The Parli Debate Prepbook: A Community-Driven Guide To Modern Parliamentary Debate
“Let The Squo Work For You”: A Treatise on Opposition Strategy Jeff Jones McKendree University
INTRODUCTION At the 2010 Midwest Debate Co-Op, I delivered a lecture on opposition strategy. Andrew Potter, a former debater for William Jewell College, posted a picture of me with the superimposed words “let the squo work for you” onto my Facebook timeline. At the time, I took it to be a largely well-intentioned joke. As I considered it more seriously, I realized that the comedy was in the simple reality that many debaters no longer believe that defense of the status quo is a viable opposition strategy. In this chapter, I will do my best to disprove that myth. The finals of the NPTE in 2011, 2012, and 2013 all featured an opposition strategy with either a counterplan or a critical alternative at its center. The government won all three of these debates with a combined 17-4 ballot count. This, in and of itself, is obviously largely meaningless because of its myriad mitigating factors, but it stands in contrast to cursory research by Lewis and Clark College Director of Forensics Joe Gantt, which suggests that the government side bias is a myth— Gantt’s numbers from the spring of 2013 showed a government win percentage of somewhere south of 48%.
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