Many of you were here in july when cokie and Steve Roberts very graciously came out and event on thein an stage to help us raise money for our Internship Program and we and we had a wonderful dinner afterward. They could not have been more generous and considerate. I just want to say that our thoughts and prayers are dedicated to them. As we are Getting Started here, i want to gently remind you all to silence your cell phones. I would like to thank four seasons books for your support and organizing the book signing that is going to follow tonights talk. This will be a similar format from what we normally do. We will have a wonderful reception and a book signing. I want to recognize mr. Tom ss three mose daughters and their husbands. They have helped us with this Wonderful Program this past decade and a half. They have carried forward his legacy of activism, which is more important. Working together, we have brought u. S. Senators, policy scholars,egal esteemed political scientists, and a few historians here for Constitution Day to talk about historical contemporary and constitutional issues. We very much appreciate their continuing support. With that in mind i want to tell you about mr. Tom moses. The man this lecture series is named for. He was a decorated world war ii veteran. We learned tonight he was a medic at the battle of the bulge. He was a devoted civil libertarian and spent much of his life defending American Civil Liberties and the u. S. Constitution. Among the many things he worked on during his life, including fair housing and civil rights issues in cleveland and baltimore, and while living in ohio, he started the first Welfare Rights Organization in the united states. As a longtime resident of jefferson county, he founded the eastern Panhandle Branch of the American Civil Liberties union of virginia. He served on the board of directors for many years and he was recognized often by community and state leaders for his service, including senator byrd and senator rockefeller. Before i formally introduce tonights speaker, i want to share some revealing statistics from the Pew Research Center that i discovered while researching this book create in june of this year a Pew Research Report revealed 68 of u. S. Adults believe that made up news and information greatly confidence inans institutions. 40 believe its in having a major impact on confidence at each other. 79 believe steps should be taken to curtail news. The report revealed americans news as a larger problem than violent crime, made up crime, immigration change and racism. We are no doubt in a crisis in discerning truth in america. We are not alone, because this is an endemic problem in democracies across the world. It is for these reasons that we are really excited to have dr. Rosenfeld here tonight. Dr. Rosenfelds work is really eyeopening in terms of providing context for this. Sophia rosenfeld is the professor of history at the university of pennsylvania. She is the author of several books, including the forthcoming choices we make and the roots and she is theom author of common sense in political history. Sophias articles and essays have appeared in the american historical review, the journal of modern history, william and mary quarterly, as well as the new york times. At penn, sophia teaches intellectual and cultural history with special emphasis on the enlightenment and the legacy of the 18th century were 18thcentury for modern democracy. Each of these subjects are explored in her recent book, democracy in truth, a short history which was published by , 10 press and provides the basis for todays talk. Provides in truth Historical Context for this contemporary moment. 176 pages,s only which isnt readily short for book which will , be on sale in the rotunda after our event, provides a deep historical analysis of the central tension that lies before american democracy. Who gets to determine what is and is not the truth . I think more importantly, it explains why the current iteration represents something new. It is not something that is a of old arguments. It has been described as incisive, inspired, essential, and my favorite, brilliantly lucid. Thats my new goal, to be described as brilliantly lucid. As you can see by all the markings, i have done a deep dive on this book and couldnt be more excited to welcome sophia as this years lecturer. Please join me in welcoming dr. Sophia rosenfeld. [applause] dr. Rosenfeld thank you, that was a nice introduction. I feel like i should sit right back down because you have given it all away. Its a great honor to be at the robert c. Byrd center for congressional history and education. It is an honor to be here at and an honorersity to be giving the 2019 memorial lecture on what is almost i especially want to think jim wyatt and the moses family and i want to thank the audience were coming out on what is a beautiful wednesday evening. It is very kind of you to be here. I will try to be lucid. I will see if i can do that. Even though im a historian by training and profession, im going to begin this evening by talking about the present. We will back up a little while. It probably wont surprise anyone in this room if i start out by saying truth has been having a bad time of it lately, not at least within 70 miles to the southeast of here. The most obvious, but by far from the only example, is the current president. By most accountings, i think im saying something that is actually objectively true and nonpartisan by saying the president often says things that are false, the Washington Post helps us notice by chronicling this in depth. If you have been paying attention to politics at all, i see you have been or you would not be sitting here this evening, you know that President Trump often reaches falsehoods about his own past actions or statements. He also routinely circulates what might be called inaccurate or unverified information, whether it is a matter of research finding or something somebody said they did. Uddiesen he frequently m the waters, blurring the lines between truth and untruth. Like ive been hearing, people are saying who knows what is going on . Or, of course, its all fake news. I will get to just one highly publicized example that might seem trivial but it fits a pattern. Two weeks ago, President Trump claimed alabama was one of the states most lucky to be hit by hurricane dorian. Everybody is laughing which means Everybody Knows this already. The National Weather service at birmingham set out, was not going to be impacted. The president proceeded to first show a doctored National Weather said he did not know who drew that nice loop with a sharpie through alabama, thereby creating a false form of documentation. Then he got another Government Agency to defend his claim with an anonymous statement contradicting the birmingham making what should be a source of apolitical information a source of politically motivated disinformation. The problem was the press reporting on it. There was some corrupt and fake news media. Who can you trust to tell the truth in the first place . What im talking about tonight is not just about trump and his acolytes. Its not just about the u. S. , either. According to reports globally, misinformation and disinformation are circulating everywhere in contemporary culture and around the world, from government to Party Platforms, to social media feeds where we have all become pendants and publishers and distributors and lastly maybe consumers. More seriously, polls show not just that people have lost trust in media, but also that a lot of people dont actually care about these boundaries. On the contrary, many people seem to embrace this blurry distinction between truth and falsehood. Some value, what might seem like authenticity, telling it like it what breaking through might seem like pc more than veracity or accuracy. Some people want to win at all costs. Many people, currently more heavily on the right, but i would more than likely be talking about the left, come to see that everything that an establishment culture is more like a matter of opinion. Or any real arbiters of truth out there are any pure objective information at all. You can think about the phrases that have been circulating in media in recent years. Alternative facts or even my truth suggestions that this , whole realm of objective truth doesnt quite exist. Weve learned that even weather predictions can be sources of my truth. And a kind of allpurpose description of the world to deny reports of a very real attempted genocide of Muslim Minority people. In 2006 just after brexit, just before the last president ial election, posttruth was named the word of the year by Oxford English dictionary. Not simply because of the brazenness of all the lying, but because a lot of people concluded in the media, weve lost any Common Ground about where to find truth in the first place, and the whole situation suggested an existential crisis for democracy. Some people might say the situation looks even worse years later. What can we point to that is changed . There is something developing called deepfakes. Some of you are nodding along or are familiar with it. Ways that audio and video can be so convincingly remastered. It makes it look like people are saying and doing things the never did. New technological capacities are more and more aware we think of russia and how many states are engaged with campaigns and disinformation, often using forprofit companies cambridgefirms like analytica. Trust has been declining in terms of knowledge. A similar result have been found all over the world. And we know more and more about the effects of untruth circulating from a rash of murders in india, of perceived child abductors. It is a crazy phenomenon that spread out of a Misinformation Campaign to the propping up of antiimmigrant sentiment in the u. S. And around the world. That is my depressing introduction, probably not much of a way to start Constitution Day, but im going to switch gears a little bit. Before we conclude that we are really post anything, that democracy itself is exceptionally at stake, we need to ask more about what came before. It is hard to figure out what has changed if you dont know it existed at an earlier moment. My subject today is the subject of my new book, democracy in truth. It is a question of history, i ask how do you get to this , point . How does a marriage of democracy in truth go astray . Thats kind of an abstract sounding question, no. Thats the kind of question that particularly appeals to me. As a historian, i spent a lot of theareer thinking about unspoken and taken for granted assumptions rather than the more prominent fights over big marquee ideas. The nature and value of truth in the context of democracy turns out to be one of those assumptions. Something we only really talk about when it is under threat. It is vital to uncover if we want to understand the ground on which we are standing. If we look closely, most of the commentary takes it to be a short period of time. If we are looking a little farther back, well find the big story doesnt start in 2006 with brexit or the election of President Trump. In 2005. It start around 2005 is when a two, twitter and facebook, all basically in a row, came to be what we now know as social media. You have to look further back the 1980s and 1990s in the u. S. , with the emergence of 24 hour cable infotainment in the d regulation of radio that gave us talk radio. All of these trends i am pointy to are really important for the latter part of the story. These are things that will intensify things that happened earlier. I think the full story starts much earlier in a truth regime, in which modern democracy was founded and in which modern democracy was baked. That is the age of enlightenment. I use this phrase truth regime. Because, very specifically to main there may be only one thing that counts as truth in certain topics. The way truth has been looked for, understood and even celebrated and is different in different places and times. And we are starting to discover how we understood what truth was in different moments. Ive like to take a deep dive this evening back some 250 years ago before the age of revolutions that took off in north america france and then try to work our way a little bit forward toward the present and our current predicament. At the core of the enlightenment, if i can generalize across geography, it was a single preoccupation. How do we collectively eradicate errors and myths and false beliefs . How do we get to something closer, like an accurate picture of what the world actually looks like . Many responses focused on methods. On the larger social and political context in which truth about the world would best come to light. In the second half of the 18th century, critics of monarchy on both sides of the atlantic developed a particularly novel argument. They claim that one real is thate of republics they have a uniquely close relationship with truth. We are kings, like priests and aristocrats had relied on , secrecy and cunning and deception as ways for leadership. Here you can imagine Something Like louis the 14th of versailles. Republicans would operate on a different that republics would operate on a different set of values. A taste of concrete evidence or proof, and personal sincerity. Trying to imagine a future, imagine in some perfect world, the whole world have become a book of morals, where everyone and everything would become legible. Those who lied would be committing crimes. This is an enlightenment fantasy of the future. The promise of early republic or democracy is truth ends and democracy would be instrument of one another. In other words, established truths would serve as the starting point for deliberations. Participation in a democratic process would from from debating to voting would aid in the cause of truths discovery and expression. This is an idea that took off as appealing, not just the devote ease of enlightened ideas but also in early capitalist markets as well. In republics it was thought this would ultimately make the dream of the kind of coincidence of virtue and knowledge where truth seeking and truth telling would be a reality. Amazingly still convinced just a few years later during the debates in the 1790s, james still said, it is an unassailable fact in a republic that light will prevail over darkness, truth over error. To a certain extent, i think we agree which may be why so many , of us have some sense that a crisis in truth means a crisis for democracy. I might be back to those pew findings one more time. Why are some people worried about this look at all the other , catastrophic things. In some sense democracies cant , work without some commitment to truth. That is one side of the story, the idea that democracy and truth have to be close cousins. There was a catch. This is where things went tricky. Think of the strategic use of we in behold these truths to be selfevident, the opening remarks of the declaration of independence that introduces the idea of the possibility of a republic. For 18thcentury republican anchors, what would distinguish all truths under the condition of popular sovereignty . I should add a caveat that is not logical. All of these truths would be collective communal conclusions. In other words, no one person no , one institution, no one sector, king or priest would get to call all the shots. Moreover, these same truths, these moral and factual ones would never be definitive or fixed or treated like dogma either. Instead, Something Like what scholars today my call Public Knowledge would be ideally worked out with some sort of open back and forth, where all of these different sectors would be weighing into arrive at this thing called truth. Number of people would have specialized leadership roles as a result of their specialized knowledge, and a larger number although not would play a role as well. To get there, they would form some sort of loose consensus. It did not mean everyone had to agree on everything, but some. Ort of loose consensus basic ideas about what causes what, what is broadly die desirable broadly desirable, and what is dangerous, also how to characterize what happened. That is how people in the late. 0th century imagined it all of this was supposed to transpire how is this going to happen . Power all of these people going to arrive at truth how are all of these people going to arrive at truth . The founders imagined a few basic principles. One was the idea of plain speech. People would speak in plain ways so they would understand across all other divides education, religious, regional. You can think of the straightforward language of rather like ben franklin than the fancy, euphemistic, language of courts. The other, of course, was free speech, which was quickly enshrined in constitutional law. Here is the idea dating all the way back to john milton that competition in information, in claims, books, periodicals in a world where it was really hard to be certain about anything, ultimately work to dispel errors of fact and interpretation alike, especially those born of religious orthodoxy. Supposed to make this all happen. But what this meant was commitment to truth combined with this weird way of getting there. Turn from theory to truth,e, most kinds of under the conditions we call democracy, have actually never been self evident at all here it it sounds good, but it is not quite how things of work out. There has always been something to fight over in terms of what counts and who gets to make the call and on what grounds. At press freedom, many times there are microcosms of a larger debate. What counts as dublin information. And what is more and this is the key point this process has always been threatened since the 18th century founding moment from those who have tried to monopolize it. People or factions or groups who try to hustle out of this contentious public sphere and capture the power that comes from having the exclusive power to define it you read on the one threat hasimes that come from knowledged elites. In the 19th century