James Fishback aims to restore the art of the healthy argument

Photos: Alex Munguia

James Fishback, a former star high school debater and debate coach, dropped a bombshell at Bari Weiss’s The Free Press site on May 25. In a piece entitled “At High School Debates, Debate Is No Longer Allowed,” Fishback described how woke ideology is taking over competitive debate, as it has so many other venerable American institutions — colleges and universities, a large swath of corporate America, and women’s competitive sports.

As someone who views debate as my most formative high school educational experience (see Outlook, “Go Forth and Argue”), I was appalled and immediately reached out to James. Over nearly two hours of conversation, I discovered that he is not only a highly effective gadfly skewering the National Speech and Debate Association (NSDA), which has run high school debate for nearly a century, but a true entrepreneur in the realm of ideas.

At the age of 24, he re-imagined high school debate from the beginning, and created new debate formats that would inculcate competitors with traditional debating skills while avoiding new pitfalls. The new debate league that he built, Incubate Debate, began holding tournaments in Florida in 2020 and has already grown to be the biggest debate league in the Sunshine State. And perhaps most importantly, he’s demonstrated how a new generation can defend its principles with civility and professionalism while avoiding the intellectual snobbery and “canceling” that’s dominating too much of America’s public discourse.

Incubator of Political Power

High school debate, in my day, was the quintessential nerd activity: No one debated who  could have made the basketball team. But those nerds — less than one percent of American high school students participate in debate — are disproportionately found later in life in positions of power, such as Supreme Court justices or United States senators.

Today, however, the debate space has changed. As Fishback puts it, America’s future leaders are marinated in an environment in which students fear to “present arguments in favor of capitalism, defending Israel, or challenging affirmative action.” The long range repercussions are frightening to contemplate.

In my day, admittedly a long time ago (though I can still remember every round I lost my senior year and why the judge was a dunce), our debating team would set off early in the morning for tournaments, approximately 15 weekends a year, accompanied by our double file cabinets of index cards weighing up to 20 pounds apiece, which we lugged from one round to another, four rounds in all. We debated a single topic all year — e.g., compulsory arbitration, a cut-off in military aid, universal national service — though at some tournaments, teams had to debate both sides of the topic.

Each of the four debaters, two per team, was allocated 15 minutes of speaking time — ten minutes for the opening speeches and five minutes for rebuttals. (At a few tournaments, the speaking time was cut slightly, and three minutes allocated for cross-examination.) Time limits were strictly enforced.

The implicit assumption of debate in those days was that the truth is likeliest to emerge from the clash of arguments — i.e., John Stuart Mill’s free marketplace of ideas. That attitude is the antithesis of the present-day zeitgeist, which maintains that truth belongs only to a class of anointed ones, and all who fail to recognize their superior wisdom are either bigots or hopeless fools.

No longer does competitive debate stand apart from the zeitgeist, as Fishback documents.