Politics is an unseemly business and is best confined to bumper stickers and articles by Owen Jones, where it can go safely unnoticed. Every so often, though, the political has an unfortunate tendency to stray beyond its natural territory and force itself upon unsuspecting bystanders, like Donald Trump’s tiny, wandering hands.

Many of you will share in my disappointment that the second presidential debate brought a marked change to the thus far temperate and dignified nature of the race for the Whitehouse. Expecting a thorough and respectful examination of policy, what we instead got was a clash so considerable it could really only be viewed properly from space.

Now, I am not, by nature a decisive person; at least I don’t think I am. Yet, even to me, there seems little reason to prolong this election any longer, other than in the hope that it might yet outlive some of the candidates. With a view to speeding up the whole process, and knowing that the Cherwell comment section could well swing the result of this election, I have prepared the following forensic summary of the second debate.

What is a ‘Town Hall’ Debate?

Those of you who are unfamiliar with the set-up of a ‘Town Hall’ debate may have been surprised to find that it takes place in what appears to be a large Crèche for the politically indisposed, run by Anderson Cooper.

Although the setting was novel, the plot passed predictably enough. Trump and Hillary wiled away most of the 90 minutes pacing aimlessly around the stage and directing hysterical pleas into a silent audience like characters in a Samuel Beckett play.

Must I concentrate?

The question-and-answer format is tailored to those for whom more than two minutes worth of information on any given question constitutes a dangerous overload. Though the two moderators frequently discouraged both the candidates from exceeding their time, Trump was heard to complain at one point that it was ‘one on three’; though presumably that is just the kind of encounter he will bragging about next time he hits the locker room with Billy “ninth-most-famous-Bush” Bush. 

Who best took advantage of the bar stools?

Hillary’s determination to merely sit on her bar stool was really quite uncreative, and in honesty, may well have cost her my vote. The Donald, on the other hand, used his to full effect: standing behind it as if it were a shield, toying with it suggestively with his chipolata fingers, and wielding it above his head in the final moments of the debate to administer the death blow, or ‘Turbo Trump’, to his opponent.

Who provided the best talking points?

It has come, somewhat inevitably, to the point in the election cycle where all anyone seems able to talk about is pussy, specifically ‘grabbing’ pussy. Here we go again, we all sigh. Will these politicians every give up being so predictable and accept that the public are tired of the same old genital-obsessed rhetoric? Thus it was a welcome relief when Trump threatened to incarcerate Hilary, with just the kind of devilish charm he knows the ladies can’t resist.

Who provided the most effective distractions while their opponent spoke?

The split-screen frame in which the debate is filmed invites the non-speaking participant to use mime in order to undermine their opponent’s argument.

Donald, whose lips appear to both be engaged in a ceaseless competition to become the upper one, is at a clear advantage when it comes to this kind of political diversion. Hillary, on the other hand, focused on demonstrating that bemusement, usually a fleeting sensation, can actually be sustained over a one-and-a-half hour period. 

Who Won?

Anyone who actually watched the debate will know there were no winners, only losers.

Timothy Garton Ash has a stern, unaffected look about him. I meet him in his office at St Anthony’s. He is possessed of a rather subdued elegance, his answers arrive in sincere and vigorous phrases, he suggests that we stand as we talk. Of the armful of books he has written, the latest is Free Speech, a defense of his own line of anti-authoritarian liberalism.

I wonder whether it isn’t part of the liberal disposition to be always defensive, continually on guard against perceived threats to essential freedoms. Of course the set of freedoms are a thing constantly under negotiation, Garton Ash acknowledges. But now we really are “in a period where illiberalism is on the rise” and not just illiberalism, but “anti-liberalism”. The history of freedoms is one of troughs and peaks: if the days of Gladstone and Mill were a renaissance of liberal thought, and the post-Cold-War era a time of “liberal triumphalism”, then now we are in a period of bitter contestation: its “liberal modernity versus illiberal modernity”, and the real danger is the silent “salami-slicing” of liberal values.

“At British universities freedom of speech is under threat from two sides”, caught “in a kind of pincers”. On one side is the government, whose counter terrorism legislation “in its original version, was truly insidious”. The bill, which proposed the policing of forms of non-violent extremism, led Garton Ash to make well-publicised comments earlier this year that even Jesus Christ would be banned from addressing campuses under such an ill-conceived policy.

While governing powers can be relied upon to accept essential freedoms only begrudgingly, what might be harder to explain is the pressure on free speech “from below”: the increasing disregard for free speech amongst today’s most activist students. He tells me he wants to be careful though: “I’m very suspicious of middle-aged people explaining the young”; at the same time, he finds illiberalism amongst the young “very concerning”. Perhaps today’s studentry are simply overindulged and hostile to challenge; important too is the “echo-chamber” effect of the internet, that plays a role in buttressing an intolerance of opposition; or, Garton Ash smiles, perhaps it is simply that “liberalism has been the hegemonic ideology for a long period of time. To be young is to kick against the pricks: the pricks are liberals!”

He is reluctant to despair wholesale with today’s youth. “There’s a kind of Colonel- Blimp-like rejection” of much student activism “as being anti-free-speech…I think it’s important not to damn the lot.” The Rhodes Must Fall movement of last year, for instance “was not an infringement of free speech”, he argues, although it may have pushed free speech issues to the fore in certain oblique ways. Trigger warnings too he finds he can accommodate. Of course there are “ludicrous examples”: students at Columbia trying to impose warnings on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. “Give us a break,” he exclaims. But in principle they seem no different to the warnings given before distressing news reports, for example. “The one that I really do think is a problem”, he continues, “is no-platforming… This is not a group of students saying ‘we don’t want to hear Germaine Greer or Julie Bindel’. It’s one group of students saying that another group of students should not be allowed to hear someone they want to hear, and that is a clear violation of free speech [that] I don’t think we should accept.”

Would he ever consider no-platforming? “There are many, many speakers I wouldn’t want personally to invite!” But aside from speech which is strictly unlawful, the proper response to outrageous speakers is the challenge of “robust debate—what the Americans call counter-speech.” Students who advocate no-platforming sometimes claim it as their form of free expression, but “I don’t buy that. It doesn’t seem to me to be persuasive.” Garton Ash seems to think that such arguments stem not from a rejection, but a distortion of liberalism. “Partly by taking part of the logic of egalitarian liberalism to an extreme,” we arrive at “a logic of no offence” with a radical edge, whose attraction is its “primary colour, simple solutions.” Liberalism, he adds, is deeply suspicious of all radicalism.

I ask if ideological hostility ever moves him to question whether freedom of speech is really such a universal value; is it something people accept unthinkingly, rather than feel the moral force of? The question of universalism is one that concerns him deeply. It’s no good to simply confront the world proclaiming that “there was a bunch of white men who between 1600 and 2000 worked the whole thing out”. Rather, he aims to present the arguments, “stripped away of their cultural integuments”. He is deeply opposed, though, to a brand of cultural determinism that holds some societies to be fundamentally hostile to free discourse; after all, “free speech…is the freedom that enables and secures most other freedoms”. The cruel irony is the catch-22 of free speech: “you can’t really know what you think about the subject until you’ve heard all the arguments for and against”. Yet despite this, perhaps because of it, what he has discovered in a life spent traveling through and writing about dictatorships is that people there “are a hell of a lot more interested in free speech than many people in free countries are.”

Another aspect of the contemporary retaliation against free speech comes in the form of an intricate “identity politics of free speech”. This increasingly prevalent position holds that the only tolerable form of expression is self-referential, that legitimate speech is limited fundamentally by the identity of the speaker. Garton Ash is keen to point out that “if we’re talking about the experience of African women, then I would want to listen particularly closely to African women” in that instance. “That’s common sense, logic and actually a sort of human decency. But it’s a big, and I think illegitimate, leap from that to say only African women can talk about the experience of African women, because in that case only white middle-aged professors at Oxford would be entitled to speak about the experience of white middle-aged professors at Oxford and then all wider debate logically becomes impossible.” It is vital that we avoid “absolute rules enforcing civility by law”. Instead we ought to “try to achieve what I call robust civility, which has a certain cultural, intellectual sensitivity to these things, but allows all voices to be heard.”

Bertrand Russell had a line that a writer’s most cherished ideals are rarely those he states overtly. During our conversation my impression of Garton Ash is of an owner of a deeply-felt humanism and a borderless sympathy with political struggle, giving foundation to his liberal ideals. He recently wrote of his devastation at the result of the EU referendum, calling it the “biggest defeat” of his political life. He talks of the increasing ruthlessness of anti-liberalism in China, of the iniquities of the coercive, self-interested tabloid press, and the horror at the “assassin’s veto”, played in attacks such as those on the editorial board of Charlie Hebdo. Clear above all things is his desire to spread the conversation wide, and to resolve human differences through argument and reason. “I hope that’s what we do at this university” he tells me; after all, “there’s an art to talking about these things.”

Oxford does a wonderful job at educating historians, biologists, classicists, geologists, and almost any other academic discipline. But it does not do a very good job at educating people.

In the United States, university is a place of experimentation. You try many subjects, before deciding which one you’ll major in. Maybe you take a few classes in biology, a few in history, a few in Russian literature and a few in geology. Maybe you would like to double major in philosophy and geology, or drama and chemistry. That is allowed and normal.

In Britain things are different. When applying to Oxford, I realised that I would have to choose between my two academic loves. One the one hand, biology — the beauty of evolution, the intricacies of the natural world, the moral purpose of conservation and the excitement of field work. On the other hand, I had history—the imaginative study of how life once was, the great intellectual and political debates of bygone eras, and the cast of fascinating characters which shaped the modern world. Faced with such a dilemma, and being unable to study both at Oxford, I flipped a coin and hence find myself studying biology.

There is much to be said about the English style of education. Someone with a BA in any subject at Oxford will know far more on how to do that subject than someone with a BA at a US university. But there is something to be said for the opportunity to shop around, for perhaps a year or even a term, before specializing too deeply into one field.

I love biology, and do not regret applying for it. But for all the joys of biology, I still love history. Oxford is a great university, but it could be greater. There is a benefit in a liberal education, and Oxford and her students would benefit if there was a tad more flexibility in the subject combinations, and the ability to try things before delving head first into only one subject.

At the end of last week, Haiti began three days of national mourning to honour the near 900 people who died as a result of Hurricane Matthew. Its effects within Haiti have been immense, with tens of thousands of homes obliterated and over 350 000 people in need of aid.

Mainstream media outlets took two varying approaches in covering the disaster. Unsurprisingly, the news within the US focused on the effects upon the citizens of the east coast of their own country, whilst appearing indifferent to the high number of Haitian fatalities.

On the other hand, UK Media outlets did recognise the devastation caused in Haiti, yet it fundamentally lacked nuance. They carelessly juxta-positioned Florida’s hasty and organised response to the disaster, involving millions of citizens being encouraged to evacuate their homes in cars full of essential supplies with the Haitian response, blaming its mass devastation on its poor infrastructure, ineffective government, and lack of a coherent plan if such a disaster should strike. It also drew attention to Haiti’s vulnerability to natural disasters due to over half of the population dwelling in shantytowns in a nation still recovering from the aftershocks of the 2010 earthquake and the subsequent cholera outbreak.

As illustrated above, Haiti is portrayed in a very negative light. It is often forgotten that Haiti was the first independent nation of Latin America after the first successful transatlantic slave revolt during the Haitian revolution of 1791-1804. It is this dismissal of history which leads to the wretched portrayal of the country by foreign news media.

It is not by lack of luck that Haiti is so poor. After becoming an independent, slave-free nation, Haiti was coerced into signing a treaty with France which involved paying 90 million Francs, 40 billion US dollars today with the consideration of inflation, as a form of reparations for the loss of “property” of slaves by the French plantation owners, having only finally paid off this unjust debt by 1947. Yes, unstable and corrupt governments, such as the Duvalier rule have played their part over the years. However, how much could the country have developed and progressed without this crippling debit?

International NGOs such as the Red Cross, Oxfam or UNICEF, though benevolent in their intentions, cannot continue the “rinse and repeat” cycle of shoe-horning aid into Haiti whenever a natural disaster strikes. This is mere short term solution which fails to address the historical legacy left behind by French colonialism. It is no use highlighting the lack of response in the poorest country in the western hemisphere without acknowledging the historical framework and role of France’s colonial legacy in doing so.

It is not enough for France to send 32 tonnes of humanitarian aid to appease its own moral conscience, while failing to attempt to reconcile its own damaging colonial legacy within Haiti. It is this historical background, which has lead to Haiti’s fragility and its consistent reliance on international aid. This is something several news outlets should bare in mind in their ignorant portrayal of Haiti.