My most enduring memory of college policy debate is manhandling Rubbermaid tubs. These were big, plastic, and unwieldy, the sort of thing fathers use to store Christmas lights or power tools in the garage. Debaters would lug these monstrosities, by hand or on a dolly, from round to round. Enclosed within were reams of files on every imaginable topic: capitalism, arguments for and against U.S. hegemony, the internal politics of the Chinese Politburo, renewable energy, the case for de-growth, the philosophy of Michel Foucault. Veteran debaters would often reserve one or more tubs for “backfiles,” papers dating back years from earlier topics. Locating a strategic backfile in the middle of a round could mean the difference between victory and defeat.
Policy debate has since gone digital, eliminating an awkward physical component from what is supposed to be a purely intellectual competition. The Borgesian ambition embodied by the tubs remains, however. A good policy debater is supposed to have an answer for everything, or at least everything that can be argued in a six-minute speech.
In high school and college, competitive policy debate is the province of the nerdy and socially awkward. But an obscure culture war within the activity anticipated many of the ideas that have shaped the past decade of American life. A revealing account of this clash is Cross-X, a 2007 book from Joe Miller, a journalist who spent a year following a successful debate team from Central High School in Kansas City. Central is a bad school, but the policy debate program is a rare bright spot, affording black students the opportunity to compete (and often win) against elite public and private schools on the national circuit.
Winning the occasional tournament was not enough. According to the book, Miller is instrumental, first as an observer and later as an assistant coach, in pushing Central’s team away from typical policy arguments and toward a more radical, race-based critique of the activity. In the process, he keeps stumbling over arguments that would later reemerge in the mainstream.
Traditional policy debate is a rules-bound activity. Speeches and cross-examination periods are constrained by strict time limits. Failing to answer an opponent’s point is treated as the equivalent of conceding its correctness. Most importantly, students are expected to argue within the confines of the resolution, a topic adopted by the debate community before each year. The topic might be anything from expanding access to mental health treatment to enacting a more confrontational policy toward China, but it is written with the expectation that debaters will assume the role of the United States federal government. At every tournament, half of each team’s rounds will be negative and half will be affirmative. If you’re affirmative, you’re expected to defend the resolution. If you’re negative, you’re supposed to attack it.
In Cross-X, Miller’s students start to challenge the rules and conventions of debate. They slow their speeches and play music in rounds. They eschew reading lengthy pieces of evidence from wonks and experts. And they stop debating the resolution or roleplaying the federal government. Instead, they level a critique of debate itself, arguing that its neutral pose is a sham and its rules and conventions are exclusionary and racist. Before any other topics can be addressed, they contend, the community must grapple with its own bad practices.
This was a direct attack on the Rubbermaid tubs and the style of debate they embodied. Instead of expert knowledge and topic-specific stratagems, Miller’s teams asked bigger questions about debate and the nature of American society. In doing so, they anticipated an intra-Left clash between an older, technocratic style of liberalism, with its faith in incremental progress, objectivity, and the policymaking process, and a more radical critique of society.
What happened to debate in the year Cross X covers would soon happen to everything. Slowly but surely, the arguments that Central High School deployed to challenge the rules of the game have been turned on other ostensibly neutral institutions. An open letter published in Scientific American argued that our understanding of scientific objectivity is shaped by white supremacy. Oregon health officials recently delayed a meeting on the grounds that urgency is a “white supremacy value.” After a brief media controversy, the National Museum of African American History scrubbed a webpage that called “objective, rational linear thinking” an aspect of “white dominant culture.” And as Jay Caspian Kang of the New York Times has observed, criticisms of policy debate and its pretensions to neutrality have since reemerged as arguments against the SAT.
The cultural stereotype of a high school debater is a nerdy figure arguing for corporate tax cuts. The stereotype is wrong. Like most academic precincts, policy debate leans left. Consequently, serious intellectual challenges to Central High School’s approach often came from radical places. Students argued against race-based critiques on the grounds they exempted capitalism, the real root cause of society’s ills. In doing so, they anticipated the 2016 clash between Bernie Sanders, an old-school avatar of left-wing class politics, and Hillary Clinton, who famously asked, “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow … would that end racism? Would that end sexism?”
At one point in Cross-X, Central’s top team loses a round because their opponents seize on evidence they’ve read that says “man” instead of “human.” This is a familiar — and frustratingly childish — tactic from the policy debate circuit, where language deemed insensitive or gendered by the opposing team can be a “voting issue,” even if your side is winning on policy. Debaters usually comb through older evidence to replace terms like “man” and “mankind” with gender-neutral language. Last September, the ACLU followed suit, producing a bowdlerized version of a well-known Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote about abortion: “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person’s] life, to [their] well-being and dignity … When the government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices.”
Other activist debate tactics from the same era have also gone mainstream. Some teams argued that judges should ignore the resolution and vote to “give back the land,” a symbolic endorsement of the idea that federal land was stolen from Native Americans. CNN now runs Sunday night specials on the “Landback” movement. The Washington State Department of Corrections includes a perfunctory land acknowledgment at the bottom of its homepage. The Metropolitan Museum of Art displays a land acknowledgment plaque near its entrance.
These arguments, playtested in stuffy classrooms by children in loose ties and ill-fitting pantsuits, prefigured a broader shift within liberal institutions. Organizations that once focused on single issues have, at least rhetorically, expanded their view to critique racism, sexism, and traditional ideas about gender and sexuality. It is no longer enough for the ACLU to advocate for civil liberties. It must transmogrify into an all-purpose campaigner for “social justice,” despite the protests of former ACLU Presidents Nadine Strossen and the late Ira Glasser. The website of the Sierra Club, an environmental group once narrowly attuned to issues such as pollutants, deforestation, and air quality, now has an issues page with an entire section on social justice (sample language: “Racism is killing the planet”).
In many ways, the clash between traditional policy debate and Miller’s preferred approach predicted liberalism’s future. Disillusionment with stalled progress during the late Obama era and the shock of Donald Trump’s election undermined hope of incremental progress and gave life to radical critiques of American society. Liberal assumptions about the desirability of debating controversial ideas in a neutral forum became unfashionable. Arguments grounded in identity and lived experience rose to prominence. In many spaces, the approach favored by the Central High debate team became too tempting to ignore. Liberals once embraced a narrative of American history that emphasized slow but inexorable progress. The past decade has convinced many that the system is rigged. Rather than learn to win, the only thing to do is to refuse to play the game, to flip the board.
But it is hard to predict how a revolution will unfold. A coach at a smaller college program told Miller that freeing debate from traditional standards would make it “a lot harder for the Dartmouths, Northwesterns, and Harvards to continue to dominate the scene.” Yet no one has proven more flexible than elite institutions, which are quite adept at burnishing their social justice credentials with paeans to diversity, equity, and inclusion even as they defend their status as, materially, the most privileged organizations in the world. Despite a few notable breakthroughs from smaller schools critiquing the rules of policy debate, traditional powerhouses continue to dominate the circuit at both the high school and college levels. Urban debate leagues and activist debating have diversified the activity, but the older, more established programs aren’t going anywhere.
In 2014, Central High School alum Ryan Walsh and his partner became the first college debaters to win both the Cross Examination Debate Association Championship and the National Debate Tournament for Emporia State University. According to the Atlantic, the two champion debaters, both black, were “hacking traditional college debate’s white privilege problem” by attacking the norms and assumptions at the heart of the activity. Despite Emporia’s radical arguments, their victory vindicated one core belief of old-school policy debaters. Academic debate is still an incubator for consequential ideas, for better or for worse.
Will Collins is a high school teacher in Budapest, Hungary.
