The negative aff

It has been suggested by a Sailor that it’s hard to argue against doing something when no argument has been put forward in favor of doing it. That is, Sept-Oct forces the Aff to come out against tests, which no one has at any point said are a good thing. In other words, once again the aff is going neg.

The committee can correct me if I’m wrong, but I have detected a trend over the last few years to frame a resolution so that the negative has a clear advocacy in favor of something. In other words, the negative can’t just say no, usually because the resolution already does (mostly with the word “not”). This is spiritually in keeping with the rule that there is no negative presumption, because the heretics who persist in the belief that there is a neg presumption will pick up negs who do nothing but refute the aff, whereas the point of LD is that both sides should have an advocacy. I’ve discussed this at length in the past. The expression “the best defense is a good offense” is wasted on a lot of debaters who think that the best defense is a good defense. Sadder still, some judges join them in this thinking. A switched-advocacy resolution pretty much renders such an approach impossible. In Sept-Oct, the neg has no choice but to argue in favor of tests (or do a mind-twist dance that might have repercussions all along the time-space continuum).

The problem with a resolution as specific as this one is that, as a result of the inverted advocacy, it is now the aff that is sort of boxed into the corner of running pure defense (as my Sailor says, against an as yet unspoken offense). If you’re not arguing in favor of tests, my guess is that you’re arguing against them. What else can you do? Run an aff counterplan? Well, actually, yes, because if you’re not testing, you’re probably forced to come up with some other way to verify that someone is worthy of a diploma…

When a resolution is vague, the switched advocacy probably does enforce better debating by negatives. When it’s as specific as this, however, I wonder if it won’t, as I had originally suggested, end up becoming sort of repetitious early on. That is, there won’t be that much variety in arguments put forth because, given the nature of the sides, there’s no way to reasonably get them out there. Before long every round will be pretty similar to every other round.

But I would suggest that that is not necessarily a bad thing. There have been some topics where virtually every round was identical, in my experience. Capital punishment back in the 90s was one of them, when you could flow it in your sleep after a day or two (I judged a lot back then). But what happened when cases were pretty much identical was that debating was forced to kick it up a notch. It was all about the arguing and not the content. The content was a given. But when it came to arguing about it, miss one step, and you fell off into the crocodiles. Good debaters always beat lesser debaters on the basis of debating skill, not tricky (or tricked up) positions that confused everyone and snuck by the judges. Maybe Sept-Oct will end up likewise.

We’ll see.