Kia ora! Welcome to Frozen Peaches’ new series of articles for debaters. (I mean as in the high school/university competitive activity of debating, but if this helps you argue with your friends and family, more power to you.) I'm the reigning national debating champion, I'm going to keep saying that until a new challenger pries the cup from my frozen, peachy hands, and I'm here to talk to you about politics in debating and politics motions. These articles are intended for any coaches who want to send the links to their high school regional teams, but I hope this has something useful for all readers.
Let’s define what we’re talking about here. When I say “politics in debating”, I mean motions that are not about politics itself, but draw out debaters’ personal politics. This will always be subjective based on what teams personally find more or less political. Crime, such as THW repeal three strikes laws, is a classic example: almost everybody has encountered somebody arguing passionately for harsher sentences or rehabilitation.
Most issues have some underlying political element, but most people usually don’t spot them (e.g. standardised learning or trade). Debaters tend to approach them with original ideas and without drawing on a clear political tradition. Other motions present issues you’re already familiar with the debates around in the real world, and these prior perceptions are bound to play a part in your thinking as you prep and rebut. The first couple of articles will cover the problems that this presents for teams.
When I say “politics motions”, I mean motions about how politics operates. Consider, for instance, motions about how elections should be run or how to run in elections, how governments should form or govern, or the best way for a political movement or party to achieve its goals. Articles 3-5 in this series tackle these: 3 concerns the core few trends that almost always appear in politics, wherever you are, while 4 will be actual information about the current politics of the world and especially New Zealand. 5 serves as a practical demonstration.
In my experience, politics motions and politics in debating present three challenges for debaters, particularly at a high school level:
speakers possess very little knowledge about what politics looks like in practice;
speakers are very reluctant to commit to specifics; and
speakers with strong political views prefer to share those views rather than advancing the best case to win the debate.
and 2. are reflective of the fact that most debaters come from the general population and, as such, face the same challenges as most voters. In real life, voters’ impressions of politics are also pretty vague and often founded on myths. Voters are also often apprehensive about openly sharing which policy solutions they think are better than the alternatives, knowing others may disagree. 3. is reflective of the fact that debating also disproportionately attracts strange people who a) know a lot about politics and b) know less than they think.
I’m going to tackle these challenges in five articles. The first is the one you’re reading now, and is basically one big "be sporting, not a silly bugger” statement, particularly for the politics-pilled. The second will tackle the opposite challenge: explaining why the tendency to make vague arguments rather than focusing on specifics may be understandable, but hurts your chances of winning. The third prepares you to know which half of a political divide you sit on as soon as you receive the motion. The fourth should keep you well-equipped for likely motions to be assigned this year, and with examples and mechanisms for a wide range of debates. The fifth uses everything we’ve learnt so far to demonstrate what you can do with all of this!
One final note: I’m going to use some debates I’ve judged or spoken in as examples. These really help to illustrate the points I’m making and I’d be doing a disservice to you all to leave them out. That necessarily means sometimes I’m going to be saying “this speaker needed to do this better to win”. Just like judge feedback, this isn’t meant to insult anybody or point at speakers as examples to laugh at. We all make mistakes and we all gotta learn. And almost every speech any speaker has ever given has some redemptive qualities - that’s why I give out 65s and 67s and 69s to flawed speeches, not 61s and 62s*.
Onto the piece!
[*The range judges can score speakers on is usually 60 to 80, where 70 is an average speech, 80 is the best speech ever given, and 60 is standing up for ten seconds, emitting a forlorn squeak and sitting down.]
Part One: Debating is a team sport where you try to win, not an opportunity to monologue your beliefs to the six other people forced to be there
Young people caring about politics is a good thing. Most people aspire to know more about what's going on in the world. These debaters are making that aspiration reality. Good stuff! Young people being able to debate with heart is a great thing. Some speakers draw on their personal experiences or most strongly held beliefs to create a rhetorically compelling and vividly clear explanation for their case. They bring a lot to the competition. Splendid!
We love a speaker who is freakishly ready with the dossier for politics moots, or who has a good-natured groan about "haha, I can't believe I have to debate THIS side of the motion". The problem arises when we go from that to a speaker who actively kneecaps their own team’s ability to win because they don’t want to open up their mind.
Now, there are debates that are exceptions to the rule for this. Sometimes, what at the uni level we call "equity" will be violated when a subject that's very personally sensitive is handled badly. Perhaps a motion that's just too taboo is set - this shouldn’t happen, but, particularly if whoever is setting the motions is not familiar with debating, you might just get a black swan event. Possibly, where a debate goes triggers some raw nerves for a speaker about their personal experiences.
Most probably, a team steps over the line in talking about what they shouldn’t and does so too callously. That goes past a healthy debate of ideas to hitting somebody on something they deeply, sincerely care about. When I talk about needing to be open to debating different perspectives, I’m not talking about forcing yourself to get into areas you really feel would not be healthy for you to debate publicly.
Regardless of the debate outcome, you just holistically should choose to do the right thing. Understand what subjects you haven’t experienced yourself. Respect any speeches that share stuff from a personal place. I’d flag two areas to particularly take care. One is that you’re likeliest to make people feel seriously uncomfortable or hurt by being flippant about violence, and particularly sexual violence. Not everybody’s childhood and high school life has been peachy. This is personal for some people.
If the debate is going to tread near these subjects, you have two choices. One, carefully prep out and present how difficult topics can impact people, demonstrating that your side is sympathetic to those impacted and has solutions for them. Two, don't do this at all and pick other impacts. For instance, in a crime debate, instead of explaining how victims of crime feel unsafe with graphic depictions of violence, substitute in how meaningful property damage and theft can feel for residents and business owners - the pieces they have to pick up and the feeling of vulnerability that sticks with them.
Two is that, particularly at the high school level, the most common kind of offence given is contempt towards poor people. Anybody can be a jerk but let’s be frank here: this more often comes from privately schooled kids who haven’t met many people or seen much of the world. There isn’t an income threshold to come be part of debating. Be kind and thoughtful, everyone. One of the biggest opportunities in debating is to meet people from all kinds of different backgrounds. Don’t make people with different backgrounds from you feel like they don’t belong here. Nobody ever got themselves anywhere by ruling themselves out of friendships and new experiences.
Okay, disclaimer done. You’re all nice people now. Let’s talk about what I mean when I say being too political is a bad thing for debating. There are two situations where somebody inserting their personal beliefs is detrimental to the debate. The first is the speaker who won’t commit to making the best case for a side of the motion they fundamentally disagree with. We’ll get to the second in a minute.
If you sign up to do debating, sooner or later you're going to get assigned to argue something you don't believe in. For instance, you may be pretty left-wing and have to neg THW raise the minimum wage. Perhaps you’re rather right-wing and are on aff for THS a maximum income. Don’t want to argue against what you believe in? You are doing yourself a disservice both as a debater and as a politically engaged person.
If you intend to be able to beat ideas you dislike with your own arguments in the real world, you should understand what makes those ideas tick. As we see with higher levels of debating, the best arguments usually come from a place of understanding the motives and incentives behind an opposing argument, to then explaining how those actually work against its own success. For example, banning oil and gas exploration in NZ is popular with environmentalist young people. However, a strong argument against this policy is that this can lead to importing dirty Indonesian coal instead: the same quantity of fossil fuels are being extracted to meet the same quantity demanded, but in a country with worse environmental regulations and older technologies, leading to greater environmental harms.
A debater who is affing THW ban oil and gas exploration in NZ and is convinced they’re just objectively right about the environment won’t be prepared to rebut this neg argument. A debater who is negging this motion but simply dismisses environmental concerns and only cares about the economy misses out on this argument. They don’t engage with the other team’s path to victory (environment > economy). A team that can do better at both their own path to victory and their opponent’s is surely on track for a W: whatever the judge is convinced to evaluate as the most important thing in the debate, that team is ahead.
This is one of the great advantages of choosing to do debating. You get to break apart and understand the pros and cons of different approaches in a way that’s rare in real life arguments. Young people particularly tend to only hear from one side of the political aisle, left or right, compared to older generations who tune in to morning talk shows or talkback radio. Those platforms may have their slants, but they’re likelier to actually bring on voices from both sides.
It’s the difference between seeing Chlöe Swarbrick’s Instagram posts versus seeing Chlöe Swarbrick debate David Seymour on the AM show. Not only do you get an added perspective, but Swarbrick has to deepen her own argument to respond to criticisms - just like 2nd and 3rd speakers have to make your case better than it starts out at first to keep your team in contention. (And believe me, you do. The judge has already jotted down your points when your first speaker said them. Do not repeat them. Come up with new mechs. Tell us more.)
Coming to debating hoping to only argue for what you fervently believe in is like sitting down for a night of poker and planning to only raise on royal flushes. It's great fun when fortune deposits a golden opportunity in your lap, but it’s borderline statistically impossible that you’ll get far easier hands than everybody else. The real meat of the competition plays out the rest of the time, when you’re chucked into difficult situations that you don’t know how to deal with and you learn how to handle them. You'll be missing out if you can't throw yourself into these new challenges with relish.
The second kind of problem speaker really illustrates the fault of placing your views above what the debate demands. This is the speaker who gets the side of the debate they want to argue, hooray! Royal flush!...and then argues through sharing their reckons, rather than identifying what they need to do to win. Allow me one more example: the first round of Canterbury Regionals concerned THW ban job applicants from disclosing the name of the university/universities that issued any degrees they may hold. Aff weren't performing as well as I knew they could (I later split for them in the semis), but still they defeated the negating team by a solid margin.
That came down to the way in which neg chose to argue. Neg's case was about ensuring that the employers hired the best people for the job, and so the best workers had gone to the best universities. The likeliest way to win from there would be mechanising out that, if you go to Harvard, you’re gonna know a lot more stuff than if you go to Lincoln, here’s how, here’s the impacts. Instead, however, speakers shared how their dad worked hard to get into a good uni, or set out the concept of equality of opportunity as opposed to equity of outcome. The former is likely true, the latter is a valid perspective. Both were communicated clearly. Neither piece of content helped them to win the debate.
Aff showed more disadvantaged people getting opportunities for good work with deeper mechanisation. In this debate, that mattered more than neg's impacting of better doctors doing surgeries. Neg’s specificity was good to hear. However, in order to win, they needed more mech'ing out of what the difference was if you couldn't put Harvard or Lincoln in your job application anymore. Their time should probably have been spent on that.
Their choices of what to argue and to keep arguing were inefficient. Somebody’s dad working hard is an anecdote. I couldn’t credit that meaning anything for most people without mechanisms, e.g people like that dad who get into top universities are hard workers because they need a high grade average, have to do well on examinations (particularly for scholarships), choose to pour effort into lots of extracurriculars, and are surrounded by other hard workers who breed a positive culture of achievement.
The principle of equality of opportunity versus equity of outcome wasn’t getting them anywhere. I wasn’t hearing why one was more valid than the other. More than that, I wasn’t hearing the practical impacting of how raising the ceiling improved more lives more than raising the floor. As always, judges can’t judge based on an imagined ideal of what would be good. We can only decide who has won based on which team has actually proven x positive thing likely will happen.
You must be especially aware of this in the New Zealand circuit. Kiwi judges are notoriously pragmatic by international standards. We’re a small country without a prestigious Oxbridge upper crust, and so we don’t produce many high-minded philosophers. We don't dismiss principles out of hand, but we're waiting for you to specifically impact how people's lives get better. In this case, I needed to hear something like mechs on how educational outcomes primarily depend on effort rather than rich/poor divides → how important employers like hospitals will hire top workers who went to the best universities → how surgeries go better and more people live more years when a hard-working Harvardite is in the operating room versus a lazy Lincolnian.
This is why it's so important to open up your horizons. Even if you are passionately arguing for what you believe in, if it's not contributing to however you win the debate, then there's no point. This isn't to discourage speakers bringing in their personal experiences, or embracing angles where they do get to construct a case they've wanted to talk about. However, an important part of developing good strategy is understanding when your specific case can catch the other team off guard and provide a good path to victory, versus when you're kinda trolling your team's chances.
In my team’s last round at BP '22, we did our best to run a case about how the People's Republic of China was going to be run by an omnipotent authoritarian AI and how that was really bad. We talked about what we really wanted to, not what was strategically wisest, and we knew we were doing that. We did that because on our wins versus losses we'd already lost our chance to break, and we were still giving this case our best effort to not ruin the experience for the other teams. That's your very specific, very rare scenario for running a case that's most satisfying to run personally over a good approach to the debate. If you’re not in that situation, don’t.
Over my nine years of debating, I stayed open to arguing the side of the debate that I personally disagreed with. That made me a better debater and that gave me more understanding of the world around me. And that’s how I won NZBP ‘23.
😎😎
Stay tuned for Part Two!
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