Lay Progressive Argumentation

Lay Progressive Arguments

Introduction

First and foremost, it’s important to mention that lay progressive arguments are only strategic for debaters extremely comfortable, both with the argument they’re running, and with lay-oriented debating. 

Progressive arguments in lay rounds can be incredibly useful for debaters who normally go for prog positions like the kritik, for mixed panels, and for people who want more varied and interesting rounds. 

However, there is a massive tradeoff in having to spend a ton of speech time explaining much more complex positions to parent judges. There is also a huge risk associated with the reward, that judges who have been trained to be afraid of progressive arguments will simply write them off. 

If you do it right, however, you open yourself up to more complex, fun, and interesting rounds. 

The issue these rounds present is not just the challenge of explaining more complex positions; the most important thing is articulating a clear ballot story as to why your argument is more important than clear-cut policy impacts. 

Running progressive arguments in lay debate isn’t just tech debate but slower and without the jargon. Your chances of winning with these arguments radically improve when you change the structure of the arguments themselves, simplifying them and abandoning circuit norms that seem like second nature. 

It is even more important in these rounds than usual to slow your speech. Progressive concepts are hard, and speaking fast gives judges an excuse to write you off. Similarly, you should never use language you aren’t certain every judge will know. Calling the positions you are running counterplans, theory shells, or kritiks will often scare judges who have been trained to be afraid of progressive argumentation.

Counterplans

When running a counterplan in lay rounds, the main difference is that you need to articulate much more clearly why the counterplan is competitive. 

This doesn’t mean proliferating a huge amount of top level responses to the permutation. It means creating a coherent narrative on why doing the plan prevents the counterplan from happening, and vice versa. 

This changes the argument from “we should do this advocacy” (where judges won’t understand why this means they should vote neg), to “the plan prevents us from doing this”, which is far more intuitive.

Remember, lay debate is different from tech debate in that unless stated otherwise, judges will presume what seems the most “reasonable” or aligns with their expectations of what debate should look like. 

Judges also have a built-in (and often unmoving) expectation that the only way a team can earn a ballot is through the affirmation or negation of the resolution. 

This means topical counterplans are usually unstrategic in front of lay judges. They are unlikely to understand why they aren’t a reason to vote affirmative. Furthermore, topical counterplans don’t make a lot of sense against ‘whole rez’ affs (which are almost always the affirmative you’ll be negating a lay round) in the first place, so articulating a competition story becomes almost impossible. 

Advantage Counterplans

Advantage counterplans are one of the best types of counterplans to go for in front of lay judges. In these scenarios, it’s best to structure your advantage counterplan with the counterplan text, the net benefit to doing the counterplan, and then why the plan’s mandate prevents the counterplan’s imposition. 

For example, if the plan mandates that ‘the USFG should ban all fracking’, a lay advantage counterplan could be structured as such:

“Judge, instead of banning all fracking, we should impose a heavy tax on carbon emissions and invest in renewable energy infrastructure.”

“This is a better option because banning all fracking immediately will cause severe energy grid blackouts and destroy the economy [insert DA]. 

“Additionally, imposing a heavy carbon tax would also solve environmental damage [insert advantage].”

“This means that there is nothing that is uniquely good about the aff’s plan. The counterplan solves [insert ‘solves case’ arguments].” 

“Furthermore, a carbon tax is better than the plan: [insert net benefit]”.

“In conclusion, instead of banning all fracking, implement a carbon tax and invest in renewables, because in addition to stopping climate change, it prevents an economic crash and energy grid blackouts.”

Advantage counterplans are especially strategic in front of lay judges because they’re exactly what you’d expect from a counterplan. They are alternate proposals that have tangible net benefits over the aff as well as solving the aff and they don’t rely on weird resolutional tricks to gain their competition.

Agent counterplans

These are also extremely strategic, and they are on par in their in-round viability with advantage counterplans. It is very easy to explain to a lay judge that we should do the plan but with a different actor. For example, the states counterplan:

“Judge, instead of the federal government banning all fracking, state governments should implement their own policies that restrict fracking.”

“This is a better option for two key reasons. First, a federal ban is too rigid and doesn’t leave room to account for the specific local economic and environmental situations that vary wildly across the U.S. [insert DA to the plan’s agent].”

“Second, using the federal government for an issue like this causes federal overreach and is bad for democracy [insert DA]. However, using state governments instead solves both of these issues [insert solvency].”

These counterplans are strategic because the competition is very obvious and it problematizes a specific part of the plan. 

Process counterplans

For process counterplans, it is important to not run what circuit debaters might consider ‘slop’. Parent judges will simply intervene against you if they feel your argument is a ‘trick’ to avoid clash instead of a legitimate problematization with an element of the plan.

This means counterplans which are widely agreed to be not rooted in academic literature, outlandish, unfair, or intuitively harmful are unstrategic.  

That means no consult counterplans, word PIKs, condition PICs, counterplans like ‘uncooperative federalism’, which most agree would collapse the rule of law. 

These types of counterplans are likely to be immediately rejected by any lay judge. Even if they aren’t, their competition is inherently weak, and judges will likely either not understand why this isn’t an affirmative advocacy or have an incredibly low bar for the permutation. 

On a truth level, “the plan must happen immediately and with absolute certainty, so the ‘Consult Spiderman’ PIC is competitive because he might say no and consultation takes time” is a bad argument.

Some ‘unfair’ counterplans, however, can work. For example, PICs:

If the resolution is “Resolved: The USFG ought to ban the corporate acquisition of single-family residences,” a persuasive counterplan could be “The USFG should ban the corporate acquisition of single-family-residences except for nonprofit organizations that aim to provide affordable housing to the homeless”. 

It is important to understand that unless the perm is really egregious, you likely won’t be able to get a lay judge to reject severance or intrinsic perms, so it is better to write your counterplan such that it is still competitive unless the aff severs major parts of their plan. 

Furthermore, when running a counterplan, not just in lay debate, but in all debate, you should frame the round as a clash of policy options. It is intuitive to most lay judges that for a policy to be good, it should be the best option. 

Far more strategic than invocations of things like “opportunity cost” or even “uniqueness”, is framing like this:

“My opponent has missed the boat. Policies don’t occur in a vacuum. You should ask yourself: would you sign this bill, when it is clearly the worst of several options? If the answer is no, you should vote negative.”

Theory

The first thing to understand is that theory debates, which are often incredibly fast and jargon-heavy, are useless if the judge doesn’t understand your argument. 

Concepts like ‘competing interps > reasonability’, ‘drop the argument v. drop the debater’, or even ‘interp, violation, standards, voters’ are nonsense to parent judges. 

The only theory arguments worth reading in lay rounds are resolutional theory. Judges default to a ‘truth testing’ model, so even if they understand something like a friv shell, they likely won’t vote on it because it doesn’t affirm or negate the resolution.

Lay theory rounds should be a question of why what your opponent did makes the round impossible to adjudicate accurately. For example, if the negative reads multiple conditional counterplans that contradict each other, you could say something like:

“Judge, the negative is endorsing several contradictory courses of action. They tell you to have the 50 states fund high speed rail lines and have the federal government halt all public transit and instead subsidize private EV infrastructure. These contradictory advocacies are illogical and make the debate impossible to evaluate, because [insert simplified strat skew argument].”

Judges are often far more receptive to ‘clash’ or ‘education’ based arguments than ‘fairness’. It is strategic here, as well as in all theory rounds, to describe how debate works under each model, what type of arguments are made, and how debate under your model is more fair/more effective/more education. Framing fairness arguments this way, as a question of debate quality, is far more effective than as a ‘fairness paradox’ type argument.

Remember, you have to win theory under the reasonability paradigm, so it’s only worth running if the abuse is real. 

Additionally, most lay judges will default to ‘drop the argument’, so be prepared to go back to talking about substance. Instead of going for theory completely in your last speech, you should tie in the theoretical arguments you’ve made to your substantive arguments to give the judge the impression that you’re still talking about the topic.

Furthermore, for lay judges, theory doesn’t operate on a higher layer than substance. They must be evaluated on the same layer, which means you can’t just say “theory uplayers so vote for me”. You have to show why the abuse is substantial enough to lose the entire round or at least the argument.

Shells like conditionality are viable if the negative strategy is truly abusive. However, the best theory shells to run are shells in which the opponent violated one of the actual event rules. 

For example, if the aff reads a plan in PF, you can run a ‘plans bad’ shell and emphasize both why plans are bad, and that they’re against the rules. 

Shells to avoid are things like solvency advocate theory, disclosure theory, ASPEC or OSPEC. Judges often don’t know what the wiki is and don’t care. They don’t know what a solvency advocate is, and don’t care about marginal fairness impacts unless they affect the resolutional debate.

When you extend theory, don’t extend it like you would extend it in front of a tech judge. Extend it as one coherent argument, the same way that you would give it in the 1NC or 1AR, but shorter. Make sure that there’s a coherent story that ties back to how the debate should look. 

Lastly, don’t frame the debate as “they cheated, so I win” unless they literally violated NSDA rules. You should instead be framing it as “what they did makes evaluating this round fairly and accurately impossible. Instead, you should err [our side] and not consider this argument to compensate for this so that we can have quality topic discussion.” 

Kritiks

Firstly, it is important to understand what a kritik is. There are many, varied definitions; however, the only thing that necessarily defines a kritik, which can be read on the aff or the neg, is that it is an argument grounded in kritikal theory.

Kritikal theory is a subsection of philosophy which attempts to problematize or analyze power relations. These power relations can flow from person to person, person to state, state to state, person to class, or any combination. 

Kritikal theory tends to be dense and hard to understand. Therefore, when reading the lay K, it is important not to treat it as a ‘tech K, but slower and without the jargon’. While this is true for all lay progressive arguments, going slow and using recognizable language is key. This probably means that, if negating with the K, it should be your sole off-case position. 

There are broadly three types of negative kritiks.

First, there’s a ‘you link you lose’ K. ‘You link you lose’ kritiks, like all K’s, problematize a part of the 1AC. However, they include an argument which says that proving the link argument (that an element of the 1AC is genuinely problematic) is sufficient to vote negative.

Put simply, these kritiks use theoretical justifications to say, “They did a bad thing: vote against them”. 

Because these arguments are most similar to theory shells, they can be hard to win in front of a parent judge. However, if the abuse is legitimate (that is, if the 1AC is genuinely racist/sexist/homophobic), they can be incredibly easy to win. 

The second type of kritik is a ‘philosophical competition’ K. Kritiks often suffer from a lack of uniqueness. They claim the aff is a part of a problematic system but doesn’t cause it. Because of this, there is no traditional policy impact to a kritik.

However, philosophical competition weighs the aff’s ideological investments against its effects. That means, if the aff invests in a system like capitalism, the neg gets to weigh the impacts of that system against the plan’s potential benefits. 

This is far more intuitive to parent judges, since certain ethical frameworks like deontology already do a version of this. It makes sense that, if the aff supports a certain system, they should be prepared to defend it. 

The third style of negative K is most similar to a ‘structural violence DA’. These arguments explain why the actual implementation of the plan is bad, for a kritikal reason. 

While this argument is the most intuitive to lay judges, you should consider whether the time tradeoff of having to explain kritikal theory is worth it when you don’t get the strategic value of weighing entire problematic structures against the plan’s benefits.

However, the latter two types of Ks open the door to interesting arguments not available to most disads. Namely, ‘turns case’ arguments. Put simply, if the aff’s epistemology is flawed, the plan will likely either fail or have some sort of negative impact. 

The specifics of this argument depend on the kritik. For example, a biopolitics debater might use Foucault's argument that ‘knowledge is power, but power is knowledge’. Essentially, under a biopolitical system, power is necessary to gain knowledge, which is necessary to create power, which creates a self-sustaining system where the oppressed can never escape. 

This likely turns aff arguments which rely on activism, because the negative would argue that unless we interrogate biopower, the working class will never have sufficient knowledge for organized protest. 

Judges generally evaluate Ks and substance on the same layer unless you make an epistemic or ontological argument that either short-circuits or turns case.

When running a lay K, it is most strategic on panels with 1 lay judge, 1 flay judge, and 1 tech judge. You can also run it on panels with 2 tech judges if you’re afraid that you might not be able to pick up both of them and you still want to leave the lay judge as a last resort. You could also run it on a panel with 2 lay judges and 1 tech judge, but at that point a policy oriented approach might be better. It’s generally a bad idea to run one of these in prelims if you have a single lay judge, but if you’ve already broken and you want to try out something new, then feel free to go for it.

If you have to explain more than 2 new words to the judge, it’s too complicated. You should be able to explain the lay position in layman’s language. For example, if you’re running the lay Deleuze K, don’t try explaining what deterritorialization, lines of flight, multiplicities, assemblages, and rhizomes are. Just explain the K using common sense: “The aff’s mode of thinking is too linear. [insert theory of power warrant and impact]”

There are some lay Ks you absolutely should not run under any circumstances. These mostly consist of the destructive Ks where the goal is to destroy debate. 

For example, running ‘serious gaming’ on a lay judge is generally a bad idea, and you will have an extremely hard time convincing them that they need to accelerate the destruction of debate through pushing even more meaningless slop into the activity. 

This means that something like afropessimism where the alt is to burn the world down will also be an uphill battle in front of a lay judge. Additionally, K’s that undermine the judge’s worldview or make radical claims to the effect of ‘you’ve been lied to your entire life’, like psychoanalysis, security, or Baudrillard, are unstrategic in front of lay judges. 

There are some lay Ks that depend on the judge. Judges come into rounds with more biases towards or against kritikal literature than policy literature, and even less of an expectation to be ‘tabula rasa’.

A judge that is a teacher, a leftist, or studied philosophy opens up more lanes to reading the kritik. A judge that studied economics, gender theory, race theory or the law may be open to kritiks that use literature bases like Deleuze, cap, or fem. 

Lay Ks work the best when they directly connect to the judge. An identity K is strategic if you are part of a minority group you feel passionate about, especially if the judge is too. These are often unstrategic as microaggression Ks. Instead, you should use your opponent’s actions to prove a broader point about debate and the world.

K-affs

K-affs should be topical. Lay judges love topical K-affs. They’ve likely already seen 5-6 very similar debates, and they appreciate a surprising and interesting interpretation of the topic. 

Non-topical k-affs are generally unstrategic, but if you do decide to go for one, make sure you give the judge a really good intuitive reason why the aff must be non-topical. Lay judges are generally very receptive to the TVA.

Conclusion

In conclusion, lay progressive arguments are a fun and interesting way to develop your argumentation skills. More than the debate itself, how we debate matters, so it’s important to be respectful, open-minded, and curious.