Counterplans 101 Part 2 – More Types of Counterplans

“The best personal defense is an explosive counterattack.” - Lt. Col. Jeff Cooper, WWII and Korean War Veteran

Today we continue to look at different kinds of counterplans (check out part 1 here). Just a reminder, this post isn’t about what kind of counterplans are valid–that's coming soon. Instead, this is about different kinds of counterplans and how likely they are to succeed.

You may call these types of counterplans different names. In a debate round, hopefully you won’t use any of this terminology–if you are running a “minor repair” or “the opposite plan” you don’t need to tell the judge that–just run that counterplan! We are just using this terminology to make it easier to discuss different options that you have when running a counterplan.

Let’s get started:

The opposite plan 

This is exactly what it sounds like. The negative presents the exact opposite plan of what the affirmative is doing. In this case, the debate just boils down to which narrative is more convincing. The only time I (Luke) ran a counterplan, it was the opposite plan. It was a quarterfinal round at a qualifier, and my partner and I didn’t really have anything to lose because we had enough points to go to the national championship. We had discussed running this counterplan for a while and so we felt as if it was worth the risk running it just to say we ran a counterplan. We were seniors, so this was our last real chance to do something like this without risk. It worked in our favor, as we won this round in a 2-1 decision.

In the Federal prison system, crack and powder cocaine are treated differently. An individual must have much more powder cocaine to get a 5-year sentence than crack cocaine. The affirmative presented this system as unfair, because crack cocaine and powder cocaine have the same narcotic impact upon the individual who uses them. They argued that crack cocaine is traditionally used by the impoverished, whereas powder cocaine is more popular amongst the wealthy. The affirmative argued that this disparity contributed to racial inequality within the prison system and proposed to increase the amount of crack cocaine needed to trigger the 5-year prison sentence to be equal with that of powder cocaine. My partner and I did not argue with any of their harms, we simply argued that the better plan would be to lower the amount of powder needed to trigger the 5-year sentence to be equal with that of crack cocaine. In this way, we are punishing everyone equally, but we also changed the narrative, focusing more on punishing the people who sell cocaine. We turned the narrative of the round away from inequality and more towards being tough on crime by doing the exact opposite of what the affirmative did. Our narrative was more successful because we were both tough on crime and respected equality, whereas the affirmative plan was only doing one of those things. If your opposite counterplan can have such a narrative, this kind of counterplan can be very effective.

With resolutions that can go in both directions (any resolution that doesn’t specifically say you have to “decrease” “increase” or something like that), including this year's NCFCA and Stoa resolutions, opposite counterplans will usually be topical counterplans. Again, this post isn’t about what kinds of counterplans are valid or not, we are just talking about the different kinds of counterplans.

The encompassing counterplan 

This type of counterplan encompasses the affirmative plan but broadens the scope. For example, I (Luke) ran a policy my senior year to pass a bill requiring private prisons to release their prison records upon public request. This was done in order to hold them accountable. An encompassing counterplan would also pass the same bill, but include extra monetary incentives for private prisons to improve their prison conditions. The negative argued that both accountability and incentives are needed. If the negative can prove that the affirmative plan does not provide enough benefits to provide a holistic solution whereas the negative does, the negative could win. This is slightly different than an amendment counterplan because you are adding new mandates to broaden the scope of the advantages or solvency as opposed to just avoiding a specific issue.

This type of counterplan is risky because you are passing the affirmative exact mandate, and so all of the argument hinges on your additional mandate that broadens the scope. If you go too broad, you risk losing the ability to solve the harm, in which case the affirmative wins even if their plan addresses less issues than yours does. Only run an encompassing counterplan if you have thoroughly talked through your extra mandate and have some form of evidence or argument prepared to back it up. 

The other big risk is that you are still arguing for passing the affirmative plan, just passing something else as well. Thus it can be very hard to persuade judges that they shouldn’t vote for AFF, since you seem to be arguing for AFFs plan too.

To our fellow debate nerds: we aren’t going into details of whether this can meet the burden of mutual exclusivity. If you would like us to talk about that, post in the comments below and we can share more details there. If you’re wondering what mutual exclusivity is, the next post will talk about it.

Generic counterplans

There are a variety of different generic counterplans that can be run against any case. These include: changing details like funding, timeline, or enforcement; commissioning a study on the issue before passing a policy; and others.

It’s usually hard to sell a generic counterplan, because it's just that–generic. It tends to sound like you had nothing else to say about the case, so you decided to run a generic counterplan. I haven’t heard any stories of successful generic counterplans in recent years in NCFCA or Stoa.

However, some of these ideas can work well as non-counterplan arguments. For example, if an issue is complex, you could argue that it needs further study and we shouldn’t just pass a policy now. If the AFF doesn’t have good funding or enforcement, you could point that out.

The unrelated plan

When I say “unrelated plan” I don’t mean that the plan is totally unrelated to the AFF’s case. That would be unlikely to work at all. Instead, I mean that the plan is totally different from AFF’s plan, but it solves the AFF’s harms/brings about the AFF’s advantages without causing disadvantages. For example, if AFF’s plan was to eat lettuce, and their advantage was to improve health, we might run a counterplan to eat Spinach. We might argue that we have greater advantages because of Spinach being healthier than lettuce. Perhaps at the time we are debating, lots of lettuce is contaminated with E. coli, so we could run a disadvantage of E. coli infection from AFF’s plan, since that isn't an issue with our plan. Many counterplans fit under this category.

We hope this helps you learn more about the variety of options you have when it comes to running counterplans. There are many categories of counterplans. There are also many subcategories that are unmentioned here mostly because they are hybrids of different types of counterplans. Counterplans are not run very often in NCFCA. It does help to be prepared though, so knowing the types of counterplans is the first step in beating them or running them.

In the next part of this series, I’m going to discuss what a counterplan must do in order to win the round. In other words, we will talk about the counterplan “burden of proof.”