Congressional history and education hosted this event. Jay welcome, ladies and gentlemen to the robert c. Byrd center for congressional history and education. I think i know most of you. In case you dont know me, i am jay wyatt, i am the director here at the byrd center. I thank you for joining us as we celebrate Constitution Day. With the 15th annual memorial lecture on the u. S. Constitution. Constitution day, as im sure many of you know, was yesterday. We are a little bit belated in celebrating, but thats ok. Before i get started i want to take a minute to recognize the passing of Cokie Roberts. Many of you were here in july when cokie and Steve Roberts very graciously came out and participated in an event on the stage to help us raise money for our Internship Program 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 mosess three daughters and their husbands. Together, 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 experts, legal scholars, 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 very deservedly 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 that 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. In june of this year a Pew Research Report revealed 68 of u. S. Adults believe that made up news and information greatly impacts americans confidence in institutions. 54 believe its in having a major impact on confidence at each other. And 79 believe steps should be or curtailstrict made up news. The report revealed americans see made up news as a larger problem than violent crime, made up crime, immigration change and racism. It gives you a sense of what we are dealing with. We are no doubt any moment of crisis when it comes to 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. Her work is really so resident. That is not to put too much pressure on you for solving these problems, but dr. Rosenfelds work is really eyeopening in terms of providing context for this. Sophia rosenfeld is the walter h one and berg professor of history at the university of pennsylvania. She is the author of several books, including the forthcoming choices we make the roots of modern freedom and she is the 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. The Washington Post, the nation and dissent. At penn, sophia teaches intellectual and cultural history with special emphasis on the enlightenment and the legacy of the 18thcentury for modern democracy. Each of these subjects are explored in her recent book, democracy and truth a short history. Which was published by 10 press pen press and provides the basis for todays talk. Democracy in truth provides Historical Context for this contemporary moment. Though it is only 176 pages, which is incredibly short for historians [laughter] jay the 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 of this centuries old fight represents something new. It is not something that is a recycling of old arguments. Democracy in truth has been described as incisive, inspired, essential, and my favorite, brilliantly lucid. Thats my new goal, to be described as brilliantly lucid. [laughter] jay 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 help me welcome dr. Sophia rosenfeld. [applause] dr. Rosenfeld thank you, that was such 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 Shepherd University and an honor to be giving the 2019 memorial lecture on what is almost Constitution Day. One day off, we are close. I especially want to think jim thank jim wyatt and the moses family who are here tonight. I also want to thank the audience for 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. [laughter] brilliantlyd lucid. That is a tall order. Just lucid will go ok. 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 least about 70 miles to the southeast of here. D. C. Shington, 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 know this by chronicling this in depth. They are up to 12,000 something comments. If you have been paying attention to politics at all, i assume 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 or something they did. And then he frequently muddies the waters, blurring the lines between truth and untruth. Ive been hearing, people are saying, who knows whats going on . Or of course, it is all fake news. I will give you just one, and i promise, 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 likely 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. But rather than correct what may have been a small error, not much consequence, the president proceeded to first show a doctored National Weather service map and 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 bureau, making what should be a source of neutral, apolitical information a source of politically motivated disinformation. And then finally, he insisted the problem was not his info, the problem was the press reporting on it. It was the correct corrupt and fake news media. In the public says 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. It is actually not just about the u. S. , either. According to reports globally, misinformation and disinformation are circulating with new reach everywhere in contemporary culture and around the world, from government to Party Platforms, to social media feeds where we have all become pundits as well as 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 is or breaking through what might seem like pc more than veracity or accuracy. Some people want to win at all costs. Truth be dammed, the truth is not a vital part of the story. And 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 spin. Rejecting the idea that there are any impartial disinterested sources of information or any real arbiters of truth out there or 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. Has become a bipartisan expression and adopted in places like myanmar to deny reports of a very real attempted genocide of Muslim Minority people. As you undoubtedly know, 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. Everywhere had its own version of this. Some people might say the situation looks even worse years later. Here we are three falls after posttruth. What can we point to that is changed . A number of new developments, the development of something called deepfakes. Some of you are nodding along or are familiar with it. Ways that audio and video can be so convincingly remastered. Make people saying and doing things they never did. New technological capacities, we are more and more aware we think of russia and how many states are engaged with campaigns and disinformation, often using forprofit companies for help, firms like cambridge analytica. Trust has been declining in terms of knowledge. That comes back to your pew survey, similar results 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 what existed at an earlier moment. My subject today is the subject of my new book, democracy in truth. It is a problem for historians, it is a question of history, i ask, how do you get to this point . How does a marriage of democracy and truth which looks so good from the outside, go so astray . Thats kind of an abstract sounding question, no. I know. Thats the kind of question that particularly appeals to me. As a historian, i spent a lot of my career thinking about the unspoken and taken for granted assumptions rather than the more prominent fights over big marquee ideas. That under undergird malt modern politics. 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. But 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 willing to look a little farther back, well find the big story doesnt start in 2006 with brexit or the election of President Trump. Or the naming of posttruth as the word of the year. Nor does it start in 2005. It seems like it must have been longer ago, but around 2005 is when youtube and 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 and the deregulation 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. I will say less about them upfront tonight but i will be happy to talk about them in questions too. 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. It sounds jargony. I use it because, very specifically to main there may to mean that 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. Speaking of deep dives, 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. What we might now call epistemology. Others focused 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 claimed that one Real Advantage of republics is that 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. Rulership. Here you can imagine Something Like louis the 14th of versailles. People scheming against each other. 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 the year hundred 40, 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. But also, participation in a democratic process, 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. And in 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 the zeal for truth is the driving force of his present moment. Just a few years later during the debates in the 1790s, James Madison who had a lot to say about the wall of truth in the constitution earlier, 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 sort of still tacitly 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. That when you say why are some people worried about this, look at all the other catastrophic things. 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. There was always a catch. This is where things went tricky. And this will take us farther into the story. Think of the strategic use of we in we hold these truths to be selfevident, the opening remarks of the declaration of independence that introduces the idea of the possibility of a republic. For 18thcen