Against Artificial Clash

I

“Everybody should debate.”

Such an easy place to land. Political science majors, incarcerated people, middle schoolers, STEM students, retired people, political candidates, everyone on campus, the military academies, astrobiologists, political extremists, churchgoers, activists, refugees, kindergarteners, AI bots, participants in a group chat, artists. They should all debate. We should all debate. 

Why wouldn’t this be true? Debate makes you smarter and a better communicator, it expands your agency and reach, it incentivizes bigger thinking, and provides portable skills. So why shouldn’t everyone debate? 

But what I want to ask is whether the mass proliferation of managed adversarial discourse best serves all the subjects, particularly in this historical moment. 

I want to invite us to think about decoupling debate from structural adversariality. This is a pretext for a perhaps more timely suggestion: that debate is ultimately an organizing tool, its dialectic key to collaboration, conflict resolution, and a collective strategization for these uncertain times. 

Two main arguments guide this concept mapping: First, debate education has done amazingly well at helping students think strategically, but has done a mediocre-to-lousy job of teaching students to think and act collaboratively. 

Second, the managed adversariality we impose on competitive debate and reproduce into our debate-across-the-curriculum programs is not intrinsic to debate and often imposes a power structure and context that is parasitic to actual educational and democratic projects. Such adversariality isn't even necessary in “contest” debate because there are many collaborative rubrics that can incentivize debate skills just as well or better than adversarial debate. Compulsory adversariality is a later institutional refinement. We keep using it almost exclusively because we haven’t thought through not doing so, but folks, now’s the time. 

II

I think there are three main downsides to expecting debaters to debate against each other, particularly while heralding debate as a universal good that belongs in all educational spaces. 

First, structural adversity is very often the wrong kind of rigor: Debate is rigorous, and that’s good. My favorite theory-blip is “debate should be difficult but not impossible.” But structural adversariality builds an individualistic/hierarchical culture of rigor that we sometimes unthinkingly praise in our self-congratulations about toughening up our students. People who leave debate because of its interpersonal vibe identify this.  The Invitational Rhetoric movement was correct in that much argumentative discourse incentivizes an epistemology of predation. My question is how much of that culture is due to the structural imposition of side-taking. 

Like NVC and Invitational Rhetoric, I think that power relations will inevitably make their way into deliberation and need to be named and checked and thought through. Unlike those movements, I don’t think persuasive projects are intrinsically violent; it seems unduly Heideggerian to suggest that argument in service of collaborative problem-solving or coalition-building, or good-faith listening-based stakeholder representation, is as predatory as an advertisement for women’s beauty products, Nazi propaganda, or even an anti-drug PSA. History is full of movements that really tried on this: The Highlander Folk School’s multiracial workshops in the 1950s–60s, where labor organizers and civil‑rights activists argued intensely over strategy while maintaining a culture of mutual respect; the Zapatista community assemblies in Chiapas where villages engaged in rigorous, collective decision‑making about autonomy, land use, and negotiation strategy; and the early chapters of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), where neighborhood leaders engaged in sharp, probing deliberations about power‑building tactics within a fundamentally cooperative, relational organizing model. 

What those collectives had in common was that the debate they were encouraging (an extremely rigorous one) was, if anything, structurally invitational. It was intrinsically collaborative. 

Contemporary debate teaches students to rise above the “humbling” effects of losses in the game, mistakes, getting out-strategized, “out-teched,” adversariality treated as a lesson, toughening up. Maybe those are good skills in a harsh world. But we do not teach students how to navigate the multilateral challenges of consensus-building; debaters might be able to learn those skills elsewhere, but that’s a dereliction on our part, because they aren’t out there learning it with the rigor of debate, and consensus-building has as much original claim to the telos of debate as anything else. 

Second, it’s the wrong kind of clash. “Clash” should not have to suppress authentic reasoning. It should invite authenticity with the same rigor as we credit to traditional competitive debate. 

This is especially important as we move towards “Debate Across the Curriculum.” I have worked with classes that wanted their students to debate about the subject matter, public groups and government agencies that wished to sponsor debates, and constructing motions around their subject matter is often artificial-feeling and silly. In such planning conversations, invariably, it emerges that there are more than two sides to every question, that these sides are often based on competing needs of various subject-matter-constituents, and two-sides motions end up feeling artificial, silly, convoluted, sometimes full of caveats. 

Hyper-adversariality seems to produce a silly kind of clash. Any former debater who goes into law will tell you that the law (often cited as an originating model for competitive debating) is far less adversarial than competitive debate. This is true of any other field of which debate is derivative. 

Third, we have the problem of the third (yes, I did this on purpose). The predominance of adversariality in debate requires that we empower an external authority who defines the rules, judges the clash, and determines the winner. What looks like a two‑party contest is actually a three‑part system in which the third (judge, institution, audience, or platform) derives legitimacy from managing the conflict it requires. This shifts debate away from collaborative inquiry and toward performances calibrated for that third party’s expectations. The result is a structure where participants argue at each other but ultimately perform for a more powerful other, further narrowing dignity and agency.

We might try and navigate through these difficulties if they were all intrinsic to the process required to gain debate’s many educational and dialectical benefits. Are they?

III 

Rather than asking: “Is debate adversarial or deliberative?” the better questions might be: “Which historical function of argument should a given debate institution serve?” and “What should we be building and teaching now?” 

I will accept the various reasons people give for how competitive academic debate incentivizes behavior that undermines solidarity. An important corollary point that we have not had a lot of public discussion about is that structured adversariality and the traditional culture of competition are not necessary. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have debate tournaments, debate games, or competition. I’m saying we can decouple Debate Across the Curriculum, and Debate in Community, and possibly Competitive Debate, from structural, compulsory adversariality. 

Synthesis, not victory/defeat, has been the historically dominant and organic purpose of debating. Deliberative structures, full of debate and clash, have been polyphonic rather than binary: positions overlapping, participants revising their views mid-debate and in public, and leaders often synthesizing contributions instead of choosing sides. 

The imposition of structural adversariality in debating is like the imposition of a structural separation between actor and audience in theater. Boal treats the rigid separation between performer and audience as a historical contingency, not an eternal feature of theatre. Earlier communal forms blurred that line, but modern theatre professionalized performers and immobilized spectators, turning them into passive consumers. Closing this boundary reverses that historical narrowing: spectators become “spect‑actors” who intervene, reshape scenes, and collectively rehearse social change.

The same is true of decoupling debate from structural adversariality. Treating the "we must oppose one another" framework as a natural or necessary feature of debating obscures the fact that it, too, is a historical construction. Relaxing that frame allows students to interact, and even compete, as co‑authors rather than opponents. The result is not the absence of disagreement but the restoration of agency, dignity, and shared responsibility for the inquiry itself. Antagonistic debate may organically develop in collaboration. There may be good-faith, deliberatively facilitated structural antagonism. But these are not intrinsic defaults, and the adversariality of even those contingent spaces can be questioned. 

To say that the hyper-adversarial is not necessary is not to say it should be abandoned or destroyed. People participate in all kinds of fun, beneficial, but unnecessary activities. There may be benefits to the exaggerated adversariality of that kind of debating: Boal criticized Brecht for preserving the performer/audience dichotomy in the latter’s otherwise progressive vision of theater. Brecht could reasonably have responded that dedicated performers can give exaggerated, over-the-top performances to maximize the educational potential of the production. I see adversarial competitive debate the same way: it should not necessarily model “the real world.” Rather, certain forms of dialectical exchange can be exaggerated for a particular pedagogical purpose (like debating a year-long, information-intensive topic and channeling competition in a way that produces volumes upon volumes of synthesized research projects, and encourages an esoteric speaking style that elevates logos). 

Moreover, this isn’t a call for us to demand students make all their debating “lay accessible.” Attempts to conform competitive debate to “lay” or “public” communication norms often produce insincere, canned, and even classist public discourse. But perhaps the absence of compulsory adversariality will open space for students to learn to communicate with each other in sincerity and good faith, which is ultimately more valuable than a neo-elocutionary concept of public discourse. 

What I’m suggesting is a rigorous, fun, even esoteric debate space that foundationally abandons the mandate that we occupy opposite sides of a proposition. This isn’t a new idea, but the creation of dedicated, conscientious space for it is new and, I will continue to argue, necessary now more than ever.  

In a collaborative debate game, the “third,” that traditionally external judge, shareholder, authority, shifts into the role of stakeholder or co‑collaborator. Instead of evaluating from above, other parties become part of the shared problem‑solving process, helping participants test ideas and co‑create solutions. “Authority” moves from adjudication to collective reasoning.

We can “argue against each other” but we can also “argue against ourselves” or against a problem, or an institution, or against scarcity, or against Moloch, and can do that together, or in collegiality while peer-grading ourselves and selecting the winners of the tournament as co-celebrants or co-conspirators. We need debate games where players are co-reasoning agents rather than obstacles. We need rubrics that incentivize curiosity with the same rigor as current practices encourage epistemic dominance.