resolution is always a compromise we have got used to why not talk about it again this is why the next talk is entitled institution for resolution disputes and our speaker is Rosa Menkman a Dutch artist curator and researcher and founder of IRD or the Institute of Resolution Dispute a big applause for Rosa please and the stage is yours thank you thank you thank you for being here on this like very late part of the whole conference and I mean when I was checking in everybody seemed so tired it was really funny to experience this like latency in everybody so I'm Rosa Menkman I'm from the Netherlands everybody speaks German to me here it's really funny because my name sounds German but actually when you say something in German I will speak back in English but please speak to me when you want to in 2015 I'm gonna talk from 2015 onwards I was invited to be a research fellow in a big Institute in the Netherlands to do research on resolutions and this is a huge honor for me and I dropped everything in London where I used to live at the time and went and moved back to Amsterdam which actually was not my favorite city in the world at all so I went there and three days before my my contract started which we had already signed like a month back and everything I was fired because the head of the department had looked into my accreditation and my PhD that I was doing at the time had started somewhere else and had not the right accreditation since I ported it from Cologne to London and so I would have to revisit the whole institutional network and get my stuff right in time to start now that was not possible and so I was how do you say that properly for a live stream I was like drop the kitty that so I got really how you say like sad in Amsterdam alone without a cause and kind of angry with institutions and this is when at a certain time I got out of my darkness and went to the Californian desert to live alone in the middle of nowhere and this talk will be about two works that I made or two institutions two exhibitions one is the institutions institutes like double or a plural for resolution disputes and then the second one which is kind of a more in-depth research is behind white shadows and I made these and the research kind of started in the desert where I was looking from my house into this little village you have to imagine the desert there's not a lot but straight from my patio I could see this this is from Google Street for you so you can't really see it very well but this is little Baghdad and little Baghdad is a military place where people bombed the hell out of night so you wake up you hear and feel this infra sounds then you know the military is having some fun or something like that not from yeah so I was inspired by a research that was done in the zone by Trevor Peglin Trevor Peglin you all should know is a hacker and artist and yeah political artist and technologist and he made a work called symbology that's a research on all the military patches in the USA he went to area 51 drove around it and in interviewed people to see what all those patches meant and he found out there is a secret language in these patches and so while I was there and I could see and hear and feel all these secret military operations I still had no idea what was happening so I was really inspired by like not really understanding all the data all the information all the feelings you have while you're sitting on your patio and this with the symbology research made me to create these two patches which are kind of like the keys to two works the institution institutions for resolution disputes and behind the white shadows one is the black on black patch which is a encrypted patch and the second one is a white on white patch and it glows in the dark because I like that with this started also because you know the Institute had dropped me but I still wanted to do my research I started to do it by myself and I started to call it beyond resolution mostly because I was dropped from the school but also because you know I wanted to understand what was happening between these things that I can sense but that are not resolved for me to be read so I started this beyond resolutions to website and I research resolutions from vernacular a habitual genealogical a tactical and a skill perspective so I think these are five very interesting ways to break resolutions down and to understand that resolutions are not always ways to solve an image a text whatever but also way to compromise certain data and to not be able to understand it to make things unintelligible or to obfuscate or even cut out particular pieces of information so this was not the first time I had a fight with an institutional network when I was young already I was really inspired by you know like all kids actually I was inspired by the universe as specifically sound in space and I wanted to research sound in space but my teacher told me it's not possible because there is no sound in space only years later I found out that there is actually sound in space you need to just transcode it in the right way you can transcode specific frequencies and that's when I started to understand there's much more to data than just the ways we normally show it so I started in my classes to explain to my kids I've been teaching this year to colloquia here in Germany and also some in other countries just visiting lectureships there I was starting to teach about the rheology of data a rheology is a term from physics and it means kind of the fluidity of matter and the siphoning of data so here you see you know just a normal spectrum that you can listen to but you also see a little rainbow very simplified rainbow and I teach my kids in one of the first classes that you can actually listen to rainbows if you just sonify them and what that means because there's a whole political field here in medicine and in big data research sometimes so not sonifying certain pieces of data gives us a completely new insight this year I had to teach a class of painters and they don't do computation at all they're actually scared of it one of the kids told me yeah but you know you make art or you make artistic work with your computation how do you find emotions in that how can you I mean it's not possible computers are without analysis whereas actually the emotion in paint you know you put it in there so I have all these like very basic problems that I encounter when I teach these kids about very complex ways of thinking about your data or complex or maybe so not complex that it becomes complex for them like taking away all the institutional frameworks and really going to the core and how can you translate them so this is a work by B Flix and I tried to use it as an example of how data and painting can come together this is a string of data that he painted on a piece of fabric but then he gives you the program that can be any object and you can wrap it around the object and then it becomes a painting depending on the program that you know shows that piece of data I think it's a very interesting way to connect the materiality of paint and the materiality of data and to kind of bridge the gap and I'm kind of explaining these things also because I think all of us are educators in a certain way specifically if you're in hacker you're dealing a lot with opening up information and trying to make it like understandable for other people or yeah obfuscated then you have to understand how other people read it so what I'm trying to do is also give you some problems that I've been running into while I've been teaching this whole year like crazy to make some side money since I have no more money now you've been thinking probably like what is this crazy presentation she's giving with the clouds and weird shots slides it's part of a work that I've made a few wait I have to go to here yeah it's a 3d work it was inspired by work that was called compressed process it was a way to get my videos out of the quadrilateral frame because one way that resolutions make us think about our media is the way they are embedded so if I put my video for instance on Vimeo I know it's a work of video that I can probably skip through if I want to make a piece of video art and I want to really think about the materiality of that piece of video art and then put it on Vimeo I kind of defeat this purpose right it becomes this like really boring object that I mean if I watch video art online which I rarely do but if I do it I skip every 15 seconds or maybe a minute I mean if I look through my own videos on Vimeo then I have hardly any full place so I started to feel really like this is defeating the purpose of my research so I was starting to make applications to put videos in to make weird slideshow things and this is a work that I released and I released it and I got a wired review by our Germany thank you very much and they said it's a flop as a video game it's super annoying now I was just making a piece of video art in a 3d environment but what I realized is that you can never escape your resolution video is what is in a flat screen the moment I put my videos in 3d as a texture that you can navigate it becomes a video game even if there's no goal but just to watch some silly stuff float around so you can never escape your resolutions every time you're deconstructing a resolution you're also reconstructing a new resolution so you're always building compromises and the building compromises so that said I was really annoyed with the Institute that fired me and I started the institutions for resolution disputes and this was really to show them like look I want to win from you basically I don't know how to say this properly I was skip a few slides because I'm going through time very fast this is a resolution target I'm using this slide because this is actually an aerial photography target from 1951 for analog photography it was used also in the Californian desert by the American military I was living two hours drive away from this so one day I drove through the desert in my little car and almost got stuck but I survived and I saw it and realized later that there's a work by Hito style inspired by this pattern and it's beautiful and all about resolutions and in this work she is saying this is a resolution target it measures the resolution of the world as a picture resolution determines visibility whatever is not captured by resolution is invisible and what I'm trying to do is expand the visibility and make things visible that are normally not visible I'm going to skip a few slides and go to a work that I made when I was finally coming back from the desert and invited by transfer gallery in New York to make a solo show about my anger at that time I was actually approached by the Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam to buy a big work of mine the vernacular file format it's a work that kind of deconstructs different kinds of compression languages and shows what is the basis and the politics of these compressions so I used the same image I put a similar glitch in it or similar data obstruction and see what comes out and by this by these aesthetics that come out on the surface I try to explain how these compressions are built when the Museum wanted to buy it they wanted to buy the research archive which means 16 gigabytes of broken data basically all put into folders of like this is a JPEG when it's broken like this so what do you do when you sell 16 gigabytes of broken data and how do you show it I started to research what else was happening in this work I'm going to boot up a new presentation because unfortunately yeah I started to realize that my work actually has lived beyond this particular research this is also my face but I started to see it in many places I started to see it on tea cups I started to see it on sweaters a lot of glitch iPhone and Android apps use it as their icon I started to see that people used my face and clicked on it and then they were making a glitch so this work expanded from its research archive and the PDF that was constructed out of it to something completely copied without copyright commodified and strange for me I lost my own face in a way and then I started to realize that this is not I'm not the only one that has lost their face so I did a little bit of research and found for instance this work by James Bridal who's been doing research on the render ghosts if you're walking through London and you see all these billboards of new architectural constructions being built they always have these render ghosts put inside of them and he made a whole archive of trying to understand who these people are this is his render research blog in which he has a whole archive of different kinds of people and when he finally researched where these people came from he came to an kind of a company that sells render bots or render images that were based in New Mexico and so he went to New Mexico to see if he could find these people and to ask did anybody ask you if they could use your face but he found nobody that looked like these people of course of course because you know finally he found somebody in a bar that told them like look if you really look close to these people they really don't look like people in New Mexico these are fancy people and most of them are maybe Asian but definitely not very much looking like the people that walk the streets of New Mexico and finally he never got the answer but he did realize that these people were probably never asked to be used so this is one example of the line in which I've seen this kind of co-optation of our objectification of humans this is a research by a constant del art he presented it in the 32nd C3 it's called Jennifer in Paradise it's part of a possibility of an army talk if you ever want to look it back it's a beautiful talk here Constan found the photo of Jennifer Jennifer was the soon-to-be wife of John Knoll the programmer of Photoshop and John tried to test his Photoshop software on an image and that image was the image of his not so very properly dressed girlfriend Jennifer at the time and one of the lines that I think are most striking of this work is when he says did you ever ask permission to Jennifer do you realize that you're objectifying your own soon-to-be wife and it's an open letter to Jennifer but there's some remarks in an other article on in which he says these things so I realized I'm in this tradition but worse even switching again because there's not I cannot port a lot of slides in my strangely built software I'm part of a more longer tradition or a longer tradition of Caucasian test cards while I was using my face as a test card for glitch so how do images fall apart there's actually a long tradition of the use of the white face or the white model in photography and other image processing technologies so here are some normal test images these are very pretty ladies here is an image of Teddy her name is Teddy Smith she was the Playboy Centerfold of the 1960s and she was used for a paper on dither here is Lena JPEG Lena was the Playboy Centerfold of 1973 and when in 1972 and when in 1973 Nasir Ahmed a researcher originally from Bangalore tried to write about a new compression standard using DCT discrete cosine transform which became later the basis of JPEG he was not really met with a lot of enthusiasm however when he finally did publish his paper on DCT California picked up really fast and in one of the labs a few guys found an image to test his premise of DCT's and this was Lena and Lena was the basis of the compressions that we still use most often in our and if you walk through for instance the kebab or whatever and you see these big photos of kebabs on on the front of the if for instance if you go to Sonale you'll see a kebab printed out really big and you'll see this like kind of blocky kebab parts that is a block that has been tested on Lena but only tested on Lena so the people in this particular research place they were using an image of the 1972 Centerfold scanned it in with their own Muirhead scanner they had a self-built circuit bent Muirhead scanner with three channels a red green and blue but one of the channels or one of the scanning mechanisms was a little bit slower so they lost one line she got a little bit thinner even in the photo so she looked a little bit better and they used only this photo it's 512 by 512 pixels so from a media archaeological perspective this is a very strange object but also if you think about politics they use just this image as a one-size-fits-all but compression in our daily lives is not one-size-fits-all it's not physics is just physics we're using different objects to compress our images with so what would it mean if we now use still the Lena compression when it's just another kind of image is there maybe a racist undertone in this kind of compression there was a lot of research in a lot of like kind of like not anger but like criticism from mostly the female community finally this is not the end of the Caucasian test card we still have this kind of usage of white images in all our technologies for instance in the HP webcams in a few years ago they were only tested on white people and once they went to seal to retail they would not track any black images and any black facials because they were never tested on this there was also the Nikon cool pics camera that always would ask Asian features are you maybe closing your eyes so they were never tested on any but Caucasian faces so this whole history of using a Caucasian test object is still apparent in everyday technologies and it's really problematic and I realized that I kind of unknowingly kind of playing a role in this by also using my own face and letting this be the face for deconstructing facial or funicular file formats the compression of images so by behind the white shadows I showed my research archive I also showed the research archive of other image images that used white Caucasian females and I finally showed the work that I made for for the whole I said when I do a lot of research on compressions I've I realized that when I try to explain it often when I really go into the mathematics I lose my students completely so I was starting to try to build kind of works that would not just be mathematical but try to get the emotions that the painters wanted in my work back and so I started to kind of anthropomorphize my my objects so for instance JPEGs are built out of blocks I started to really make works in which the blocks were talking about their experience of compressing a particular image one of the works was DCT siphoning I will play it in the background really quickly if it wants to yeah there it is so that doesn't really want to play but that doesn't because it's also playing on my own screen anyway in DCT siphoning there is two blocks it's inspired by the Roman flatland by James Abbott and in flatland there's an object in a flatland that has to learn about different complexities of space Euclidean space in this particular inspiration I'm taking two blocks that have to learn about different complexities of compression so they go from the dots the pixels to the lines which are for instance the basis of gifts to the blocks their own space for JPEGs to wave floods and to factor objects or even lead our technologies and they experience it how humans would experience it the sun gets or the little one sometimes gets really scared well the big one kind of knows what to expect and tries to hold him by the hand and tries to explain like look you don't have to be scared here it's just lines it's just vectors etc so it's kind of like how humans experience things that they cannot read that are a lit eligible to them and how when we see something that we cannot understand often just dismiss it and don't want to read it and I find this really important and I think also just to to try to explain that when you dismiss stuff you're dismissing actually a piece of information it might be really important and it might be legible I cannot just show the kids that I'm teaching like look there is something you just don't understand it so what I'm trying to do is build these works to show how they are acting towards their compressions and their digital technologies and explain them like look you're acting just like this little block that runs away from the compression so what I wanted to close with is the conclusion of the two exhibitions the institutions were resolution disputes and behind white shadows and that's the question every time we're using technologies they're following particular resolutions resolution sets through standards for instance by the ISO or other standardizing institutions we have to always ask ask who set these standards who made these resolutions and what are they compromising because if we're not asking what are they compromising we might become blind to other options for instance video is not just a quadrilateral objects right if video would be something more than just what's happening within this quadrilateral frame this window then I would have different I could make different shapes of video I could put them on top of each other I could make collage of videos that would have different timelines and different soundtracks and I could really play with what video also is because in the end video is just a moving story that can have different levels but because of computer technologies and other technologies before it we've become stuck in the resolution of video and we've compromised the other options and these compromises are not just in fun they are an actual real-life realities that give problems to us or that make problems for other people and that's why we need to ask what is always who is setting the affordances of our resolutions and what is being compromised who is casting the shadows behind our technologies and so I wanted to close with a quote by Hannah Arendt which is define and create the future do not be defined just by your past and I think we should also use our technologies these ways we can still define and create our futures we can create our own power points in weird 3d technologies and we can make videos that are not quadrilateral and then get burned by like wires reviews or whatever that's okay you know it's actually fun to get an angry review because people are just really boring so the work these these siphoning is downloadable from my website the paper behind white shadows also and I would like to end here and maybe take a question if there is a question thank you we have about two minutes for questions there are four microphones two on this side to on this side and yeah microphone to please ask a question thanks for your great talk it's great to see a concept like discrete codes and transformations and the run-length encoding being a president artwork and also I found out many years ago that in the GPAC standard there's an optional way of compressing GPACs instead of Huffman encoding you can use arithmetic coding and it's never enabled by any browser so those GPACs are never used but there should be more smaller and use more less bandwidth have you seen any people that actually would like to introduce arithmetic coding or other compression standards or variants of it just to well use more computing power and save bandwidth I think one of my favorite artists working with JPEG is Ted Davis he's based out of Basel and he's been doing really breaking the JPEG compression down really from like the basics and then you can really write into the JPEG compression but I don't think he tackled even arithmetic encoding yeah actually I did I didn't show this but in the end I wanted to and I will show it to you because you're asking about JPEGs this is a work that I made when I was actually fired by the Institute and it uses the DCTs when I was fired they they made it cryptography design awards and I thought now you fired me I will make a game with you I will send you some cryptography so I made my own kind of like encryption which is of course I mean even cryptography design seems like really silly so I thought okay I will do something really silly I used the DCT that you're asking about DCT's discrete cosine transform it consists consists of 64 macro blocks I mapped every macro block to every glyph of the alphabet so the 64 most used characters and then I wrote them a message a really angry message actually one of the institutions is completely against them as one of the five institutions of the exhibition and guess who won that competition I don't think they ever read it because they're too lame to read the shit but I think they did something nice back nice means that I got one tenth of the money they were supposed to pay me in this silly computer here but I feel like in a way I fuck I said it anyway so I won a little bit that day but just one tenth of what I lost thank you is there another question from the Internet signal I don't know then I would like to have the opportunity to ask a question myself because I did work in super resolution microscopy did you ever look into super resolving biological structures I've seen some moye patterns in your work in your presentation right now did you ever touch that or what did you do with moye patterns more a pattern yes I yeah okay so for me I was talking a little bit about an ecology of compression complexities so really going from the line to the dots to the lines to the blocks to the way floods to the you know like really complex I would say also zip files are part of that complexity like when everything just gets chaotic when we as humans don't have a Euclidean space necessarily to compare to it then it becomes really messy but anyway they go through a line environment and in this line environment the little one gets really excited because he can play through the more patterns and actually he's having a little romantic moment with one of the mores which is also a joke because you know a lot of people only like to like things they understand already they I mean the exercise is always in understanding something that is more complex but that's what most people are scared of so it's easy to fall in love with a line if you're a block it's hard to fall in love with a way flood right so I mean but anyway that's not really your question you're asking about moire in biology and I've never worked with moire in biology was that a yeah thanks okay any question left I think we are out of time yes a big can round of applause for our speaker Rosa Menkman


Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Aaron Powell. I'm Matthew Feeney. Today we're joined by John Samples He's a vice president here at the Cato Institute and he founded and directs Cato Center for Representative Government and the First Amendment Project Come back to Free Thoughts John. Thanks for having me. We're talking about institutions today and What's happened to America's political institutions in the last year? But let's when people use that term when we talk about America's political institutions, what do we mean? What are we talking about? Well, I think you're talking about the rules and practices in the constitutional framework, right? The concern I think about the last year when we started the year was that You know, there would be we have a system of government where it's divided powers. The powers are balanced We had elected a president who seemed to be Unhappy with a lot of that and he also seemed to have strong populist streak and that he was going to threaten that kind of both the non-presidential institutions and maybe the courts maybe other maybe this whatever the states and That he would essentially bring that kind of fragmented Liberal democracy further down the road toward being something else a much more non-liberal democracy but populist and the institutions then would which are in the American system are really designed and We're designed to stop someone like a populist a demagogue That they would not be able up to the task that they the division of powers would not stop him The the sort of I mean the first amendment itself is an institution the protections for freedom of speech backed by the courts That's an institution that constrains someone who is a Populist a demagogue and so on. How do you think that the institutions have fed in in doing? Doing their job. I remember in the wake of the election a lot of my Anti-Chump friends or acquaintances were complaining and my own thoughts on it were well, let's see how the institutions hold up Let's think about the courts and courts are pretty robust and I was trying to remain optimistic in these days How how how well do you think they've actually fed I think for most people who were concerned at the beginning of 2017 they've probably done better than expected in retrospect an early sign was when he or Steve Bannon and Steve Miller wrote the executive order about those predominantly Muslim countries and that ran into first of all just sort of practical problems But also ran into the courts and was you know essentially ran and was basically struck down and had to be revised and all sorts of things That was an early good sign in that President Trump did not say you know John Marshall like Andrew Jackson said or this alleged would have said John Marshall has made his decision and let him enforce it. He didn't in other words Donald Trump didn't say I'm not these you know, I'm going to make America safe. I'm going to do what I was elected to do I have the mandate. I'm going forward to protect America Instead he dropped back and they did what they Anybody would do in that situation or what most Administrations would do as they started to try to get their act together to write something that could get through the courts So that was a good sign that For all the bluster and everything he wasn't up to high-scale constitutional crises and and vote, you know provoking them and in general you would have to say if I had one indication of He's had a lot of resistance. The press has been very resistant He's been very abusive to the press and so on if I had to say there was one thing that indicated his difficulties It's that you have a really good economy now in some ways a stronger economy than we've had for a decade So usually presidents really Get a good boost from that particularly there The public approval of what they're doing, right? So Donald Trump really should be and it's 52 54 range in terms of public support favoring his the way he's doing his job and that's you know, fairly high fairly good rating But he is in fact struggling along in the high 30s Maybe the occasional poll gave you a 41 42 So I think what we can say is because of his behavior and the fear he invokes Then he's probably paid a price of about 10 points at least and maybe more the other thing is he's Well in his way to causing another tripwire to go off Which is elections are supposed to stay that's why we have not just everybody elected at the same time You have the House and the Senate are all fears and one-third of the Senate and so on It does it looks like the Republican Party is going to have a terrible blowout and in 2018 the This sort of I'm referring here to the there's a generic party preference Which is a fairly good indicator about where things are going Is that I mean I heard there was a 17 point difference Just and then we've had something like 13 point differences throughout the latter part of the fall That is people preferred the Democrats in general about the congressional elections to the Republicans This is a number that's usually in the three to four. Maybe when Republicans are going to do well They're gonna have a two or three point advantage But usually you know these sort of things were 20 seats change hands are in that area 17 points I mean they could lose 50 or 60 seats the way we're looking which would be I mean one thing You would say about Donald Trump this pushback and the elections kicking in and him essentially Really mobilizing his opponents. They really want to do something to stop him all of that Could bring you know could be paid in a cost to economic liberty although he himself is not all that big on economic liberty It could be in that you get a a administration 2020 that has a majority that wants to do a lot more on taxes a lot more on regulation and so on and So in a sense even though many libertarians in my impression And there's Donald Trump is not a libertarian. He's an anti libertarian right in many ways my impression is that You know, he could cause an anti libertarian backlash on the economic side that could be very difficult in post 2020 so It's you know, there's that but I would say I think there is another area that's really problematic in institutions This question of norms though where he's done has the worry generally where he has the ability to do damage He really has Just today as we said here, of course, you know There's so many examples right every week seems to bring two or three things that he says or tweets that then are Discussed widely and they're just and they're always behavior You notice there's two aspects to it is it right people have certain Expectations about what the president of the United States will do and then he does it that's a norm And then he contradicts it in some way and of course now what's going on as we tape this is that He's called certain countries by a vulgar name in the middle of a negotiation session I mean, and then it's gotten out into public and this is just not something one expects from a president He violates that norm, but you know, it is interesting I think he's worse in a lot of ways because norm violation is actually pretty common. Let me give you an example About what I'm talking about, you know, we expect that Maybe libertarians don't but many many Americans do that presidents won't lie but it's pretty clear that in the run-up to the Obamacare vote that president Obama at the time Did lie about whether you would get to keep your insurance He had every reason to know that many people wouldn't be able to it had been a problem Be they've been honest about this in in 96 and it didn't work So president Obama, you know, I think he knew that people would lose it and he said that because he was wanted Why did he do that? He wanted to he thought it's a classic political thing that Aaron talks about quite a bit actually Which is he the greater good. He wanted to break the norm of not lying to achieve what he saw as you know Coverage for other for people extending coverage. So that's kind of a typical thing, you know That we have a norm and president Obama, I think would have said well Then he would have subscribed to the norm, but he's in that case. He There was this other thing he wanted to do and so he he violated it But he didn't say oh, you know lying all the time is okay And he didn't know and you also came out of it saying we didn't think there are no norms the thing about president Trump is he breaks norms all the time including the one about lying and He doesn't do it for any particular reason I can think of except it's just sort of Can am I wrong about does he be able to help himself? It seems that The constant reporting coming from inside the White House and from people who've interacted with them as it doesn't sound like He's the kind of creature that has reasons That that's just a cause and effect is kind of cognitively behind beyond him So he's I think he just is acting out. It's just the way he acts, but I want to I want to ask about these norms because He is yes left and right. He is breaking norms Refusing to follow along with norms, but that doesn't seem like that's quite the same thing as him Changing norms or even really threatening to change norms because he is wildly unpopular and the result when he breaks one of these norms when he says something is a huge backlash From the majority of people, you know, I mean you get his you get his core base of supporters Which isn't even the you know 37 to 40 percent of the country who approve of him typically it's it's an even smaller number are his really hardcore base like they The the you know self-described deplorables they eat this stuff up, but they were never part of those norms anyway We just kind of could safely ignore them because they didn't have any power but The rest of the country seems it's almost like when he does this the rest of the country Doubles down on its assertion of the original violated norm and and says no no no this is really important We're going to enforce it. We're gonna shame those who don't and so the I guess I can see a pot that the likelihood my prediction would be if They had if the Trumpkins head to an overwhelming defeat in 2018 if Trump either chooses not to run again in 2020 or gets demolished in 2020 and you see you drive that That portion of the American right into the wilderness The rest of the country has spent these years effectively practicing norm enforcement of the original norms and thinking about them and flexing those muscles and So I think if anything he there's a chance he could be strengthening those norms in the long run as John mentioned We're recording this in the wake of the president saying something disparaging about Friday January 12 Friday January 12 And the president is reported to have said something very disparaging about a few countries and journalists very upset about this and The press is running with it But a lot of the commentary you hear is you know what? This is how real people talk and actually he's a man of the people and and some critical thing to remember I think is that these institutions that we're talking about are inherently elitist in the sense of the courts the the politicians journalism These are all Rather elite and and I I hope that Aaron is right that actually a lot of this stuff is actually unpopular out some and What people call real America, but I don't know is there something to worry about in the sense that we're relying on Inherently elitist institutions you're gonna rely on elite institutions anywhere you go But Aaron makes a good case and it's possible and we do see that although there's a certain amount It's been one year a certain amount of exhaustion me me and to some extent maybe is already set in there's talk of you know Adapting to him and accepting him. I think the problem here is that unlike go back to Barack Obama for a minute President Obama as I said may have broken the norm about lying Right, but he didn't deny the norm He wouldn't and he might deny that he broke it if he were here with us But he could still believe in the norm. I generally think that President Trump breaks the norm and there's this frequency problem. He does it all the time He does five times before breakfast, right five weeks before breakfast Yeah, well they usually highest most of them involve norm breaking, but he also appears to deny that there could that norms are Are Valuable now the problem is or that they're binding or that they should be binding, right? Because everyone breaks norms in one way or the other at some point But what's different about him is the idea that I think there's an underlying thing an Underlined view that it's all BS anyway, and I'm just gonna I'm burning the house down here, right? And the house is these norms now here's where Aaron and I could possibly differ or just the way it works out differs The people are concerned about this are all from people who say the president has a it's the very important that the president is doing This because people are not sort of they're not libertarian the way We always want libertarian people to be independent minded to make up their own mind to stay away from partisanship all this stuff people look to the president as a leader who who sets, you know a kind of moral structure or whatever for Just actually examples for people to follow and that if the president is doing this despite all the good pushback and despite, you know and All of that that it's going to affect the underlying culture of the society such that When it's somewhat and that if he's the first of many like this, right? We've fallen and we can't get back up Then this is going to be an acceptable way. It's just to be a different set of norms that will be but norms the very idea of these Unconstitutional Non-legal non-statutory things that we accept it will itself be gone And so everyone will be burning down the house all the time and that'll be the way you win All right So I don't know what you're the I agree with you though I see your point in the sense that it does look like The system is working better and it's also There's also they Lot of people have followed him down his particular rabbit hole So you think about significant national newspapers that have stuff about him or news channels that have stuff about him all the time You know they're going to have They're going to be a different Institution after this administration is over than they were going in right and Is that a good thing or a bad thing some people you might say well They were always partisan anyway. They were just more careful about it But he's essentially dragged everyone down with him and Ross Duthat had this piece in March of last year Or at the beginning when he said he urged The you know the DC media and so on not to go down the rabbit hole with him, but most have right I think the things are going better than expected I guess I would say but I'm worried about the effects of this over time and that are kind of incremental and so on And it is because he's the president and he also Doesn't seem to do he doesn't agree that the president should offer any kind of Model of behavior, which you have to say is very different from For all of the things I would disagree with with the previous two presidents was not true Right. They had a sense of you had to do this stuff. He seems to think Well, you just do anything and screw it I mean, that's if that were that if I had to say one thing that was it When you were giving your assessment of how America's political institutions have functioned and stood up to Trump in the last year and And you said so you said that they basically they stood up better than you than many feared they would and I'm curious about Why that is like so what the lesson to draw from that Regarding our institutions and their enduring strength because on the one hand you could draw the lesson that our Institutions are stronger than we thought they were But the other Thing we might learn from it is simply that Donald Trump turned out to be far more breathtakingly incompetent than we expected him to be so do you Think one of those is the stronger case Do you think that their institutions are in fact slightly stronger than we thought in a situation like this the thing that less than you Don't learn is very important. All right. It could be very important and by that. I mean We make it we could conclude right now. Oh, you know, he was president and that seemed really bad and everything But the institutions held up. Let's not worry. We don't have to worry about it. However, I think you're correct I think that in a sense we got lucky and surprisingly so because He doesn't behave like any politician in a way In other words, he doesn't even do things that are seem to be You know to advance his power and popularity and so on and he also seems Completely unfamiliar with the job and unwilling to learn anything about it and actually, you know It He does seem to be in a sense the country lucked out to the extent that he is an actual threat And he's incompetent It also could be that he's redefining the job of president It could be the incompetence is such in terms of actual governance. He doesn't really try all that much to govern As far as I can tell Although people in his administration certainly do but you may have a bifurcation here in that the president may become Entertainer-in-chief. He sort of goes around calling the other side names and saying outrageous things just as if he were on television in some way and then there's the rest of the administration that's filled with sort of You know depending people that are have some experience and they can get whatever it's done Which you can get through Congress and the bureaucracy and so on and so you have a new American presidency, which is That and then this business about Oprah Winfrey running for president, which was you know was greeted with You know, we don't know that she wouldn't be a very strong candidate In terms of winning a general election, but she would I think even though she seems to be somewhat different in personality She would be a continuation of that model, right? In which you have no political experience needed but you really should be on TV and be entertaining if you want to be president and then You've what you will have done is cut whatever connection there was between elections and the deliberation of sorts before that and the governance the president offers in some way the one place where elections Don't translate directly into policy, but they are connected. I mean that makes me wonder About what you said earlier about norms, which is that that norms can change and and powerful people change them Whether deliberately or not deliberately and I sometimes wonder if Trump Inadvertently is actually Changing politics in a sense where it becomes considered totally normal for someone like Oprah Winfrey to run for president and In 2020 or 2024 we'll just have to deal with a bunch of former celebrities or current celebrities who think in light of Trump that this is a normal thing and that the norm which was that Career politicians run for president will have been broken now Ned positive on our benefit. I guess it's too soon to tell but norms change speaking about norms and wishing to be Considered fair by anyone. I mean, I think also but anyone listening to this. I mean, I think the you have to take into account that The person who ran against him though he keeps running against her despite the fact that the elections over many people were Against her because they believed with more than a little reason that the norms that apply to everyone else Say, you know lower-level people in the intelligence apparatus Didn't apply to her. She was a she could violate those norms and setting up the email and all that stuff and that She that and that an entire and Trump ran basically on the idea that an entire elite was full of it on those Things they didn't follow those kinds of But you know the other thing we haven't mentioned is things like breaking norms about instructing You know members of the Justice Department to prosecute his former opponent and during the I mean I Still I think will remember for the rest of my life the Republican National Convention when you have a chance The chant is put the other opponent in jail These were not things that I mean maybe there was a lot of BS going there always was in politics and campaigns but that was Striking even though she had broken them, you know, she was There's a bunch of stuff that's true about her but going forward then so This is you this fear that we are electoral systems, which is just something where it's If you want to win the presidency you have to be a big celebrity who's been on TV And so we get big celebrities around TV as our presidents how much Control do The parties have over that like Trump Trump won Because of the way that the primary system worked Could if the if the two major parties decided that it was not in their interests to live in that kind of world for whatever reason could they flex their muscles change up those systems and Try to prevent it from happening So here I'm gonna go with an authority my friend Bob Bauer who knows About as much as about he's worked for the Democratic Party for many years and knows about as much about parties And he as it works. He happens to be around people who say, you know stronger parties and Some in some ways the 1968 situation right Bobby Kennedy won a primary But he wasn't going to get the nomination because the party elders or the party leaders said this is our guy as Humphrey Can you can you have stronger parties and Bauer's view is you really shouldn't go down that path? Because you just there's no way to get to it, right? You can't build parties back that way Certainly that would be the kind of elite Filtering process you keep coming back to James Madison and Federalist 10 right filtering the word is filtering We're trying to filter the popular will into things that are truly in the best interest of the entire undertaking Including the permanent interest of this society says Well, that would be a filtering device, but it's not I mean the Democrats are probably in better shape To do that, but again these people that we're talking about if this happens It'll be because they're very popular, right? It'll be Oprah will get the nomination because she will be Highly likely to beat Donald Trump or other candidates So I don't think we can count on the parties to stop that we've sort of blown out that Constraint in a way so so far we've talked about I get Institutions that have clear boundaries or definitions things like the court system and also ones are slightly more nebulous So the press which seems to apply to everything from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal CNN, but also to blogs that Some people would consider now To be included in this umbrella of the press But there's another institution that seems like the press to be rather poorly defined Which is this thing called the deep state that has has got a lot of play in the last year or so So I get a question that you could answer for the listeners What do people mean when they talk about the deep state and what kind of impact has it had on the first year of Trump's presidency? I think it depends on who you're talking to if you take a very Negative view of the deep state. It's kind of permanent people particularly who work in the intelligence and Perhaps also the judicial the Justice Department who are permanent members of the Washington bureaucracy and therefore From this point of view people who are exactly the people Donald Trump was talking about and people threatened by his effort to drain the swamp and so on Generally, I think you can talk when you talk about the deep state. You're talking about the permanent bureaucracy. There's a lot of it It's very it's always been an issue for any president coming in from When they follow a member of the other party, it's always been the Longstanding effort was to or practice was for people to take political appointees and bury them in the bureaucracy and merit system jobs and so nice little bomb waiting there to impede the next administration So over time you have lots of people inside a bureaucracy that for bureaucratic Partisan or other reasons just you know, but remember the FBI agent talking about how bad Trump was and the insurance policy and all of that that's sort of just an ideological or just a Repulsion right as opposed to a partisanship or whatever these people And make you know, you have they have to in a sense. They don't have an absolute veto But they can impede you and that's what's happened Going back to Aaron's comment about competence. I mean the problem of the You know, you could say the special prosecutor was part of the revenge of the deep state but That was just that you got yourself there Goes back to I mean if you're an experienced campaigner and politician and president the one thing you do is you Stay away from stuff that can come back and bite you, right? And so that's the the campaign Meeting with Russian agents, whatever happened Russian people, whatever happened there just apart from that you stay away from that you You don't do things like firing Comey and so on you try to he's I Think in some ways mr. Trump believes his own rhetoric about the presidency that he's and it's a rhetoric that sort of Many of us bought in that the presidency was this over. Well, he had it even more Which was it was kind of like a king in which everything was a prerogative You just had discretion on everything including libel laws. He seems to seem to think Other people had like it's too strong, but we didn't believe it had all of those prerogatives. So we wanted it to constitutionally he seems to believe it was like a king and He acted on that Belief and that's caused a lot of his problems Maybe it's of some reassurance that at least for the president It seems to be an instinct rather than a thought through ideology in that he didn't It seems to me when when he fired Comey, it wasn't really clear that he didn't understand that It's just not the sort of thing that presidents are supposed to do which is to fire the FBI director without a good cause It just seemed that that he instinctively Wanted to get rid of him and and proceeded and so perhaps the ignorance of the norms will help us in the long run Yeah, I think that's an instance where his He's I mean Trump seems to be someone who clearly cannot update information he like he just he has a way of thinking about things and that's the way things are and he's not he can't change it and the I mean the Comey thing was fascinating because Not only did he not realize that wasn't the kind of thing a president should do But he genuinely thought that just firing Comey would we kind of end the whole thing Which was very clear that that's like in his businesses where he was the king in effect If there was someone he didn't like He just got rid of them and then they went away and he never had to hear about them again And so he just kind of assumes that that's the way that that suddenly The united states the united states government and the united states writ large is now just like the trump organization And he can act the same way And he has the same degree of power them there was I can't remember where it was reported but the talk of When he was running um It was kelly and conway who said this but talking about how When he won all of these people who disrespected him were suddenly going to have to respect him We're suddenly going to have to like, you know, they thought that that's how it worked Um and to just not to fundamentally not get that this system is so different that firing Comey would only make Things dramatically worse in a way that he would be powerless to do anything about like he just he seems stuck in this like mindset of running his small family business, which is what you know, the trump organization was really a small business in a Lot of ways And he just can't he can't figure out that he's in a different environment. And so he's like just Doing the same things with disastrous results as far as he's concerned Well, there's also I think a larger picture here that Has run its course now and may continue running this way You know In a way if you look at watergate, the president's elected afterwards were frequently Outsiders and it was this a kind of narrative that seemed to fit Which is the outsider comes from the states saw frequently a governor He's going to clean up washington drain the swamp and make everything now With carter and reagan and clinton even you did have people who were professional politicians who had Political experience they had some idea particularly with reagan had run a small country for eight years and so on But also the other two and they had their ups and downs and so on But the the search for the outsider the man on the white horse in a way But the Americans are big about the you know, pure the pure guy from outside that's not tainted by the system Even bush, uh, george w from george hw was the only one that's the insider, right? hw ania and barack obama for a variety he's even though he was a senator Was an outsider in any way you could see him that way and trump is the ultimate person like that He is the guy that's going to come and drain the swamp and blow it up and burn it down and make it all better And that's just not the way you actually make things better. You know it did seem a seem You it takes a degree if you're going to I mean for Our agenda somehow if we were going to get serious buy-in and serious Changes toward it is going to take people that can convince others to do it It's got to have political experience and knows how to get the Congress to do it One thing that I have found myself thinking about in this first year is so we talk about the notion of rational ignorance among voters that That that can explain why voters often make bad decisions because it's not in there You know It's not in their best interest to spend the amount of time studying policy issues and economics and law and all of that That you would need in order to really know the difference between these candidates or know how these policies will play out And that's a that kind of ignorance is I mean we call it rational It's like so it's in a sense. It's it's an excusable ignorance because for most people given the Insignificance of your vote It would actually be the wrong decision for them to put that amount of investment in to learning this stuff But the thing that struck me about trump selection and then The way he his first year has played out And and then the the core of his base that remains Committed to him is there's a different sort of ignorance At play here That's not that I think you can't call rational and in fact is a much more troubling kind of ignorance Both Both in terms of what it did here and going forward but also in terms of I think the nature of democracy And that's like an ignorance of you know, if I put it if I were to put it in Virtue ethical terms as I frequently do on free thoughts. It would be an ignorance in the practical and intellectual virtues like an inability an absolute inability to recognize basic competence That like it was obvious It was obvious throughout the whole campaign that this was a man who regardless of his policies was utterly incompetent to govern And would be terrible when he got elected. That was you know, you didn't you know That wasn't a partisan issue like everyone recognized that except suddenly a bunch of americans didn't and a lot of americans still don't And and that seems to me to be a really troubling thing about American democracy american electorate is not just that they're rationally ignorant about policy issues But they seem to have now displayed that they Are incapable of recognizing Basic human functioning to even do the job in the first place. That's possibly true Uh, we don't know how many people of that and how many new voters and so on but I would say also of Remember the intellectual case for uh trump's election made by intellectual a intellectual was the flight 93 election Right And as you may know about the flight 93 election, it's we're on flight 93 that went down in pennsylvania Except as an election and hillary clinton is flying the plane and we know how this ends And here's this guy over here that doesn't seem like he knows anything. Remember this was an article Because conservative intellectuals were having their doubts, let's say And um, here's this guy over here donald trump You know, he may not be able to fly the plane But we still should rush the cockpit and put him in and see if he can fly it because we know what the next alternative is So I think a lot of people Saw it less as They didn't they had some delusions about donald trump. I would guess but we all have some delusions But they saw her as so bad That um in a way it was a better to take a chance the plane was going to crash You know likely whatever you were doing because we were in a certain situation But you know take a chance on him and um Because he was better than her than she was even though you could acknowledge that she was bad Now I think it is an interesting question the you raise. I just don't know how I could sort out We do know that you know, uh still He got 90 million votes 90 of the republican vote. That's about normal for a candidate. Uh, he got he's maintained A pretty good approval rating among republicans It could also be that you're just what you identify as ignorance is just a kind of What I would talk about is an extreme partisanship that has gone too far It's it's sucked up everything in its path. And so it's all all about red team or blue team And there's no independent. We see this in the public opinion data People don't make independent by and large At least the people that move don't make independent decisions about whether the federal government can do what is right most of the time When their team is in yes, the answer is it can when their team is out about 20 or 30 percent just shift over into the other column So it could be that while partisanship has its uses It's just gotten out of hand here and people ignore Any you know in a sense, maybe you could say that the flight 93 argument itself is a sign of partisanship out of control To me the the whole argument just seemed to be a A little strange because the the analogies weren't working at least when when I read the flight 93 Article, but we got to be careful about overstating the degree of support that so yet 90 percent of republican voters, but the president trump If I believe this is correct had fewer votes in mitt romney in 2012 This is not as if there was this massive swell of popular support, but You'll mention a flight 93 reminded me of p. J. O'Rourke's comment about about the election where he said that Clinton is wrong but wrong within normal parameters and and I think actually it's really Quite important to keep within the normal parameters that that It it actually is worth even if you know that you know, a clinton administration would be a disaster at least would be a disaster within within the norm now and now it could be that like we mentioned earlier norms change and and And the outcome of that remains to be seen, but it isn't That important isn't important to think yet. We've got to keep within some certain norms We shouldn't just throw caution to the wind because we really really really don't like the other candidate Well, uh, that's the problem. It does seem like that people had talked themselves into thinking That uh, he wasn't so bad or she was really bad, right and you know, there was as I say Reason to think that she was breaking norms Maybe it was overdone But the other thing is you could say well We what we've had here to go back to a topic from a couple minutes ago I mean what we have here is a fairly normal republican administration with perhaps fewer given that they have a majority in both houses Fewer achievements to their but they got rid of a royal regulation on the executive order side So apart from the craziness at 1600 and his fighting with others and his behavior This is just uh, maybe a little inexperienced, but it's a pretty normal administration now. We may Yeah, I mean one of the great concerns about the coming year is NAFTA stayed firm. Yeah, the trading system was okay in 2007 Last year and 2017 And so on and so forth and you know, the immigration stuff Is starting to happen, but the actual big stuff on the orders got stopped blah blah blah So there may be much worse to come, but it looks like kind of like Um, you could argue that, uh, but you can't argue that about the behavior of the, uh, president I've heard the argument that One of the reasons the republican congress Seemed to look the other way on a lot of this and be somewhat protective of him and not critical of him and not distance themselves from him Was because they wanted to get through their signature legislation um and Obamacare failed in that regard and is likely off the table now um, but they just Recently got their big tax Bill through With that now done, which was the other big one that they were hoping for Um, and especially with the prospect of a getting their clocks cleaned in 2018 um, do you think that we start to see more republican Members of congress Thinking I should distance myself from him. I should be more critical or even go so far as to thinking like We might be able to get a lot more done with Pence. I guess I would say that Uh, they're still they don't have to worry about those issues, but they may have to worry about, uh, They may be thinking about primary voters. They may Could be concerned that Their voters don't or as you know them again Uh, pretty solidly placed house members going to be us in a 60 40 district But if they lose 10 of the vote They're in trouble and there's it does seem to be blood in the water that do seem to be people retiring There seem to be good quality democrats coming out. It's really looking like a blowouts coming And so if you go out there at least between now an election day and oppose him Uh, I think people are going to be afraid of being jeff flake electorally Even though they might want to be jeff flake on the moral side of things um So the behavior of congress as a blocking mechanism does show something gene haley has said from time to time Which is the separation of powers doesn't work so well when you have high partisanship and uh, you know a, um Uh congress that is controlled by the president's party. Um I mean he went he was abusive of the really abusive of the uh, both Not so much ryan, but of mcconnell and even that mcconnell is kind of like a very Rational kind of he doesn't get upset about things but my god, that was that was kind of norm I mean you'd say those things behind uh Behind their back or behind closed doors one of the things all the stuff he says has been said he just says it all in public Right, and that's another breaking of a norm because when you say it behind closed doors It means you know, this is not something you should be doing and he doesn't seem to get the two You raise the question of impeachment. I think we should talk about 25th amendments another kind of issue and all of that I I we had an earlier. I guess I talked on kato's podcast about this. I'm I would like if he's going to be impeached and removed I would like for it to be clear cut so that a rational person and maybe Three two thirds or three quarters of the population says yeah, he's got to go I I think you know To remove him because he is the way he is Uh is may well be justified you might constitutionally that might be there But I think we have to worry about making things worse than they are in the following sense Having a significant part of the population running around thinking that this was a illegitimate act would not be good because the Of doubts about the legitimacy of the government are to some extent what caused trump himself and You know we I think There needs to be some consent Not perfect But there ought to be some and the thing about it is he may do things or things may come out where You know two out of three people no matter whether they supported him or not Say, yeah, that's just way and he's He's guilty. It's not they just haven't made it up. It's not a deep state State conspiracy. It's not just the Dems got power in 2018 and they're doing a partisan thing No, this is like Yeah, it's that's what we got But we're not anywhere near there yet and we don't you know It's not clear that he will Have done that. I I do think of course you're paying a legitimacy price now to And the 25th amendment gene has convinced me is you know, that's I mean, he would have to Be stark raving mad In some situation to get that done again there you're probably really talking about a much more higher demand on consent I mean, I think it's He would have to be he would have to be Wilsonian in that he has a stroke or something like that and he's incapacitated Or he begins to behave in ways that we associate with madness So that again There's been a little chatter about this since last week You know, there's something wrong with the world we're living in here We have every week we go through this stuff We could come in here every week and talk about the things that have gone on. This isn't the way it's supposed to be and even though the consequences You know the year has been good in some ways even from a libertarian perspective. We're seeing we got chris edwards has talked a long time about tax reform. We got some of that and so on but You know, it's been very weird and just not as terrible as expected and I just don't know where we're going Thanks for listening. This episode of free thoughts was produced by test terrible and evan banks to learn more visit us at www.libertarianism.org You


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