Planorama #3: TOC, Innovation, and the Inevitability of Plans Good/Bad

TOC 2019

More than a few debates will be decided this weekend on whether the affirmative can read a regime-specific plan or must defend withdrawal of aid in general. The resolution is poorly worded for contemporary circuit debate. It is a vague quasi-policy topic that leaves too much to the debaters to decide.

To remedy this, the LD Wording Committee should consider lists (e.g. “Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Jordan), qualifiers (e.g. “substantially”/“significantly” or “some”/”most”/”all”), and regions (e.g. “the Middle East”). Until then—and I’m not holding my breath—‘plans bad’ and its ilk will persist. As I wrote last time, these shells have become more frivolous: regime-specific affs are exceedingly popular and the average debater’s policy chops are much better than just five years ago. But that won’t deter theory initiators, so long as there are facially plausible limits and semantics arguments (and affs dodge the biggest debates on the topic and instead talk about Tajikistan, Burundi, or Vietnam…).

I hope that debaters have done their homework. I hope that this year’s TOC will be chock-full of counterplans and disadvantages. I hope that despite poor topic wording, we can agree that Saudi Arabia, which is roughly 20% of the metagame, is a topical plan.

That said, I love a good T debate. If you can beat a TOC-caliber debater on the most common negative procedural, go for it. After all, 2018 TOC Finals was decided on probably the most popular kritik today. A TOC semis debate in 2017 came down to RVIs yes/no. I have decided TOC debates on generics ranging from reasonability to skepticism to spreading bad. Some debaters will innovate this weekend with new plans, new kritiks, and advanced theory arguments. They should be rewarded for their creativity, but often the debaters who win go for the tried-and-true, battle-tested arguments they know best. And frankly, affs should be able to defend their affs in April against all objections, whether procedural or substantive.

Innovation?

Still, debaters on both sides of ‘plans bad’ procedurals may need to up their game this year. Semantics arguments have been popular for three or four seasons. Aff appeals to topic literature, stable ground, and the risk of proliferating PICs have been around for much longer. To win the argument against top competition, debaters at this year’s TOC will need to have the basics covered and add something extra.

For the aff, there are two areas of innovation not totally explored. First, affs can stray from traditional plan construction and burdens analysis. Policy debate usually centers on the plan and only the plan. Affs this year might choose to innovate by defending the ‘whole’ resolution with one or more ‘examples’ as I discussed in Planorama 1. They may or may not bar the neg from arguing other examples. Affs could argue that debate should center on the plan only if it is typical, i.e. representative, of the generic class of authoritarian regimes. Second, affs can defend topicality conditions other than ‘entailment’ (the view that the plan text must imply the truth of the resolution). Some say plans must be merely within the ‘bounds’ of the resolution, and other explanations are plausible.

For the neg, the best strategy might be to go back to basics. Winning semantics against top debaters is an uphill battle, and it requires a number of steps: topicality is entailment, regimes is generic, semantics outweigh pragmatics, etc. I wonder if it might be more profitable to say single-example debate is bad tout court. The circuit has been fixated on semantics vs. pragmatics and related debates, so maybe there’s room for 2000s-style ‘plans bad.’ To do this, negs would need a compelling explanation for what type of debate is lost with regime specification and why that matters. (I don’t think it’s ‘philosophy.’) They need to either diminish the value of example-focus or explain its compatibility with the generic reading. They need to get the aff away from ‘Saudi Arabia good’ and make them defend Uzbekistan or whatever other squirrely plans are out there.

Inevitability of Plans Good/Bad

This advice might seem strange and even misguided given the dominance of pro-plan pragmatic arguments over the past several seasons. But I think it’s necessary because of the inevitability of the plans good/bad debate (as opposed to the semantics of bare plurals). As affs become more sophisticated, they will find ways to make this debate about plans good/bad. For one, they can argue that the goodness of plans is itself a reason to prefer pragmatics over semantics. If plans are ubiquitous and the best way to debate, a view of topicality standards that could de facto exclude them (i.e. semantics first) is undesirable. Two, they can argue that the goodness of plans is a reason to prefer a definition of topicality that includes them. A view like entailment that could de facto exclude them is bad to the degree that it does, they’ll say. Third, crafty affs will say that ‘plans good’ is a reason—even if we accept ‘whole res’—to exclude neg counterwarrants or focus on the plan if it meets some criteria for legitimate induction.

Each of these fits a pattern: neg says X view of T standards, the definition of topicality, or fair burdens militates against plan focus; aff says the desirability of plan focus is a reason to reject X. The neg’s modus ponens is the aff’s modus tollens.

Opponents will say this puts the cart before the horse, “We can’t determine if plans are the best way to debate before we’ve defined the topic!” Maybe so, but that won’t stop affs from cross-applying ‘plans good’ wherever they can. Assume arguendo that negs are right on some of these issues. They still need to wade through a messy, layered T debate all in hopes that a judge will agree that (i) topicality should be narrowly defined as ‘when the plan entails the resolution’; (ii) standards like limits, ground, and topic literature are basically irrelevant; and (iii) most affs misunderstand the very meaning of the word regimes. That’s a lot to chew.

The best ‘plans bad’ negatives at TOC 2019 will either have something new to say about (i)-(iii) or no longer rely on them. Some will groan at yet another T-generic debate at the most prestigious tournament of the year, but I’m excited to see these debates develop, and this year’s TOC is a great place to do it.

Coming Up

This edition I made good on my promise to say something about the inevitability of pragmatics. I’m still working on pieces about various models of topicality, alternative case constructions, resolutional analysis, and more. Let me know if there’s a topic you’d like to see me cover!