Master Debaters Redux

by tristero

I was very interested to read the comments to my query: How on earth could Liberty beat Harvard in debate? Most commentators made points like no one cares about college debate, debating contests are esoteric and not real world, Liberty spends a lot of money on debate and Harvard doesn’t, the rankings are misleading, and so on. All of this I have no doubt is true but it sidesteps a crucial fact that reverberates far beyond the trivialities of college debating:

There are no circumstances in which a contest between Harvard University debaters and a team from Liberty should even be close.

I’m not saying that Harvard has the smartest and most knowledgeable kids in the country, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t have many of them. Conversely, I’m not saying that Liberty has the dumbest, most ignorant kids in the country, but it sure has a helluva lot more than Harvard. (For the record, I did not go to Harvard. Or Liberty.)

In short, Harvard should cream Liberty. Hell, nearly every school in the country should cream Liberty. But apparently they don’t. And I’d like to know exactly how and why. We should all be interested in the answer.

Assuming it really is the case that Liberty can beat Harvard -and it seems to be* -, then it is one more example of how seriously undervalued the study of rhetoric – the art of persuasion – has become within the reality-based community. It’s also illustrates how seriously important rhetoric is considered among the wingnuts. Once again, they are systematically training, with no expense spared, the next generation of rightwingers. Training them to roll America back to the halcyon years of Cotton Mather. And convince the majority of the country that that’s a Good Idea.

Yes, the corruption of the media is a dreadful problem in getting out the truth about these nuts. Yes, the crazies can and do outspend us. Yes, they will lie, distort, and defraud elections, scientific data, and their opponents’ positions. Yes, the Democratic infrastructure is cowardly (notable exceptions duly noted).

But from where I sit, that doesn’t fully explain the serial failures by Democrats and liberals to make their case, a case which is so obviously sensible, especially when compared to the arguments of the winners on the right. What’s left out of the explanation of failure can easily be symbolized – if not actually demonstrated – in this seemingly trivial, unimportant debate contest.

If we care about a world where religious lunatics aren’t telling the rest of us what we can and cannot do, we damn well better figure out how to beat clowns like Liberty every time, no matter how trivial college debating might seem to some of us.

*One hightly knowledgeable commentator said the rankings were just pr and that Liberty was known as a joke among the varsity. That may have been true in 199x, but according to the article

Liberty is competitive at all three levels—varsity, JV and novice. “They’re tough. [But] we’re not afraid to debate Liberty,” says Harvard coach Dallas Perkins Jr., whose varsity team was beaten by Falwell’s last month.

[UPDATE] A very good discussion of why the ranking of Liberty as #1 is somewhat misleading. Perhaps most importantly, Liberty focuses on novice debaters and since it enters so many contests, its program, not its debaters or their teams, is ranked one. As Ed says in his reply to the fellow from Liberty, the Newsweek article reads as if the best debating teams in the country are at Liberty. Hat tip to TW in comments.

Even so, that doesn’t get at the heart of the matter for me, which is why Liberty *still* does so well, apparently even beating Harvard.