On a simmering June afternoon in Richmond, Virginia, well after school has let out for the summer, four teenage boys in frumpy suits stand at the front of a poorly air-conditioned classroom, sweating and talking over one another. They are arguing about American military interventions—do they lead to power vacuums and repressive puppet states, or prevent genocides and deter belligerent regimes?
The boys’ exchanges, part of the 2026 National Speech and Debate Tournament that I came to judge, bear the hallmarks of a typical round. There’s some informative research (“intervention is 100 times more likely if the afflicted country has oil reserves”), some half-baked analysis (“the failure in Iran makes China less likely to invade Taiwan”), and some comical assertions (“Côte d’Ivoire is not the same country as the Ivory Coast”). The boys do not agree on a single issue. In debate, any agreement is treated as a “concession,” so even superficial and unimportant claims are vociferously disputed.
After an hour, the participants slump into their seats, exhausted, loosening their ties and guzzling water as they anxiously await to learn if they’ll advance to the next round of “the largest academic competition in the world.” When the decision comes in—a 2-1 split for the team I’d voted against—I’m surprised because the round hadn’t seemed particularly close, but not too surprised because I’d lost many rounds that seemed more decisively in my favor. Once, when I was loudly inveighing against a particularly unjust decision, my coach cheerfully informed me that “while the winner of a debate doesn’t usually deserve to win, the loser always deserves to lose,” which is both the nicest and most withering way I’ve been told to be quiet.
I don’t miss competing, but judging at Richmond, I couldn’t help but feel nostalgic for those tournament weekends spent wandering eerily empty schools—equations and lesson plans still up on the whiteboards, squeaky dress shoes echoing through deserted hallways, like in a zombie movie where the heroes return to a place they’d escaped. A good tournament felt like suspended time. The outside world ceases to matter: Text messages, calculus assignments, and Miami Heat box scores all went unchecked.
Something about debate’s separation from the real world—a realm bounded only by the limits of persuasion—has always seemed crucial to its justification. Recently, though, a spate of critiques from conservatives and liberals alike have lambasted high school debate for its insularity and esotericism. James Fishback, the founder of an upstart debate league and recent fourth-place finisher in Florida’s Republican gubernatorial primary, complained in The Free Press that “you rarely see students present arguments in favor of capitalism, defending Israel, or challenging affirmative action.” (This was prior to Fishback becoming a champion of antisemitism.) Maya Bodnick, writing in the Substack Slow Boring, likewise laments the “seismic shift in the debate landscape,” which has meant an influx of “critical theory” and a dearth of “pragmatic policy discussions.”
According to both, the rise of “progressive debate,” a broad category of nontraditional debating styles, has ruined the activity. Bodnick notes one maneuver called a “kritik” as particularly corrosive. Say a round is supposed to revolve around whether the federal minimum wage ought to be raised. A Marxist kritik might argue that any minimum wage discussion upholds a capitalist framework and thus legitimizes exploitation. According to the Marxist kritik school of thought, the “role of the ballot” (i.e., how the judge should evaluate the round) is to vote for whichever team better dismantles capitalist modes of thinking, not the team with more persuasive arguments about raising the minimum wage. Marxist kritiks are just one type among many: Feminist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, and others. For Bodnick, kritiks allow debaters to “hijack the round by proposing brand new, debater-created resolutions that advocate complex social criticisms.” She also has ideological concerns, fretting that they “promote a worldview with pernicious implications for American politics among a group of people who are likely to end up in positions to have a serious impact.”
If you’ve spent much time around debate, you’ve heard these complaints before. And in a narrow sense, Fishback and Bodnick are right: Progressive debate can make debate inaccessible, tedious, and absurd. But they mistake a recurring feature of debate for a novel ideological corruption.
The first format of American scholastic debate began as early as 1642 at universities like Harvard and Yale. Called “syllogistic disputations,” these debates conducted entirely in Latin were reserved for the highest-achieving students. By 1786, however, John Quincy Adams, then a junior at Harvard, was complaining that the debates had devolved into such academic pedantry that the debaters felt as though the school had “writ[ten] on their foreheads DUNCE in capital letters.”
More than a century later, high school debate began reproducing the same problem in new forms. For most of the 20th century, high school debate meant Policy Debate, a research-heavy event in which teams spent an entire year arguing a single resolution. By the 1970s, competitors had discovered that the easiest way to gain an advantage was simply to cram in evidence, giving rise to “spreading,” the practice of speaking at hundreds of words per minute. The National Speech and Debate Association (NSDA) introduced Lincoln-Douglas (LD) Debate in 1980 as a more philosophical alternative, with frequently changing topics to thwart Policy’s fetishization of evidence. But in 2002, after kritiks and other progressive debate techniques infiltrated the event, the NSDA was forced to concede that LD had itself become “specialized, filled with code-words that ordinary people do not understand.”
The NSDA responded by creating Public Forum, a format intended to be accessible to ordinary audiences, which is why they originally recommended that “college debaters, ex-debaters and debate coaches who are not classroom teachers should not judge this event.” Yet within two decades, Public Forum had developed many of the dreaded tendencies it was meant to eschew: Spreading, kritiks, and elaborate “Theory” arguments (a tactic in which one team claims the other has violated some procedural norm—paraphrasing evidence, for example—and should therefore lose the round).
The pattern suggests that the problem is less about ideology than competition itself. Give debaters a set of rules and a ballot, and they will discover strategies to maximize their odds of winning, even when they render the activity less intelligible or less connected to whatever purpose the rules were supposed to serve.
That’s because debate has always been closer to a sport than an academic inquiry. Participants are supposed to weave a series of plausible claims into a narrative designed to survive a round, not necessarily to describe reality. Arguments are deployed, narrowed, abandoned, and revived according to their strategic value. What is true outside the round is oftentimes not an important consideration within it. Taking everything said in a debate literally is therefore a little like watching stand-up without realizing the comedian is cracking jokes. That Fishback and Bodnick were unable to grasp this basic point made me suspect they had the problem backward: What if the danger is not that debate has strayed too far beyond mainstream modes of argumentation, but that today’s gamified public discourse so closely mirrors this absurd high school activity? Say what you will about debate, but at least most of its participants know they’re playing a game. Does anyone else?
Nationals offers an especially useful test for the Fishback-Bodnick hypothesis. A quirky, antiquated qualifications process caps the number of teams per local district, which means that instead of the typical powerhouse schools dominating the field and supplying most of the judges, there’s an unusually large pool of competitors and judges for whom the progressive styles of debate are unintelligible. In theory, then, Nationals should serve as a pastoral ideal for the type of debate that Fishback and Bodnick want to see return.
In reality, however, Nationals demonstrates the inadequacy of replacing one orthodoxy with another. In each round I watched in Richmond, the goodness of America’s foreign policy intentions was simply taken for granted. Recent military operations in Iran and Venezuela, highly relevant to the topic, barely came up. And many of my favorite elements of debate—the intricate clash of competing claims, the strategic decisions about which arguments to pursue and which to drop, weighing the ramifications of one case versus another—were elided for clarity. This dumbed-down mode of debate is merely progressive debate’s photonegative.
Nationals proves that any style of debate is prone to the activity’s competitive effects because debate is not an exercise in thinking to reveal the truth, but a performance of thinking, designed to persuade an audience. In Thinking and Moral Considerations, Hannah Arendt characterizes thinking as “resultless,” “dissolving,” and “aporetic.” Debate is the opposite: You build the strongest case and present it with as much certitude as you can muster (with a straight face).
At a structural level, debate requires students to argue both sides, becoming convincing advocates for positions they may not believe and may have demolished an hour earlier. At Nationals, I watched one team argue that without U.S. military intervention, China would dominate the international system and usher in an era of de-democratization; in a later round, assigned the opposite side, the same team argued that Chinese hegemony would benefit developing countries by increasing foreign investment. Meanwhile, a norm like “judge adaptation,” a standard practice in which teams read the “paradigm” of their judge before the round to learn the style of debate they prefer and adjust their strategy accordingly, reinforces debate’s gamified nature. What redeems the activity is that everyone knows what’s going on: The arguments are instruments of competition; the ballot determines the winner; when the round ends, so does the pretense.
The trouble begins when the logic of the debate round escapes the classroom. The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen has written about what happens when game-like scoring systems colonize activities whose real values are more complicated. In his latest book, The Score, he describes how many realms of daily life are now subject to gamification—the process by which quantifiable scoring systems dominate and distort real-life, values-driven activities, like politics or education.
College rankings (though not the Monthly’s, which attempt to correct this problem) are an obvious example. Universities expend enormous resources trying to improve metrics like acceptance rates because the metric acquires importance independent of whatever educational quality it supposedly represents. As Nguyen puts it, gamification encourages us to “outsource our values”. Instead of choosing measurements that reflect what we care about, we begin caring about whatever our measurements reward.
The debatification of the public square is a disheartening corollary. Arguments about what a party or politician should believe are routinely displaced by arguments about what will win an election. Ezra Klein, the most influential liberal pundit in America, recently urged Democrats to “make political and strategic decisions you find discomfiting … that will make it more likely to win Senate seats in Kansas and Ohio,” like running anti-abortion Democrats. From a different corner of the political conversation, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein argued that Graham Platner should remain in a Senate race after his sexting scandal (but before the emergence of accusations of sexual assault) because “people are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council.”
Candidate debates are also routinely processed as games: Who landed the memorable line? Who committed the fatal gaffe? Who “won” the night, and did it move the polls? The arguments themselves become almost secondary to the scorekeeping around them. Political strategy is not inherently illegitimate. The problem comes when the strategic question begins swallowing every other one. Is a position true? Is it wise? Is it just? Is it worth doing? Those questions become secondary to the one a debater instinctively asks: Does it win?
As Jon Baskin, the founding editor of The Point, recently wrote in a survey of contemporary liberal thought for the magazine, “There remains something discomfiting about the degree to which today’s most prominent liberal intellectuals seem to have habituated themselves to eschewing fundamental moral, philosophical and aesthetic questions altogether.” The obsession with polling, the seamless integration of prediction markets into political analysis, the use of “Wins Above Replacement” models to evaluate candidates—are these not all signs that political discourse has devolved into an interminable round of high school debate?
Even more pervasive is the competition for attention. Here again, the parallels to debate are striking. As in each event, people discover the optimal strategies for winning attention, aided by a dizzying array of metrics which spit back instant, quantifiable feedback, resulting in an online world that feels rote and lifeless. Worse, as generating attention becomes an end in itself, people resort to increasingly mercenary tactics to capture it.
The strictures of intellectual life today mean we’re all at risk of regressing into glorified high school debaters. This is perhaps the one useful insight of the Fishback-Bodnick critique, which inadvertently reveals an inability to distinguish between the gamification and performance of public thinking—that is to say, debate—and the genuine process. They mistake what goes on in debate for authentic intellectual inquiry because they inhabit an information ecosystem that is itself gamified and performative. More helpful than panicking over high school debate, though, would be attempting to cultivate spaces where thinking isn’t a game and where ideas do not need to be scored to matter.
As the world increasingly resembles a round of high school debate, the NSDA’s marketing has leaned into selling itself as a training ground for future leaders. Their promotional materials—which feature the smiling faces of alumni like Pope Leo XIV, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Oprah Winfrey—all implicitly promise that debate is not only a highly valued extracurricular credential, but also a pathway to power. Tim Kaine, who gave the opening address at Nationals in Richmond, spent his speech highlighting how his high school debate experience prepared him to be a senator.
But if my experience debating taught me anything, it’s just how powerless the activity really is. On my last day judging at Richmond, the venue switched from a middle school to the nearby high school. Getting into the building took nearly half an hour due to new protocols enacted after a scare last year at Nationals when what seemed like a gunman stormed the stage. As I waited outside, a memorial banner for a student who had fought and died in the Iraq War fluttered overhead. Walking the halls to find my room assignment, I noticed the “Believe in yourself” and “Reach for the stars” posters that had papered the middle school walls were replaced with recruitment materials for entry-level positions in the police force. School shootings, idiotic wars, inequality which precludes some students from attending college and allows others to spend their weekends debating—does learning how to come up with a clever argument ameliorate any of that?
After my final round judging, I went back to my hotel and clicked around on LinkedIn to see what became of the kids I had spent so much time debating in high school. Almost universally, their professions fell into three groups: Finance or corporate law, AI-related startups, or still coaching debate. Fishback and Bodnick can rest easy: Whatever “pernicious worldviews” they had once professed, none of these kids seem to have turned out much different from any of the other striving students I go to school with now.
I closed my computer, feeling vaguely saddened. Debate seems faintly ridiculous when you feel the weight of reality pressing against it. In each round, you feign the power to change things. Then you step outside and remember it’s all just a game. Still, for a weekend at a time, debate allowed me to escape this world and live in another. Often, I wish to go back there.
The post We’re All High School Debaters Now appeared first on Washington Monthly.
