the aff. ................................................................................................................................................. 223
Thus, we affirm the resolution by lighting the match to burn it all down. Doing it this way is necessary
- fantasizing about saving the world through big stick and soft left affirmatives only results in the
formulaic replication of the harms they outline. Insofar as the conditions that produce the harms still
exist, there will still be harm production. Insurgent politics is key to solving. .................................... 225

AFF: Critical Legal Studies AC .......................................................... 228
Struggles against injustice are only branded as “radical” from the perspective of the state and capital,
but affirming radicalism is key to getting at the root of power relations. .......................................... 229
Radicalism is essential to deeper, critical analysis and response against oppressive systems. .......... 232
Radicalism in the pursuit of social justice is a critical orientation, not simply a strategy. Radicalism is
necessary to envision and struggle for alternative social relations against oppression by the state and
capital. ................................................................................................................................................. 233
Radicalism is essential to achieving racial justice, and ensures that legal changes toward equality do
not get co-opted by racist institutions. ............................................................................................... 236
Only counter-hegemonic struggle can end anti-Blackness---small steps are insufficient. .................. 238
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Critical legal studies recognize the necessity for spiritual transformation as well as incremental
change---radicalism is key to more effective activism. ....................................................................... 239
Radicalism is necessary for social transformation that overcomes the oppressive limits of the law---
incrementalism co-opts otherwise successful movements. ................................................................ 241
Radical transformation is not automatic, yet it still possible and desirable. ....................................... 243
Incrementalism turns reform into an end-in-itself, which masks the fundamental problems of society.
............................................................................................................................................................. 244
Educational institutions train us to believe that only small and narrow reforms can succeed at
changing the country. .......................................................................................................................... 245
Radicalism as an orientation toward social change is key to living out the ideals that would guide a
truly just society. ................................................................................................................................. 246
Incremental legal reform fails because it's too entangled with the injustices of corporate capitalism,
which resists reform by nature. .......................................................................................................... 247

AFF: Eco Terror AC .......................................................................... 248
The creep is coming - fascism is making its grand return and will coopt politics to consume society in a
blaze of nationalism and blood. .......................................................................................................... 249
Fascism and terrorism are classical enemies - fascism seeks to label movements and ideological
groups as terrorist to delegitimatize their claims. .............................................................................. 251
Islamophobia isn't a fear of radicalism but rather a hatred of Islamization. This CounterJihad is
indicative of fascism's infiltration into the left. ................................................................................... 253
Radicalism on the right wing is much more open - often showing up in politics as “peaceful” “ethnic
cleansing” - among other sanitized forms of violence. ....................................................................... 257
The radical left is dead, and now we need something more. ............................................................. 261
Leftism has become complacent in its fascist hole. Return leftism to its roots of violence and stop
being bamboozled by sympathy. Hunt to kill. ..................................................................................... 262
To be clear, this affirmative isn't a commitment to violence, but rather a rejection of the commitment
to nonviolence. .................................................................................................................................... 264
The idea of “peacefully” integrating nonhuman animals into the human world we ripped away from
them is anthropocentric in and of itself. Violence is an intrinsic part of giving the world back to its
rightful owners. ................................................................................................................................... 266
The aff is a reclamation of the term terrorist in an ecological sense - break the shackles that fascism
has placed on us, and use environmental action to challenge the beast. ........................................... 269
Vote aff to affirm the resolution through the method of eco-terrorism. We don't support the fear
mongering that Leviathan describes terrorism as, but rather tactics make us uniquely dangerous to
the state and its environmental control. ............................................................................................. 270

AFF: LGBTQ+ Liberation AC ............................................................. 272
Incrementalism is inadequate for LGBT communities---radicalism is key to passing transformative
legislation such as the Equality Act. .................................................................................................... 274
Only radicalism can draw connections between multiple issues and present them as one systemic
problem---that's more effective at garnering attention for social movements than incrementalism. 277
Preferring incrementalism leads to movements excluding transgender people from LGBT rights
legislation in the name of compromise and incremental progress. .................................................... 279
The LGBT movement needs to return to the radical roots of the Gay Liberation Front in order to
achieve durable change towards social justice. .................................................................................. 280
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