What is the negative?
The negative’s role is to negate the affirmative and disprove the desirability of the plan. Thus, the negative does not have to prove that the plan is a bad idea, but simply that it is not a good idea.
The negative does this through three types of arguments:
- Disadvantages are a reason that the plan is bad – they point out a negative consequence that would arise as a result of the plan.
- Counterplans are an alternate proposal to the plan – the negative must prove that the counterplan is an opportunity cost to the plan. In other words, doing the plan forgoes the opportunity of the counterplan, which the negative must prove is more desirable.
- Negative case arguments, which simply refute the affirmative’s case/advantages.
This page will cover negative case arguments. These arguments are a good way to mitigate the risk of the affirmative’s advantages, which is helpful when you have a disadvantage, as you can argue that the risk of the disadvantage outweighs a heavily mitigated risk of the affirmative’s advantages.
The Negative on Case
The negative should attempt to poke holes in the affirmatives internal link chains – even just one hole in the chain can bring the affirmative’s entire impact scenario crashing down, if it is well supported by evidence. The details of how to execute case in each negative speech will be discussed in The 1NC and The 2NC.
Let’s take the Federal Jobs Guarantee aff example that we used earlier.
This chart helps visualize what arguments you should target in order to refute the affirmative’s advantage. If you prove that economic inequality is not increasing, or that the plan cannot solve, you can refute the affirmative’s advantage with just one argument, if done well. However, if you, for instance, have an argument that US breakdown would not draw in other countries or go international, the affirmative could simply say that they do not need to win that argument. After all, the affirmative has 2 other impacts: the Pinkerton evidence, and the Kemp evidence. While you can still make that argument, it’s important to realize you cannot solely rely on it.
Before reading down further, think about exactly what arguments you can make in order to dismantle this internal link chain.
Here are some examples of some possible arguments:
- Inequality is declining.
- Inequality doesn’t cause war.
- The plan does not solve inequality.
- US civil war won’t happen.
There are also “indicts” of the opponent’s evidence that you can make. For instance, you can point out that the Kemp evidence doesn’t just say that inequality leads to extinction, it also lists factors like complexity, external shocks, bad lucks, climate change, etc., as possible contributors to societal collapse. This is an argument called “alt causes” – there are alternative factors which lead to the aff’s impacts, that the aff cannot solve.
Take a look at the file named “Neg – Federal Jobs Guarantee – Michigan 7 2023 STARTER” on openCaselist. If you scroll down to the section labeled “AT: Inequality ADV,” you can see some examples of evidence that can be read in the 1NC and 2NC when answering case.
Presumption
Presumption is an argument that says that if every argument in the debate is null, then the negative wins the debate, because the affirmative has failed to meet their burden of proving that the plan is a good idea.