The Crossed Pond

As a high school policy debate coach, I inhabit one of the weirder and more influential subcultures in American society. I spend every weekend watching a significant subset of America’s future leaders argue about federal national service policy. Many of these future leaders conduct their discussions at upwards of 300 words per minute. It is an environment in which a sort of pseudo-radical liberalism is by far the major political paradigm; yet it is also a world in which that ideology has betrayed its core principles in interesting ways.

The stereotypical view of high school debate involves nerdlings in three-piece suits engaging in impassioned oratory while reading evidence off of 3×5 notecards stored in recipe boxes. This stereotype, reinforced by both Simpsons episodes and horrible Hollywood movies, hasn’t been accurate since the late 1970s. The recipe boxes went the way of the dodo at about the same time that the Xerox photocopier came into common use–suddenly, one debater’s research could be spread to the entire team, and it wasn’t necessary for each individual member to cut quotes out of magazines with scissors and attach them to cardstock with rubber cement. This, combined with the increasing use of ex-debaters as judges, led to an environment in which the processing of large amounts of information became more important than persuasive speaking skills, and by the mid-1980s top level debate rounds were conducted at such speed as to be almost totally incomprehensible to the average listener.

I do not regret this transition, by the way. The level of analytical rigor needed to succeed in a contemporary high-speed debate round far exceeds what’s necessary to persuade mom and dad to sign the ballot in your favor in a standard oratory round; at times I find myself amazed at the quality of the research and argumentation that these adolescents are engaged in. This is fortunate, as a pretty staggering percentage of the nation’s leaders–half of congress, by some estimates–did debate at one time or another, and I’d rather they learned to succeed through intelligent analysis as opposed to demagoguery.

However, the transition to rapid speech and away from communication skills did open the doorway to a lot of other interesting trends in the activity. First of all, this change led to the ubiquity of national summer debate camps at which the best college debaters would train high school kids in the new styles of argumentation and speaking, and the high costs of these camps along with prohibitive research burdens and interstate travel to “elite” tournaments, began to transform debate into a highly class-biased activity. Participation declined radically through the 1980s and 1990s as only the wealthiest schools were able to succeed at the highest levels.

This process also led to a sort of ideological streamlining of the activity, in which a sort of high-minded liberalism was passed down from the collegiate role models to the body of high school debaters as a whole. As it became easier to win high-level rounds by arguing positions to which the college judges were sympathetic, liberal memes acquired more currency within the community, and conservatives in general began to be crowded out. This trend accelerated in the 1990s, as postmodern philosophy and arguments about the real-world impacts of interpersonal discourse began filtering into the activity. As it became increasingly necessary to read authors like Foucault, Baudrillard, and Spanos to succeed at the game, the sort of person who read (and agreed with) those authors began to become more successful in the activity; those who found argumentation of that type to be nothing more than mental masturbation began seeking other outlets for their intellectual creativity.

This led, by the mid-2000s, to an environment in which debate nationally had dwindled to a very small number of wealthy schools (for instance, four in the entire city of New York) arguing usually within a very narrow ideological range. Indeed, the ideological limitations of the game were such that the rather limited success of the team at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University was considered to be national news. Meanwhile, the high school governing body, the National Forensic League, felt compelled to create an entirely new debate event (modelled after competitive-yelling TV shows like “Crossfire”) in order to revive interest in the activity at typical high schools. The new event has proven modestly successful in terms of student interest, but more or less disastrous in terms of rigor and the respect of the coaching community.

The current status of debate is an ironic one, ideologically. Liberalism rules the day on the national circuit–but the high-minded liberals who rule the roost from their elite prep schools seem to be very eager to protect their gains, and attempts to open up the activity to participation by less wealthy programs–and even to minority students–have resulted in very serious retrenchment by the elite. George Soros has financed an organization with the express purpose of providing inner-city high schools with the resources they need to create programs proficient in the skills needed for top-level debate, but these programs compete mainly against each other. Meanwhile, the attempts of one particular inner-city program to actually engage the community at its own level–to challenge the actual in-round practices of elite debate in order to open up the community to new participants–resulted generally in a cold shoulder, as addressed in a recent award-winning book.

Ironically, the only parts of the country in which the economic and racial makeup of the debate community mirrors the makeup of the community as a whole are Kansas and Missouri. Historically, these states have been very conservative in terms of debate practice, primarily because the majority of rounds are judged, not by debate insiders, but by actual members of the (geographic) community–parents, teachers, and the like. This has meant, historically, that the average debate round in Kansas and Missouri has been a great deal slower and a great deal more delivery-oriented than rounds elsewhere. The evolution of debate in these areas towards new paradigms and postmodern philosophy has hence been relatively slow. On the other hand, for that exact reason, Kansas and Missouri debate programs have not suffered from the radical die-off that has taken place elsewhere; nor has ideological liberalism taken an iron-clad hold, though it is certainly more prominent than one would otherwise expect it to be in this part of the country.

Hence, an ironic result: the only place where economically disadvantaged kids have a meaningful presence in the debate community is the pair of states in which debaters are LEAST likely to give lip service to issues of economic advantage. The debate liberals talk about creating a “democratic community”; the debate conservatives actually practice it.

And strangely enough: while the AVERAGE Kansas and Missouri team is not as proficient in the contemporary debate style as their national counterparts, they are able to make up a lot of the gap through the sheer number of kids who still play the game. As a result, these states produce a significant number of teams which can indeed play the national circuit game. Kansas in particular has never had more success at the national level than they’ve had recently–placing two teams in the top ten at NFL Nationals last year, for instance.

There are other arenas, I imagine, in which the ideological tenets of liberalism and conservatism produce inverse results in terms of social justice. High school debate, though, stands out as a prominent example–and it will be interesting to see what sort of future leaders are produced by the contrasting communities involved.