For the Sake of Argument: Defending debate

Abstract

For the Sake of ArgumentDefending debate Becca Rothfeld (bio) first affirmative constructive (eight minutes) the round would open with fumbling, throat-clearing, the tapping of feet or fingers against tables or tubs—those unwieldy plastic bins we filled with research about free-trade agreements or French social theory that I would lug along the corridors of high schools deserted for the weekend. By mid-morning, I'd already be moving in the miasma of competing pungencies: the stink of sour sweat, the scrubbed floors' bright institutional tang, the greasy reek of the sandwich I had eaten for breakfast. My destination was a classroom rendered thrilling by its foreignness, for I was far from my high school in Washington D.C., perhaps in a state as [End Page 47] distant and exotic as Texas or Illinois. Here, with our tubs stacked around us, we would take our places at vacant desks, pens in hand, arranged in teams of two. At last, a spindly figure ensconced in an ill-fitting suit would lurch into eight minutes of declamation. "CONTENTION ONE!" the speaker would gasp, and we were off to the races. In the popular imagination, debate tournaments take place on brightly lit stages; participants are future politicians, commanding rhetoricians with pinched loafers and good posture and a patina of prep-school polish. In fact, most debates are staged in generic high school classrooms with chewed gum nubbed under the tables and walls papered with motivational posters. Some kinds of debate, among them extemporaneous (extemp), public forum (PF) and Lincoln-Douglas (LD) obliquely resemble the public ideal, at least insofar as their practitioners try to sound like lawmakers and win largely on the basis of their dramatic delivery (or so thought those of us who prided ourselves, perhaps unduly, on our argumentative rigor). Not so when it came to policy debate, the only sort offered at my school, the sort of debate that I loved helplessly, with the unreserved ardor unique to adolescence. Participants would speak at a rate of something like five hundred words a minute in an effort to cram as many ideas as possible into speeches with strict time limits. Then, too, policy debate was so scholastic as to be largely unintelligible to an amateur audience: it was like a logic problem working itself out in real time. But this was precisely what I loved about it—that the various arguments stood in necessary relation to one another not in virtue of their content but in virtue of their form. All the attacks and parries, all the ornate maneuvering, crafted a conceptual filigree that I adored immediately and irreversibly and that removed me from my workaday life—even when, on the face of it, I was only yelling in a classroom that looked exactly like the one where I doodled through algebra or biology each week. Policy debates bore little resemblance to the public contests of charisma that the word summoned for people like my parents, who [End Page 48] didn't understand why I couldn't deliver a winning discourse at a normal or at least comprehensible speed, why I insisted on gulping and glugging in a form as technical, as rigidly structured, as a sestina. Policy debate rounds all began with the so-called first affirmative constructive (1AC), the eight-minute speech in which the speaker described the status quo as dire and proposed a policy that could serve as a remedy. In 2008-9, when I was a junior and maximally saturated in the cultish culture of the enterprise, the resolution that the council of affiliated schools settled on stated: "The United States federal government should substantially increase alternative energy incentives in the United States." We were not expected to defend or dispute the resolution in all its tantalizing generality, but rather to choose some specification of it, "the plan." The affirmative team might propose, specifically, that the government should offer tax credits for companies that contrived to reduce emissions by twenty percent within the next five years. Not passing the plan, we would claim, would culminate in various doomsday scenarios, almost all of them resulting in nuclear war. "Link!" the ill-fitting suit would shout...