Lincoln-Douglas Debate from First Principles

A short primer for the activity.

Ethan Nathaniel Elasky

Chapter Contents

Affirming

The 1AC

What is important in constructing a 1AC? How can you set yourself up for subsequent speeches well?

Being affirmative comes with a host of benefits. You get to choose your own niche within the resolution. You get tons of prep time to come up with tricks that make being neg hard. You get to give the last speech. You don’t have to prep pre-round as much as negs do. You don’t have to disclose your 1ARs (although some people are arguing this now). Anyway, being aff has a host of advantages that most people don’t take advantage of.

I’m going to be intentionally brief on this section specifically because I think most of what goes into writing an affirmative case has to do with strategy and can be found in Part 4.

The whole purpose of the 1AC is to set up the best possible 2AR. The 1AR should use significant portions of the 1AC and read new evidence only when necessary. I’ll repeat: in later speeches, use 1AC. You should be winning most debates on the substance of your initial evidence (which you properly extend). Generally your 1AC will be of higher quality than your other positions.

First, you need advantages, which are basically like disadvantages except they’re in support of the plan, rather than being opposed to it. The only constraint is that it’s important for impacts to be solved if and only if the plan passes. This is because the NEG gets counterplans to try to solve 1AC impacts in different ways.

Second, you need solvency evidence.

Solvency evidence is evidence that says that the plan solves whatever harms your advantages isolate. This evidence should function as a pre-empt to neg arguments/counterplans. On a topic with a lot of agent counterplans, you might read evidence in an aff that uses Congress to pass the plan that says *ONLY Congress solves—executive and judiciary action fail for X reason*. Or you might read evidence that says *only our process works* as an answer to process counterplans more generically. Then, when the neg basically drops solvency like they usually do, you’ll have an easy time extending these cards as takeouts to their arguments.

Solvency cards need to be applicable to a significant percentage of NEG arguments. As a rule, 1AC time is less valuable than 1AR time. The 1AR can account for and respond to the 1NC’s answers while the 1AC can’t. A balance is key—don’t sacrifice 1AC time for stuff that is unlikely to be relevant, but also don’t make your 1AR unnecessarily difficult.

The next thing I’ll talk about is how to prepare to use your 1ac. Good 1acs will make a diversity of arguments, and it’s your job to be ready to explain all of them. The easiest way to do this is to simply read every card and list all warrants you’ve highlighted within it. You’ll start to see which warrants answer which negative case arguments, disadvantages, and counterplans. You should add these to your aff file and make them short enough to be readable in the 1ar. These arguments can be on the short end because after all you’re answering 7 minutes of 1NC content in a 1AR so judges will give you a bit of leeway in terms of length as long as you cover everything.

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to block out your case answers. As Scotty says [here](https://hsimpact.wordpress.com/2015/12/02/who-wants-more-points-for-their-2ac/):

> if you give a [1AR] that is less than 80% blocks that is a failure to prepare. I’m not saying you need to be a slave to pre-written arguments and never deviate from them, but … if you have heard of [an argument] you should have a block. A block means you have thought in advance, prepared a set of arguments, highlighted/revised them to make them as efficient as possible, and ranked them in order of quality. If you skip arguments in a [1AR] block something has gone wrong- if a later argument is more important it should be earlier in the block(with rare exceptions). You should have practiced reading your blocks and know roughly how long they take[.]

(1AR replacing 2AC, the speech in policy debate after the 1NC)

So we’ve talked a bit about 1AC construction. Enough for you to get the gist, anyway. If you want to go more in-depth, see the following:

The 1AR

How should the 1AR be structured?

So we just talked about the basics of the 1AC. Now let’s talk about the next AFF speech—the 1AR.

When coaching newer debaters, I agree with the general guideline of putting the case first in the 1AR. When coaching intermediate/advanced debaters, I agree with a lot of Scotty’s analysis [here]( https://hsimpact.wordpress.com/2017/10/17/being-a-better-2ac-2-the-case/).

I generally think that the 1AR case page should start with an overview that quickly extends advantage(s) you might want in your 2AR. It should be 1-2 sentences. Rex Evans illustrates a good overview [here](https://youtu.be/NSLzc8RYCYU?t=1663s). After your overview, you should announce that you’re moving to the line-by-line (remember transitions?) and then start answering those arguments. You should use embedded clash (https://e.bearblog.dev/argument-extensions/) to dispatch these arguments in the fastest way possible. Also, make sure to answer arguments strategically. If you’re not going for your China argument, you can strategically concede a defensive argument and skip the rest of the case answers (as long as they don’t apply elsewhere).

One more advanced thing that can come between the overview and the line-by-line is a framing issue or two; these should have a good reason to be above the line-by-line. It’s usually good to do this when you have some general response to all of their case answers. It can be something like “they conceded our example of the plan happening in country X where it was extremely successful which disproves all their case answers” or something like that. These can be prewritten under your overview for you to read/skip depending on the situation.

The biggest place where 1ARs get tripped up is the case page. A general rule is that you respond in half the time the 1NC made the argument in. So if the 1NC reads 2 minutes of case answers, you should be spending at maximum a minute on them.

After the case page, you should prioritize things based on threat. (Note: for intermediate/advanced debaters, you should include the case in your list of priorities. Sometimes it is low priority). Topicality and theory are always high priority since they function on a layer above the affirmative. That means that the judge will vote NEG 100% of the time if you win your AFF while they’re winning T. After that is usually the critique, since critiques make framing arguments that render your aff unimportant. After that is disadvantages and counterplans, in whatever order seems most strategic.

Just remember that you should never make the same argument twice in the same speech. If an opponent makes a similar argument in two different places, you can tell the judge to group them and then answer them as one. Or, you can just stick to answering things strictly top-down. Once you get to the second instance of the argument, you can say you answered it above on X argument.

Sometimes a 1AR will seem very difficult. Say your opponent reads 7 off-case positions in the 1NC. This 1AR will certainly be near-impossible if you approach it the same way as you would other 1ARs. The trick is to change your strategy. Scotty has a good primer on this [here](https://hsimpact.wordpress.com/2018/10/02/improving-2ac-coverage-vs-garbage-fest-1ncs/), intended for policy debate, so I will reiterate and expand on his points.

For the negative to fit so many off-cases into one speech, they have to sacrifice quality for quantity. Usually this means reading a bunch of incomplete arguments and passing them off as “positions.” For instance, disadvantages missing uniqueness, counterplans missing a solvency advocate/solvency evidence/competition, critiques missing alternatives/framing/impacts, 1 sentence topicality arguments, 1 sentence theory arguments, etc. These are not “real” arguments in the sense that you don’t have to treat them as seriously as you would others.

The next few chapters will introduce the bare-bones of counterplans, critiques and topicality. At the end of each chapter, I’ll come back to what to do if pieces are missing. This will provide you with a good understanding of each position by forcing you to understand why each piece of a position is important.

Sample Affirmatives

You as the affirmative have a lot of choice. As the aff, you can choose your own corner of the resolution (whether your aff belongs, though, is a question of topicality, which will be discussed later). There are a few different styles of aff that I think are important to discuss.

1. Big stick

The most obvious aff from a policy perspective is the “big-stick aff”—this is the aff that has a plan that takes large action, claims robust solvency, and has 1-2 advantages and a few extinction scenarios to fill their six minutes. Their strategy is to take a big chunk of the available aff ground and smack negs with it. These affs can be strategic versus critiques because they do represent a large shift from the status quo and can win by saying extinction outweighs K impacts. Policy strategies work well against these affs because these larger affirmatives create a lot of negative ground, allowing room for topic disadvantages. These are the affs I recommend novices start with, which I talked about earlier.

Examples

2. Soft-left

The next most obvious aff from a policy perspective is the “soft-left” aff—this is an aff with a softer, more critical ideology that usually picks a narrow adjustment to the status quo. These affs come in two flavors.

The first type chooses the finest slice of affirmative ground, a small slice at that, and leaves the negative with low-quality responses. Against these AFFs, negatives must sometimes resort to topicality or the critique, since these affs’ topicality is often questionable and there isn’t much NEG disadvantage ground to work with. These affs come with a tradeoff—the less they change the status quo (avoiding disad links), the less persuasive “case outweighs” is when debating the K. These affs will often purport that they effect a big change from the status quo vs the K in order to make “yes solvency” and ”root cause fails” arguments more easily.

The second type of soft-left affirmative uses more affirmative ground but focuses on probable impacts rather than less plausible extinction-level scenarios. It may use “probability > magnitude” impact framing arguments to pre-empt the inevitable “Extinction first” 1NC. This type of affirmative is good versus the K as well, as its solvency claims are more proximate and represent a larger change from the status quo.

If you’re interested in learning more about soft-left affs, [this](https://hsimpact.wordpress.com/2018/07/26/umich-camp-lectures-17/) combo Michigan Debate Camp lecture set explains these concepts well.

Example soft-left AFFs:

3. Hard-left aff

The next type of aff is the resolutional hard-left aff. This aff is usually concerned with resisting some sort of power structure (perhaps biopower, or capitalism), and may claim to care more about the intention behind affirming than the practical consequences of implementing an affirmative policy. These affs are less popular, and not by coincidence. The issue with many of them is that they usually lack intrinsicness to the topic at hand, i.e. process/agent counterplans completely destroy them. I would still hesitate to read those arguments against them as a novice since it makes the debate too easy—instead, it’s more fruitful if, as a novice, you read utilitarianism and some disadvantages/advantage counterplans to try to solve some of their offense. Better versions of these affs will have answers to process counterplans so be ready for those.

Examples:

Another type of aff is the non-resolutional aff. These affs usually contain 6 minutes of impact turns to T-Must Defend the Resolution. Answers include T-Must Defend the Resolution, the critique, case answers, and PIKs out of certain words/representations/concepts in the aff. Non-resolutional affirmatives are strategic because you don’t have to research an entirely new aff every topic, block updates don’t take that long, and there are fewer blocks to write because the answers to these positions are so limited. The downside is that most arguments they make against framework are just not that true, which means negs have a decent shot at winning with it. Framework is the go-to 2NR, but other 2NRs are definitely more winnable/easier depending on context (e.g. if the 1AR only spends 10 seconds on the K, then go for it!).

Examples:
- [Strake Jesuit ZD’s Reparations AFF](https://hsld20.debatecoaches.org/download/Strake%20Jesuit/Dixon%20Aff/Strake%20Jesuit-Dixon-Aff-UT%20Longhorn%20Classic-Round2.docx) from the Lincoln-Douglas Nov-Dec 2020 federal jobs guarantee topic - [Michigan KM’s AFFs](https://opencaselist15.paperlessdebate.com/Michigan/Krakoff-Morgan%20Aff) from the 2015-2016 college policy topic on US military presence

Two last types of aff are the philosophy aff and the nailbomb aff. The philosophy aff is mainly concerned with intentions like the hard-left aff and suffers many of the same problems. These affs are usually combined with truth-testing, a paradigm of evaluation that forces the judge to vote for the aff if the aff proves the resolution true and the neg if the neg proves the resolution false. The nailbomb aff usually relies on philosophy and truth testing but then also makes a lot of blippy arguments about semantics and theory whose logical implications are that all negative strategies are impossible and/or unfair. These affs are diminishing in popularity as policy-style debate becomes the norm in LD and the judge pool for them shrinks, so I don’t encourage people to prepare to advocate these affs for tournaments.

Examples: