[eDebate] Reflections about debate and policymaking

[Josh Branson]

The connection between debate and “real world policymaking” is something 
that gets tossed around a lot both in debates and in our other forums, so I 
thought I’d share my reflections on how debate prepared me for the CSIS 
experience.

This is something I’ve been pondering for a while now, and since I’m 
probably done going to tournaments or cutting cards on any regular basis, I 
thought I would post it now, as kind of my closing thoughts on my experience 
with debate.

Caveats:
A) I am not the authority on this question, obviously, and I am far from an 
expert on the policy process. This is going off my experience this year, for 
what it’s worth.

B) I love debate. I think it’s the greatest thing in the world. None of this 
should be taken to think I don’t love debate; I could write something just 
as long about the benefits of debate, but the issues in this post are the 
ones that trouble me most and ones that might surprise some people.

C) I was guilty of many of the things in this post.

Anyway, I have 5 main points.

1. Debate’s reliance on crappy evidence and arguments

I wrote about this at length back when we were arguing about the Harrison 
card, so I won’t rehash all that stuff again. But I will say that this was, 
for me, one of the two biggest differences between debate and the “real” 
policy arena. Copley News Service (I don’t mean to overly focus on that 
card, it’s just the most obvious example) and its ilk routinely pass for 
pretty much 100% credible evidence in debates, where it is completely 
useless in the policy world.

I’ve been wondering for a while how serious this issue is…and I think that 
it’s fairly serious. Debate trains us as debaters and coaches to look for a 
certain type of evidence (see Antonucci’s quite elegant explanation of my 
thoughts on this matter: evidence that contains simple and easy-to-consume 
analogies, flamboyant claims, simple and direct rhetorical claims etc), and 
at least for me, I’ve found myself falling into that trap when doing CSIS 
work this year at times.

When debaters read academic journals or law reviews in debates, they quickly 
skip over all the ‘background’ and ‘history’ and much of the grunt legwork 
that underlines all the final substantive claims of the article, jumping to 
the conclusions of each section. We want conclusions listed with a succinct 
summary of each warrant, so that it’s easy to read quickly, simply 
explained, and rhetorically direct.

This really hit me hard this year, when working on things that I thought I 
was already pretty damn knowledgeable about---nuclear weapons. I went into 
the year thinking I was going to be God’s gift to the nonprolif department, 
because ‘none of these people have had debate, so they won’t really 
understand all the nonprolif issues as well as I do, no matter how much 
expertise they may have.’

Well, that’s not the way it worked at all, at least for me. No doubt in a 
collegiate debate judged by one of ya’ll I could have killed them all on the 
Pan K, probably even if we talked slow, but in the real world, I was kind of 
surprised to find that the knowledge generated by debate proved to be fairly 
damn cursory and artificial. I could rattle off a list of most of the 
arguments for/against most of the general nonproliferation doctrines, but a 
lot of the empirical and factual basis for these arguments was completely 
missing in my brain. I could make the basic claim for almost anything in the 
field, but the technical issues that underlines a lot of them (the names and 
locations of the Russian CW destruction plants, an understanding of how the 
fine points of the budget process works, how a capital market sanction would 
actually be implemented, where did we get our intelligence that revealed 
Chinese serial proliferators selling bombs to AQ Khan, how does a centrifuge 
cascade work and why exactly would multilateral sanctions undermine Iran’s 
ability to get uranium gas piping technology, the names of the key players 
in the various foreign governments that make nonproliferation policy etc) 
was all missing.

Maybe this stuff sounds pretty boring, and some of it is, but this is the 
type of stuff that really determines whether or not policies are successful 
and whether or not they are effectively promulgated. But the details pretty 
much get left out in debates, replaced by a simplistic and power-worded DA 
that culminates in ‘nuclear winter.’ To my surprise, when setting out in the 
nonproliferation world, you don’t get to make grand pronouncements about the 
impact of funding Nunn-Lugar on US soft power or whether funding it would 
cause a budget deficit which would collapse the global economy and cause 
multiple scenarios for nuclear war. Instead, most of the work that is done 
is deciding which and what type of Russian facilities to allocate the money 
to, knowing the specific people within the Russian government we can trust, 
which types of nuclear disposition is safest and what types of 
transportation we should use when moving spent fuel back to storage, etc. 
When dealing with these discussions repeatedly, I found that debate had 
provided me a very sound abstract conceptual frame through which to analyze 
the general issues being raised, but little in a way of meaningfully 
engaging the policy process.

Of course, debaters can learn this language. There are plenty who have. But 
I’d wonder whether or not people who claim that debate has trained people 
for this life are mistaking correlation with causation.

Two other interesting conclusions:
A) To all the people who attack debate for propounding an overly elitist and 
undemocratic discourse and undermines good broadly appealing public speaking 
skills:

I think you’ve got it backwards.

Yes, a lot of debates involve jargon, no question. But at least in my 
experience, I found that debate provided me the opposite. The times I was 
most confident at CSIS were when we were doing public debates or discussions 
in front of unqualified audiences. I could take on even the most senior 
experts; in these types of forums, I could out debate them and rhetorically 
counteract their vast experience/knowledge advantage. On the flip side, when 
I was in conferences with only experts in the field, I often felt at a 
severe disadvantage. In forums like this, bad arguments get called out, and 
rhetorically powerful but intellectually flimsy claims are pretty much 
non-starters. Debate experience wasn’t a ton of help.

In terms of research, I did feel that all the debate research I’ve done 
provided some advantages and gave me a marginal edge over a lot of other 
people at CSIS, but nothing enormous. Most of the people there, even though 
they’d never done debate, can research just as well as the average college 
debater (ESPECIALLY on technical issues). I realize there are problems with 
the sample size etc, but it made me think twice about the infallible 
research advantages supposedly generated by policy debate.

B) How to make debate more like the technical policy world?

Narrower debates. PICs are vital to this (sorry, Duck). Thinking back on my 
8 years in debate, the topic about which I can best converse with experts 
about is the design of emissions trading schemes. That was because the 
literature was deep and the prevalence of 
upstream/downstream/auctioned/timetable PICs narrowed the debates and forced 
a real in-depth discussion.

I just don’t think we get that in a ton of debates, because most PICs are 
either wanky rhetoric PICs (and yes I was an extreme culprit) or something 
even worse like Consultation.

Thinking back on it, I don’t think that the legal topic was worded 
particularly poorly, I just think that our strategic norms of 
judging/debating create a lot of problems in generating the type of 
education a lot of us want. But one of the most striking thing for me about 
last year’s topic was that I learned more from Repko’s post about his day at 
the Supreme Court than I did from all the debates I judged combined.

In any event, how to create the types of narrow debates that will general 
real sustainable expertise on topics is tough. I think that we’ve got to 
learn how to become accepting as a community of analytical smart arguments 
to answer carded-yet-stupid arguments, maybe start accepting intrinsicness 
(something that I might post on some other day) as a way to eliminate 
politics DAs and consultation CPs, and start modifying our theory 
dispositions to be willing to call out bullshit CPs (see DHeidt’s new judge 
philosophy), and finally moving away from the cult of new and surprise 
arguments (see below).

This will also involve changing the way we teach kids as they enter debate; 
I know I, for one, am going to change the way I teach camp this summer to 
include at least a little of these thoughts. Of course, the focus must 
remain on winning above all else, but I think that that pursuit can be 
synthesized with a change in some of our debate practices.

2. Why an elite or technical discourse is important

My second conclusion is directed at people who decry the topic process 
because it’s too technical, too narrow, drown out the personal or the things 
that people want to talk about.

Again, my opinion is that this is backwards.

I think it’s a major problem that more of the people who conduct policy and 
who are influential in the process are not well-schooled in the actual 
empirical pragmatic details of the policies that they are advocating. I’ve 
read a significant amount about Iraq lately, and got to talk to a bunch of 
people who were intimately involved in the process, and one of the primary 
problems was that too much of our policy was executed in a cavalier and 
emotion-laden fashion.

The dangerous pursuit of the “liberation of the oppressed” Iraqis at the 
expense of all the obvious problems entailed with that pursuit, the complete 
“lack of a plan,” for how to stabilize the country, and an utter ignorance 
of the technical or real policy issues facing a peacebuilding operation of 
that magnitude---these are all issues that come up REPEATEDLY when 
discussing the reason we went into Iraq in such a cavalier and short-sighted 
manner.

A bunch of the more scathing indicts of the topic committee’s work---that 
the topic is too technical, that it undermines creativity etc…these are 
traits that for me are reflected in some of the most loathsome policymakers 
we have. Bush is by all accounts an idiot when it comes to policy expertise, 
but he’s the president that most people would love to have a beer with, and 
one who has let his personal conviction guide his policymaking more than any 
I can remember. His administration appears to conceive of the world in 
relatively simple generic conceptual dichotomies (stay the course vs. cut 
and run, terrorists are good or evil, our intelligence is either 100% 
accurate or it’s not). Is that really what we want our topics to boil down 
to? A “be nice to the Middle East” topic? Because it’s in the “extra 60 
words” that the real problems with policy are revealed, and it’s there that 
we find the difference between an effective invasion that removes a horrible 
dictator from power and one which kills thousands of people and causes the 
region to implode.

Yeah, you can rail against the elitism and technical nature of a lot of the 
academic literature all you want, and say that policy debate is 
exclusionary, but I think that we need more of the elite technical people 
and fewer of the smoke and mirrors BS artists running things. The policy 
world could use more Naveens and DHeidts.

3. Qualifications matter.

Way more than I thought. My boss this year was the guy who basically ran our 
proliferation policy under Clinton, and has decades of experience 
negotiating with foreign officials, of dealing hands-on with our nuclear 
posture, of having access to intelligence at the highest levels etc. No 
matter how sweet we debaters think we are at analyzing things, there is a 
real difference between people like that and those of us who lack that 
experience. In debate, this guy’s opinion is basically equal to a J.D. 
Candidate’s. In any other arena, that is a laughable proposition.

In debate, by far more important than how credible or qualified your 
argument is how NEW it is. You surprise the other team with a new strategy 
(no matter how idiotic) and the chances are good that you will win. Of 
course, that doesn’t really work in the think tank world. I actually think 
that debate would be way more educational and realistic if teams were forced 
to disclose their arguments before hand. I understand all the problems with 
mandating this, and realize it won’t happen, but I do think that the cult of 
newness at times is profoundly uneducational.

4. A large percentage of “fairness” impact arguments in debate are stupid.

People’s obsession with “fairness” or “competitive equity” is misguided. One 
of the most valuable things about debate is adapting to unfair 
circumstances. If the neg runs conditional CPs, get better and deal with it. 
If the aff doesn’t specify their agent, figure out something else besides 
your same old agent CP. This is what the policy world is like; you’ve got to 
react and deal with tough situations. Do I think it’s fair that it’s hard to 
get published without a graduate degree or personal connections? Not really. 
Are most people in the policy community open-minded and unbiased? Nope. 
Policymaking is about dealing with unfair and difficult situations, and 
sometimes debate can be the same way. Looking back, for me a lot of the most 
intellectually invigorating parts of debate were also the hardest and most 
“unfair.” It was unfair that Klinger was so fast and clear, it was unfair 
that MSU at times read short shitty unpredictable evidence, it was unfair 
that Fullerton didn’t have a plan and was able to emotionally intimidate 
judges, it was unfair that a lot of people resented me because I wanted to 
win and didn't exert much effort socializing at tournaments, it was unfair 
that some judges were biased and we had to adapt our arguments, and it was 
unfair that Emory had more card cutters on their team than we did. I’m sure 
a lot of people feel similar or worse things about debating against 
Northwestern. But adapting to this stuff is part of life, and certainly part 
of the policy world. But in debate we certainly cry foul a lot. Maybe too 
much.

5. Switching sides: debate’s biggest virtue

The one thing that I think debate does that is vastly superior to the policy 
world is forcing people to advocate things in which they don’t believe. That 
was one area in which I had a big advantage over other people in the field: 
people in general had a hard time articulating and/or anticipating the 
opposite point of view from their own. That is something that gave me as a 
debater a professional advantage, but also something I think that would 
greatly benefit the policy process. I wish more people making decisions had 
had debate training, if only because they would then be forced through the 
process of defending the other side of some issues.

This is also a devastating answer to people who complain about the topic 
process. Maybe you think the whole process is evil and bullshit and we “only 
debate about Khalilzad.” DEBATING ABOUT IT DOES NOT MEAN YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE 
IT.

One of the most productive things for my education was forcing myself to 
debate the K over and over again. Yes, I primarily did it for strategic 
reasons, and yes I had three of the greatest teachers on Earth for these 
arguments in Morales, Lundberg, and Fitzmier, but just the process of 
debating all of the arguments that I started off thinking were total 
bullshit had a profound effect on me. It has liberalized my worldview, made 
me more tolerant of ideas foreign to me, but has also deepened my conviction 
and enhanced my ability to defend some of my original beliefs.

That’s what I’ll take away from debate. But as far as “providing good policy 
training,” I don’t really know if it does. When making a real policy 
decision, you can’t just break a new aff or wax someone on the Nietzsche K. 
You’ve got to actually defend your policy, discern whether or not it would 
be a good idea if implemented, and then figure out how to get it 
implemented. This is a process with which debate seems to have little to do. 
  We spend too much time bitching on edebate about how the topic committee 
screwed up, how topicality is violent or uninteresting, getting our State K 
or our Bush DA updates ready, writing our word PICs, and too little time 
learning about the topics.

That being said, I wish I was going to be around for the Middle East topic. 
At first glance, it portends to be one of the timeliest and deepest topics 
we’ve had in a while.

Josh Branson

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