Debate as Theater of Social Change
Preface to Republication
In 2016, I was one of several debate scholars and alumni invited by Shawn Briscoe to contribute an essay to an anthology he was putting together to be called Why Debate: Transformed by Academic Discourse. At the time, I didn't think I would return to full-time debate instruction; I was working as a policy director for one organization and a legal education director for another--both nonprofits devoted to their respective areas of sustainability policies. Shawn, who is one of the best and fiercest advocates for debate education, gave the Why Debate contributors who’d moved on from the world of competitive debate wide latitude, but expected us to talk about how and why debating helped us become so successful at so many things. I argued that in addition to debate’s modeling of an ideal kind of thinking and discourse, debaters also learn about the tensions that complicate that thinking and discourse.
My essay, and probably most of the others in the book, took the long-term stability of democratic government, professional fields, and educational institutions for granted. A decade later, no conversation about debate’s transformative potential can do that. I did discuss how power imbalances in the real world complicate the rationalist, problem-solution logic on which debate partially relies. But I did not realize at the time that there would soon be much more to say about post-rationalist democratic politics.
Two important conclusions from the piece are still hills upon which I will fight: first, the necessity of confronting power imbalances and teaching debaters to engage both “inside” and “outside” of institutions; and, second, the similarities of debate and theater. Specifically:
1. Debate and theater are siblings and comrades in ways we have barely talked about in the field. That’s why participatory theater, and a variety of Boalian material and games, feature in the CoLab curriculum. Debate and theater have more than performativity in common: they give “participants a space to articulate and perform critique and change . . . mindful of the need for reciprocity between the participants themselves, and between participants and audience, both policy debate and political theater create spaces not only to learn about the nuts and bolts of politics, but also inequalities and injustices, and strategies for overcoming them.”
2. The power imbalances and structural injustices that complicate both real-world community engagement and, through foundational critical arguments, the game of policy debate, shouldn’t be ignored, erased, or “smoothed over.” If we want debate to be useful to students’ engagement with their communities, we have to be aware of the way actual politics and culture are anti-debate, and come to terms with the limitations of “optimistic,” liberal-administrative (“let’s petition the federal government with a logical argument”) models of policy debate. Engaging (rather than attempting to resolve) that tension will teach students the discernment of “when to work within systems and when to question them and agitate for their reinvention.”
I appreciate the opportunity Shawn Briscoe gave me to articulate an early version of many of the curricular elements we are building here at CoLab.
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Debate as Theater of Social Change
from Shawn Briscoe, ed, Why Debate: Transformed by Academic Discourse, 2016
After coaching debate for 15 years, I entered the world of public policy advocacy: researching problems and proposals, writing position papers and drafting model laws, orating and arguing my organizations’ positions, and coaching activists on argumentative and political strategies. The skills portability from academic debate to legal and policy reform work is easy to see. Debaters come to implicitly understand ethos as a combination of preparation and performance. Research, preparation, listening, refutation, and comparison are academic debate’s skill analogs to public discourse. Because of this, I know hundreds of public office-holders, attorneys, and professional agitators who debated. Debate gave us an edge.
But something else dwells in the world of public policy advocacy, something below the surface of, or always encircling, the professional rules and norms of public service and the policymaking process. Where one expects to find reasoned conversation about competing policy proposals, one finds advocates playing power games behind the scenes that condition the ability of various stakeholder groups to get into the room in the first place. Policy professionals’ need for funding and institutional support functions as a gatekeeper for proposals that uphold predominant power relationships. Classism, racism, sexism, and various layers of privilege interact in a world of chronic insecurity. Because of this, the best proposals don’t always win the day. What can experience in academic debate inform us about navigating a world rife with inequality and distorted communication?
As a competitive academic game, debate ideally rewards advocacy informed by research, listening, and comparison. Players take turns, follow rules, and debate about some of those rules. To an extent, competitors must adapt to the stylistic and argumentative preferences of their judges (insofar as those are known), and so the game also rewards a certain amount of empathy and an ability to articulate arguments in ways that make sense to others.
There are ethical lessons embedded in the game too: we cannot ignore our opponents’ arguments, and in fact, to respond appropriately to them, we must strive to understand them at least partially from their point of view. For half of the debate, we have no choice but to listen to them, and the better we listen, the better we can respond. In close debates, judges will reward a nuanced representation of the truth of our opponents’ arguments weighed against our own, rather than an unfair dismissal of them. Debate rewards a proactive attentiveness—an ethical gesture as much as a strategic one.
Then there is academic debate’s nuanced treatment of rules. Debate is rule-based, but many of the rules are subject to argument and interpretation. Competitors make arguments about what their opponents should and should not be allowed to do. Engaging in such conversations helps students understand the norms—communicative, legal, and procedural—that govern civic engagement, law, and policymaking.
Participants learn that rules both govern and are subject to interpretation, are both determinative and ever-changing, articulated and unstable. Former debaters will find these paradoxical truths about rulemaking when they take a civil procedure class in law school, or learn about administrative and agency rulemaking, or try to run a nonprofit board meeting or a town council hearing.
Above all, because it is a game, the skills that debate rewards will be maximized in the skill sets of participants. They will emerge from debate with superior critical thinking skills, the creativity to imagine causal chains and anticipate unintended consequences, the ability to read complex literature for the purpose of finding cogent arguments, the thickness-of-skin to listen to others passionately disagree with them, the understanding of both the necessity and mutability of rules, and the wisdom that comes from learning, again and again, that being correct in one’s own mind is insufficient; that what is important is to appear credible and correct to others. All of these skills and lessons transpose into engaged civic life, whether former debaters devote their entire careers to legal and political advocacy, or whether they use those skills to periodically engage as members of their communities on issues that concern them.
This is all very important. But notice I began by using the word ideally. Debate ideally rewards this hard work, attentiveness, audience empathy, ethical commitment to listening, and fair representation. And even when debate doesn’t fully live up to those ideals, it still tends to produce those skills. But in order to understand the whole picture of how academic debate prepares us for public and civic engagement, we need to dwell more attentively on its failures: Material power imbalances and the prejudices and hierarchies of real life have problematized the potential of this rule-based communication game to conduct itself equitably and empower its participants equally. Over the past several years, American policy debate has ruthlessly, with precision (and a lot of resistance), criticized itself. Its practitioners and educators have discovered that many of the competitive and stylistic norms are not race-, gender-, or class-neutral; that many of the ways we’ve facilitated debate education and competition have privileged the same groups and classes that historically dominate academic, political, and civic life.
For most of its history, American policy debate did not explicitly confront these power imbalances or acknowledge them in its form and content. Philosophically, participants mostly assumed that the point of the game was to introduce and defend a good idea. Performatively, participants mostly assumed that the rules and norms of debate (including the more esoteric norms of speaking style and research burdens) benefitted all participants equally. Once the debate community actually began to confront these issues, the form and content of competitive debates evolved rapidly—often awkwardly—into new sets of argumentative and performative norms.
This evolution is still taking place. Debaters will raise questions of oppression and identity—race, gender, sexuality, disability—as framework-level issues to be used as mechanisms to evaluate procedural and substantive arguments. They might analyze the political economy of policymaking in order to point out that they aren’t really roleplaying as policymakers. They might point out that the think tanks, scholars, and corporate media that make up policy debate’s literature base are mired in ideological biases. They might even challenge the esoteric communicative norms of rapid delivery as exclusive and socially aloof. In some instances, debaters might do none of these things, choosing instead to advocate a policy reform and answer pragmatic objections to their advocacy. But all participants in American policy debate at any given tournament or in any given pre-season topic discussion might expect to engage in any or all of these new, critical variances.
But aren’t these new approaches a destructive departure from the skill-building necessary for civic engagement and political activism? In fact, they aren’t. These variances stem from inequalities. Confronting those inequalities in debate can help us understand the messy and capricious power relationships of real social and political life. American policy-style debaters, in particular, have cultivated a new set of stylistic approaches and argumentative themes that are self-reflective and critical of institutional power and cultural exclusion. Because debate is performative and not merely analytic—that is, because participants perform their arguments—structure can exist alongside critique of structure, rules and conventions simultaneously followed and unfollowed.
As a self-conscious, political theater performatively articulating socially relevant arguments, academic debate reminds me of the dramatic theories and political theaters of Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal. Brecht and Boal both developed their theories of drama, and their creation of innovative theaters, in times and places of severe material inequality and political repression. In Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, Brecht fought against the rise of fascism by developing a dramatic theory of egalitarian political empowerment. He believed that performance should spark and facilitate rational self-reflection and political education in the audience. By viewing dramatic production as a collective construction rather than a mere fantasy, Brecht believed audiences might see their own collective reality as constructed and, therefore, changeable through collective democratic action.
In Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s, when the country was on the brink of military takeover, Augusto Boal evolved Brecht’s self-conscious political theater into a theater of the oppressed, including a breakdown of distinctions between actor and audience. He fashioned a type of theatrical experience where spectators became actors, setting out to determine the solutions to social and political problems presented in the productions. Both Brecht and Boal fled and eventually returned to their home countries, and both pursued these radically democratic visions of theater-as-argumentation throughout their lives.
Like those radical performative theatrics, academic debate is a self-conscious, performative articulation of social arguments, and as such a game, has the potential to open and cultivate performative argumentative norms in spaces that are not universally available in our civic and political life. Political theater has been vital in revolutionary communities because it offers participants a space to articulate and perform critique and change. In transparent and deliberative ways, mindful of the need for reciprocity between the participants themselves, and between participants and audience, both policy debate and political theater create spaces not only to learn about the nuts and bolts of politics, but also inequalities and injustices, and strategies for overcoming them. Political theater and policy debate—when committed to both intellectual rigor and openness to criticism—provide space for advocates to better understand both the injustices and the emancipatory potentials of public life. Some debate educators are not keen on the recent critical and highly politicized turn of academic debate. While many of their concerns are understandable, they may be off the mark. To thrive, live justly, and cooperate in the complex decades to come, people will need to walk the line between reform and revolution, knowing when to work within systems and when to question them and agitate for their reinvention. Exercises of power and talent must be informed by solidarity with the powerless. Protest and revolt must be informed by knowing how systems work and policies are implemented. Academic debate’s tension between rule-based conventions and boundary-pushing criticism ought to remain unresolved, reason and revolt theatrically juxtaposed. That juxtaposition is civic engagement in a nutshell.
