women still don't have the right to vote in the united states, but they will switch tactics and really achieve progress in a very comparatively small amount of time. up through 1920. and then talk about the changes and the ongoing battle through 1965 in the second part. >> this was the first of a two-part tour of the national ort trait gallery's vote for women exhibit marking the centennial of the 19th amendment. you can watch this and american artifacts programs. by visiting our website on c-span.org/history. next we hear from sofia rosenfeld who is the author of "democracy and truth." she talks about democracy and

truth. rather than an elite class. >> welcome ladies and gentlemen to the robert c. byrd center for congressional history and education. i am the director here at the bird center. i thank you for joining us as we celebrate constitution day. constitution day, as i'm sure many of you know, was yesterday. we are belated in celebrating, but that's 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 advent -- an event. here on the stage to help us raise money for our internship

program. we had a wonderful dinner afterward. they could haven't been more generous and considerate. and so i just want to sort of say that, you know, our thoughts and prayers are -- are dedicated to them tonight. as we are getting started here, i want to gently rep mind you all to silence your cell phones. i would like to thank four seasons books for your support nd organizing the book signing that's going follow tonight's talk. this will be a similar format from what we normally do. we will have a wonderful reception. want to recognize mr. tom moses's three daughters, meryl crawford and their husbands.

ing to, they have helped us with this wonderful program over the past 15 years, the past decade and a half. and they've carried forward mr. moses' legacy of activism, which is is more important. working together, we have brought u.s. senators, policy experts, legal scholars, -- esteemed political scientist, and maybe a bit of bias more than a few historians for constitution day to talk about historical contemporary and constitutional issues. we very much appreciate their continuing support. it's with that in mind, that i want to tell you about mr. tom moses, the man this lecture series is named for. e was a decorated world war ii soldier. 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 and cleveland and baltimore, 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 saver live -- american civil liberties union of irginia. he served on the board of directions 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 tonight's speaker, i want to share some revealing statistics from the key 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 impact america's confidence in - american institutions. 54% believe it's having a major impact on confidence at each other. 79% believe steps should be taken to curtail news. -- made-up news. in a broader sense, the pew report revealed american sea made of news as a larger problem than violent crime, made up crime, immigration change and racism. so it gives us some sense of what we are dealing with. 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's these reasons we are excited to have dr. rosenthal -- dr. rosenfeld.

resident. really so dr. rosenfeld's work is really eye-opening in terms of roviding contests. sophia rosenfeld is the professor for history at the university of pennsylvania. she is the author of several books, including the forthcoming "choices we make and the roots of modern read him your kono and she is the author of "common sense in political history." sophia's 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. sophia teaches intellectual and cultural history with special emphasis on the enlightenment

and the legacy of the 18th entury were democracy. -- for modern democracy. amazingly enough, each of these subjects are explored in her recent book, democracy in truth, which was published by 10 press and provides the basis for today's talk. democracy and truth provides some much needed historical context for this contemporary moment. though, it is only 176 pages which is is incredibly short for historians -- [laughter] 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. -- and demock sys all over the world. -- democracies all over the world. who gets to determine what is and is not the truth. i think more importantly, it explains why the current iteration represent something new.

it is not something that is a recycling of an old mark -- old rgument. been described as incisive, inspired, essential, and brilliantly lucid. that's my new goal, to be described as brilliantly lucid. as you can see by all the markings, i couldn't be more excited to welcome sophia as this year's lecturer. please join me in welcoming dr. ophia rosenfeld. [applause] dr. rosenfeld: thank you, that was a nice introduction. it's a great honor to be at the robert c. byrd center for congressional history and

education. it is an honor to be giving the 2019 e mosys memorial lecture on what is almost concert touche and day. 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. a very kind of you to be here. will try to be lucid. even though i'm a historian by training and profession, i'm going to begin by talking about the present. we will back up a little while. it probably won't surprise

anyone in this room if i start out by saying truth has been having a bad time of it lately, not least within 70 miles. the most obvious, but by far from the only example, is the current president. by most accountings i think i'm saying something that is ctually objectively true and nonpartisan by saying the president often says things that are false, the washington post elps us know this. if you have been paying attention to politics at all, you know that president trump often reaches falsehoods about his own past actions or tatements. 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. or it is muddying the

waters. blurring the lines between truth and untruth. i've been hearing, people are saying -- who knows what is going on. or, of course, it's 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 likely to be hit by hurricane dorian. the national weather service at birmingham set out, was not going to be impacted. but rather than correct what would be a smaller >> with not much consequence, the president proceed to first show a national weather service map and did 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 -- making what should be a source of a political information to put a test to politically motivated isinformation. 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 i'm talking about tonight is not just about trump and his acolytes. it's not just about the u.s.. according to reports globally, misinformation and disinformation are circulating

everywhere in contemporary ulture and around the world 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 don't actually care about hese boundaries. on the contrary many people seem to try to embrace this larry distinction between truth and falsehood. some value, what might seem like authenticity, they are breaking through what white seem like pc more than veracity or ccuracy. 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 -- matter of opinion. r any real arbiters of truth out there or any peer objective information at all. you can think about the phrases that have been circulating in media in recent years. suggestions that this whole realm of objective truth doesn't quite exist. we've learned that even whether productions can resources of truth. and fake news is a kind of all-purpose description of the world to deny reports of a very real attempted genocide of muslim minority

eople. n 2006 just after brexit, just before the last presidential election, post-truth 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, we've lost any common ground about where to find truth in the first place, and the whole situation suggested an existential crisis for democracy. basically everywhere had this own version of this. some people might say the situation looks even worse years later. what can we point to that is changed? a number of new developments.

for example the development of something called deep fakes. some of you are nodding along or are familiar with it. ways that audio and video can be so convincingly remastered. -- as that make people saying and doing things they never said and did. there are new technological capacities were more and more aware -- we think of russia and how many states are engaged with campaigns and disinformation, often using for-profit companies for health, firms like cambridge analytica in the u.k. or the group in israel. 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 acts of untruth circulating from a rash of murders in india, of perceived child of -- abductors kind of a crazy

phenomenon that sprade to the campaign to the anti--u.s. sentiment. so that's my really depressing introduction. probably not much of a way to start constitution day, but i'm going to switch gears a little bit. before we conclude that we really post anything, that democracy itself is exceptionally at stake, we need to listen more about what came before. if it is hard to figure out what has changed if you don't know what existed at an earlier moment. subject todayy -- is the subject of the new book democracy in truth. i asked how do you get to this point? i asked how the marriage democracy in truth -- marriage of democracy and truth went so stray? that's the kind of question that particularly appeals to me.

as a historian i spent a lot of my career kind of think about the unspoken and taken for granted assumptions rather than the more prominent fights over big marquee ideas. -- that undergird modern politics. in 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. if we look closely, most of the commentary takes it to be a hort period of time. the big story is going -- the big story doesn't start in 006. t doesn't start in 2005.

around 2005, it just went youtube and twitter and facebook all basically in a row came into being is what we call now social media. probably have to look farther back than the 1980's and 1990's with the emergence of 24-hour cable infotainment and the deration regulation of radio that gave us talk radio. all of these trends on pointing to our 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 in modern democracy was baked. i use this phrase truth egime.

i sounds a like jargony. writings wed from the of michelle pucoe. i use it very specifically to mean there may be only one thing that counts as truth in certain topics. the way truth has been looked for has been celebrated and is different in different places and times. and we are starting to discover how we understood what truth was different moments. -- was in different moments. back until the age -- back before the age of revolution and then try to work our way a little bit forward toward the present and our current predicament. so at the core of the enlightenment, if i can generalize a little bit across geography was a single preoccupation. how do we collectively eradicate

errors and myths and false beliefs that seem to be 18th century thinkers that permeates everything from politics to sex? how do we get closer to an accurate picture of what the world actually looks like? many responses focused on ethods, what we might call epistomology. but others focus on the larger social political context in which truth about the world ould 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 rgument. they claim that one real that ge of republics is they would have a uniquely close relationship with truth. where kings and priests and

cris cats -- aristocrats had relied on secrecy and cunning and deception. here you can imagine something like louis the 14th of versailles. scheming against each other. republics would thrive on a very opposite set of values. transparency so everything would be visible to the naked eye. a taste of concrete evidence or proof, and personal sincerity. the writer of "mersier" wrote a best seller trying to imagine a future imagine in some perfect world, the whole world have become morals, where everyone and everything would become legible. and those lies would be committing crimes. this is a kind of enlightenment fantasy of the future. the promise of early republic or democracy is truth ends and

democracy would be instrument of one another. so in other words, established truths meaning basic moral and factual 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 truth's 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 eeking and truth telling would be immoral a real. amazingly still convinced that the zeal for truth, quote,

unquote is the driving force of this present moment. just a few years later during the debates in the 1790's -- so -- james madison who had a lot to say about the world of truth and the federalist papers a little earlier still said that it's an unassailable fact in a republic that light will prevail over darkness, truth over error. to a certain extent i think we sort of tacetly 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. when you say why are people so worried about this? look at all the other catastrophic things. some sense that democracies can't work without some commitment to truth. that is one side of the story, the idea that democracy and truth had to be close.

there was a catch. this is where things went tricky. we hold these truths to be elf-evident. or 18th-century republican anchors, what would distinguish all truths under the condition of popular sovereignty. i want to add a caveat which is not logical like two plus two is four. but moral truth and factual truths. all of these truths would be collected this collective ommunal conclusions. 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 would call public knowledge would be ideally worked out in some open back-and-forth, were all these different sectors would be weighing into arrive at this thing called truth. a small number of people would play specialized leadership roles either inside or outside of government as a result of specialized knowledge and a larger number, though not everyone, operating with whatever wisdom they had going about their ordinary lives. -- would play a role as well. together, they form some kind of loose consensus. they would form some loose consensus about the things they taken to be essentially true. basic ideas about what causes what, what is broadly desirable,

what's dangerous and also how to characterize what's already happened. that's how thomas jefferson imagined it. even how people in the late 20th century imagined it. all this was supposed to transpire. here's the part that sounds a little bit mystical. how are people going to arrive at truth the people -- if nobody will tell them what it is? well, the early founders imagined a few basic principles would work here. one was the idea of plain speech, people would speak in plain direct ways so that they would understand each other across the all that across the the other divides. educational, religious, regional. you can think of the straightforward language of meone like ben franklin or even feunk luk. one idea was plain speech. the other was free speech, which was quickly enshrined in

constitutional law. here is the idea of dating back to john milton in the 17th century. there is competition between connotation and information, claims and books and periodical in a world which it was hard to be certain about any thing ultimately works to dispel errors of fact and interpretation of the like, especially in religious orthodoxy. what is this meant, this commitment of truth combined with this weird way of getting at it, which we are going to work it out together debating things all the time. what is this mean if we turned out from there he to practice is that most kinds of truth under the conditions of democracy have never been self-evident as -- self-evident at all.

in terms of what counts and even ore, who gets to make the call and on what ground. i would say, if you think about urrent debates about press freedom or even education, most of the time they are microcosms of this larger debate. who gets to say what we take to be true, what we learn, what counts as public information? what's more, and this is the key point here, this process has always been threatened by those who have tried to monopolize. by which i mean people or factions or groups who have tried to hustle it out of this contentious public sphere and try to capture the power that comes from having the exclusive

right to define it. sometimes that threat has come from knowledge. in the 19th century, you get the term experts. we can call them that now, but that was the innovation of the 19th century. people who claimed access to truth and superior trustworthiness on the account of their specialized training, which also implied something about their gender and wealth and race, too. the threat of these experts has been especially vivid when the experts have argued for the validity of their expertise in isolation, without the leavening effect of ordinary people's experiential sense of the world. but on the other hand, the threat has sometimes come from those claim to speak for ordinary or real or regular people, people who are thought to be endowed with a knowledge of the world born of living in

it, and the danger comes when they insist on popular consensus alone, without a collective of expert trained perspectives or outlying voices of any kind. while both of these things, elite or expert knowledge, and the common sense perspectives are vital for democracy, either without the other leads to not just potentially really bad policies, they can lead to the dismantling of democracy altogether. democracy depends on this kind of contentious pluralism when it comes to the realm of truth. sorry, i have to turn the page

here. what i would like to do next is basically tell you the story from two sides, and that would be the side basically of what happens when experts have too much say, and one argument might be that what happened between the 18th century and now, the expert authority keeps escalating, and retell the story from the other side and come back to the common sense perspective and how it escalates, which also seems to have happened, particularly in our own moment, and how these two storylines come back into some kind of clash. but let's start with the expert side of the story first. one interesting thing about expertise is even before the democracy states in western europe realized they needed a lot of these people, you need mapmakers, explorers, military specialists, some inside the government, some outside, or you cannot really have a state.

one of the things that starts to grow well before the age of revolution is what you might call knowledge bureaucracies, and that means the emergence of a new class of people, which are all the people with this useful knowledge. and even in the earliest republics, those formed in north america and france in the 18th century, it was widely understood that leadership roles, if you wanted to have an effective government, had to go to those who were assumed to be the most virtuous, often described as men of their word, so in other words people of honesty, and wise men were sometimes called men of knowledge. these were going to be the preconditions for imagining this new intellectual leadership and class. but it was really only once revolutionaries turned their

attention to putting these republics on stable foundation that real efforts began on both sides of the atlantic to try to build something that jefferson called a natural aristocracy to replace on earlier one. from this vantage point, we cannot really be surprised that the members of the federalist faction behind the new u.s. constitution came into being in the 1780's insisting on the importance of leadership drawn from "men's special obligations to wisdom and integrity." those are the words of benjamin rush, who also had the ideas that people needed to be trained in a federal university that trained these aristocratic leadership classes that would be based on its expertise rather than its birth. that never happened. americans have been skeptical of statist solutions. they also failed to make the case for financial requirements

early on for eligibility to vote and hold office, as well as indirect forms of voting when it came to electing senators and presidents. and the electoral college is one of the great holdovers from this era of thinking about how to make sure that the people didn't say too much. this was all put exactly that way in the 18th century, in the words of another federalist. the point of these plans was so that "the people may have as little to do as may be about the government." even if they were going to be sovereign. if you think this is an american twist, it isn't. because after the terror when the revolutionaries want to stabilize the situation, what do they do? some of the very same things.

they build normal schools. i believe this institution has its roots as a normal school. they built the first normal schools to create a corps of teachers who would be experts in how to disseminate knowledge. they reintroduced various kinds of censorship. and they restore property qualifications for voting, all in an effort to find ways to create democratic structures while letting those virtuous, knowledgeable people have more of a say. and ironically in some ways, just as nationstates in north and latin america and much of europe were democratizing in the sense of eliminating slavery, extending educational opportunities, trying out universal suffrage, at the same time what also grew was this new professional knowledge class, on both public and private payrolls.

men who now called themselves not only experts, but these are only words of the 19th century, professionals, scientists, proved themselves more useful than ever as governments extended their purview. one of the reasons the governments expanded their purview was to deal with the growth of capitalism and marketization. they do more and they need more information, particularly in this increasingly arcane kind of statistical information, what we would now call data. these are the precursors of the people we know called policy experts, like economists and urban planners, who would dominate the late 18th and 19th century governments around the world. japan to mexico, they have experts by the late 19th century. you see them in postcolonial settings, now you see them in transnational political organizations as well.

you might think of one man writing in germany during the weimar period. he was fascinated by the way that democracy and bureaucracy seemed to grow up together. what he put his finger on is how they needed each other, but they were always going to be intention. the more democracy expanded, the more you need bureaucrats who are essentially not democratic mr. biden: c citizens. and much of the 20th century borne out his hunches. he did not live to see what happened, but we talk now about things like technocracy, which is another word for a planning state. some like to point to the eu as the primary example of this. it is a state that seems almost entirely to be run by these bureaucrats, knowledge professionals.

when europeans complain about something they call the democratic deficit, they don't mean simply that europeans are not involved in making policy in a direct way. what they are really complaining about is that they have so little influence over the nature of policy, so little means to hold officials accountable, that what gets passed in eu law -- the classic example always involves fishing rights. what they establish as fishing rights has so little connection to the lived experience of fishermen across europe that they are creations of bureaucrats in the eu sitting in geneva or brussels dreaming this stuff up. this is the end of the first side of this story. one of the dangers of modern political life is this trajectory that seems sometimes to many people to have pushed

all truth but technocratic truth to the side. that is one storyline we can tell. of course, this is half the story, and it is evident to anybody who knows any history going back any amount of time, because of resistance to elite's domination of knowledge, production, and elite ways of knowing. it also began very early. we can go right back to that founding moment again. here i am going to give an example. my current hometown of philadelphia, very early on not only were they writing the declaration of independence, but you can think of quakers' investment in different types of knowledge. simplicity, practical know-how. african-american churches insisting on faith-based ways of knowing. these local commitments divided

the seeds for early backlash against this kind of intellectual superiority or pretension, as they were perceived to be. they were for the idea that some truth was known through a different mode. not the fancy of experts with their statistics, but through faith or through instinct or through the commonsense born of everyday lived experience, or what we might call the logic of the kitchen table. i know how to pay my bills at the kitchen table, so that is how we might think about the deficit. a translation from self to the world. and this idea had an enlightenment pedigree as it was one of the ways enlightenment thinkers challenged what were in

their day establishment truths by saying, there is a common sense that runs counter to many of these elite ideas. in 1776, tom payne -- i would call this alternative epistemology, which is to say knowing things a different way. he gave it political significance by saying that when it came to the truths of politics, and this is a radical idea in his moment, ordinary people not only knew enough to participate in the aggregate, they actually knew better. to make this point, he called on a reverse snobbery in which he suggested it was precisely ordinary people made of honesty understanding things that allowed them to cut through the absurdities spouted by churches and kings and aristocrats and overeducated people, like some absurd idea like a colony being ruled by an island, and get back to common sense truths. he insisted you could use this common sense as a foundation on which to build a new kind of government.

and until they were put out of business by his federalist opponents, payne's radical friends and contemporaries forged the first state constitution for pennsylvania that temporarily tried to make this vision a reality, basically to try to see if they could create a democracy without this ruling class. so there would be elections, everything would be transparent. there would only be one house. radical measures of different kinds. less than 15 years later -- it did not really work in philadelphia. but less than 15 years later, in france, they tried the same thing, getting rid of active and passive citizenship, coming up with a common education system for the nation, and ever since there has been this possibility of a defense of the wisdom of ordinary people, meaning those outside the realm of educated expertise, which at various

moments could include women, it could include black people of both sexes, it could include ordinary workers, peasants. it is an elastic category. but the idea that those people know something and is born of a different source has helped fuel all sorts of social and political movements directed to giving a voice to those traditionally denied one. that would include the early labor movements, abolitionists and later civil rights movements, labor movements. all premised not in the idea of rights, which were awfully familiar, but also in the idea of truth that elites have failed to see. again, there is a complication. this isn't the only recent dominant form that challenges to elite truth has taken. non-expert, non-elite claims to truth have often worked the

opposite way, to make a claim not on behalf of those marginalized by the dominant conception of truth, but as a way to reinforce the idea that the people in the singular know something that is true, whether they represent the state, the nation as a whole. and that they know something that they don't need other people to weigh in on. for claims about elite knowledge without the collective popular truth can turn exclusionary and lead to this inside the beltway, technocratic notion. arguments for the people as the primary source of truth can run a different risk. that is encouraging disdain for all kinds of verifiable expert

knowledge and its purveyors. you can think of the british figure right before the brexit vote who said, i think people have had enough of experts. this kind of disdain can often also attach itself to outlying voices, whether it is immigrants or foreigners or marginal voices of different kinds until a demagogue comes along who seems to perfectly incarnate the people's truth in this singular form. many of you may recognize that what i am describing rather loosely here is a phenomenon that can happen on the left or the right or in between, and often gets labeled as populism. what i want to say about populism is that at its core it is a storyline about who owns the truth. and the starting point goes like this. it is almost always the same story. the story is something like, some group of people, usually intellectual elites with or

without being in cahoots with some kind of oppressed group, like immigrants or racial or religious minorities, has with its obfuscating jargon and its phony claims learned at school usurped the people's basic right to define the way the world is. but the story goes like this. when the real or true or honest people wake up and realize that everything around them is subterfuge or fake news, from government intelligence to scientific inclusions at universities, they will be able to restore the reign of the true people's true candor. and in some ways, politics won't have to exist anymore because real-life solutions to real life problems will be found.

this story too has very old roots. even the antifederalists, going back to our early american history, or edmund burke writing about the french revolution, stressed in their different ways a similar story that all these fancy people with their philosophical abstractions talking about liberty and equality were pulling the wool over the eyes of ordinary people. and that the people with their basic faith or their basic business know-how needed to see through this kind of highfalutin rhetoric of their opponents. the same names and storylines have cropped up repeatedly ever sense, from french party platforms to presidential rhetoric, stoked by a free press. the press does not always lead us to the truth. and stoked by propaganda, federal and domestic alike.

sometimes it seems these days as if an anti-elite notion of truth and knowledge is becoming the fastest growing, if not necessarily the dominant, idiom of politics in the world today, and at a steep price. and that brings us back around finally to the present. i promise we are getting to the end here. if we accept that technocratic and populist truths have been on a collision course, something is built into the enlightenment understanding of truth. both sides of the story have been ramped up in unprecedented ways very recently by technological and media shifts, and by macrotrends like deregulation. the obvious question is, what can we do? and here, i am going to tread very carefully.

for one, i am a historian. secondly, the stakes are high, as a philosopher once said. when it comes to truth -- and i am really paraphrasing because she does not say it exactly like this -- when it comes to truth, there is the danger of doing too little and there is the danger of doing too much. too little and you risk fascism, where everyone accepts lying as a matter of course and nobody expect anything different. too much and you get the reign of terror with the obsession of unmasking every person and every claim. we do need to tread carefully and we might think on different scales. i will throw out a few ideas, and if other people have other thoughts, i would love to hear them. at the micro level, i think we can continue to encourage basic fact checking, sober,

nonpartisan fact checking, even if most of the time it is ignored, and on occasion it backfires, pulling up conspiracy theories into the light of day. at the grandest macro level of national or global political change, the hill is a lot steeper. but citizens might push hard for policies that attack growing income inequality so we are not so very far from each other in experience opportunity and education that we seem to be inhabiting very different worlds. i think that is vital.

and we can also try to step away from increasingly obsolete notions of a free marketplace of ideas. that is a 20th century term. but we might need to think more about actually regulating this marketplace so the truth is as important a variable as sensationalism when it comes to the algorithms used to determine what we read and see. and the sources and the money behind misinformation are made more visible to us. i don't think we can really count entirely on self-regulation and voluntary codes when it comes to technology giants like google and facebook. and europeans are probably leading the way in trying to address some of these questions. in the middle, i believe we have to do more to support institutions concerned with the discovery and promulgation of truth, especially those that work to bridge social and epistemological gaps. that means colleges, universities, libraries, centers of all kind, this one being a good example, and especially schools so that people are encouraged, starting with the very young, both that develop a healthy, properly democratic skepticism toward official truth but also some sense of how and where verifiable knowledge if produced can be found, and what too much ability and proof

consist of. in the end, i would say verifiable truth, no matter how contentious and open ended it is, does matter to the survival of democracy. some forms of truth, maybe medicine, could survive without democratic politics. but democracy probably cannot survive without any commitment to a common foundation in truth and some kind of hostility to lies. at a practical level, democracy depends on us trusting each other, which means some kind of conviction that we are telling the truth when we speak to each other. it is a necessity of sound factual information as a starting point for debate. we might disagree about what to do about unemployment, but we actually need to agree if it has gone up or gone down until we have some kind of debate about

what to do about it. and finally, maybe even more, i think democracy requires truth as a key aspiration. without this aspiration toward knowing more, there is little reason why we might want to live under such an uncertain or precarious system in the first place, i think. some of you might say, maybe we don't need democracy at all. it isn't working very well. maybe it is just a nice papering over of various forms of exclusion and domination and injustice. maybe truth is just another one of its mythologies, because we can't really pin it down anyway. democracy has, though, as reimagined in the late 18th century, i think, the

extraordinary virtue of always providing for the possibility of second or maybe even third and fourth chances. and that is because of its relationship to truth. by this way of thinking, democracy's great advantage is not in the empirical outcomes it produces, as one political scientist might argue. it is rather that we can never be sure we have gotten things right, and that's ok. i would say only if we can imagine moral and epistemic progress that it is progress away from not just lies, but wrong information, and toward better information. knowing more, can we rectify the gaps between democratic theory and all its promises, and the world in which we actually live and operate now? that is where i think history can in fact see the work that needs to be done. i will stop there. [applause] sophia: i would be happy to hear

your thoughts or take questions, or anything anybody would like to say. >> thinking about the young people. i was an educator and am recently retired. i don't see too many of them here. and then the future. can we do a better job of preparing them to deal with these matters by introducing critical thinking on a more pervasive scale? because i think a lot of people let these things slip by them. they don't really think about them deeply. sophia: of course, that is an incredibly important question. and one important thing i think students today do need to learn is something we might call media literacy, how to even begin to figure out -- nobody knows instinctively.

these things come through their snapchats, facebook pages, whatever vehicle they are using, twitter. they need some way of assessing information that is unvetted, unlike most material in newspapers. they need to learn something about where information comes from. but i think at a more foundational level, what i was trying to suggest is they need to cultivate two rather different habits. one is questioning what they have heard, which i might call skepticism. democracy requires that all the time. is that really true? is he being honest? is that how things are? and simultaneously, to learn something about -- you cannot operate in life entirely as a skeptic. some things you have to accept as working premises, which we might call truth, and also how you arrived at those. when you hear the national weather service says the tornado is going to hit this location, you have some idea, how has this

information been ascertained? it is not a guess. it may not be 100% foolproof, but it is a very educated guess. students also need to know how real information is developed. >> when i was in grade school, there was an assumption about democracy that we were taught, in that democracy equates with wisdom and that we might make mistakes from time to time, but ultimately you have to have faith in the american people because when they go to the polls, eventually they will do the right thing and things will get better. what do you think of that? [laughter] sophia: that sounds like a

loaded question to me. [laughter] i think there is very little actual evidence that democracy always produces the best outcomes. all sorts of terrible states actually began with people voting for them, including totalitarian states, fascist states. elections themselves do not to me suggest that the people always know best. however, what i was trying to suggest at the end, maybe the less exalted vision of democracy is that democracy does have that possibility of a do over. and it means you do not have to live with whatever has just happened or been decided. and maybe, if you are an optimist -- and i suppose in the end i am -- you think that people get it wrong a lot, but sometimes they get it right.

and if you keep trying, there is still always the chance that we know more, we make better decisions. i don't believe that history always bends toward things getting better all the time, but measure signs of progress over the centuries. the very fact we have the liberty to sit here and have this conversation right now is kind of a product of history. so i guess that is a long-winded way of saying, i think it is too simple to imagine that people know and they get it right all the time, but we might still imagine that the people can still work on it, which is better than any other vision that i think i can come up with. interestingly, when cokie

roberts was here, she supported the electoral college. what is your take on that? sophia: it is a very interesting question. i am not an expert on the electoral college. there are probably some people in this room who know certainly more about it than i do. in some ways these days it's not as undemocratic as simply the existence of the senate, because the senate was imagined for a world in which the population of states would not be so vastly unequal as it is today. electoral college seems to me a little bit of a left over. now, some years it might help democrats, other years republicans. we are talking more about a structure. it has its limitations. i don't think it is the most dangerous or worrisome part of our political system, and there

might be some good reasons for it. populist politics are not always the best. there are some advantages to parties, too. there are trade-offs, at least. but i would say that some of the holdovers of our 18th-century kind of political imaginary seem somewhat past their prime in terms of the way that populations are distributed today, who gets to vote, and a variety of other questions. i could imagine very radical changes, not that they would happen, but compulsory voting, mass voting without state affiliation. maybe we can consider what happens when you do not have a winner take all scenarios. there are interesting possibilities. most of them are not very politically viable, but it does not mean that what we have is because it was imagined in the 18th century the perfect model for the moment. >> i wonder if you have a theory or conjecture at least about why

the elites are so clueless about what is going on, on the other site? the two most obvious examples are brexit, which seemed to take all of europe by surprise, and our 2016 election, when there was a vast popular resentment that nobody on the coasts knew about. i suspect that's happened before in history. cliched answer, but i might have to give it, is about kind of a bubble effect, that the more sources of information that we have, the more overwhelmed we are. i am, at least. every time i turn on my phone, i don't know what to look at first. so many different kinds of news. the more we in a sense go to what we already know and trust and talk to the people we already know and trust, and that is true probably across that partisan divide, probably equally so. we aren't in the same educational institutions.

we are not living in the same places, in many cases. west virginia is interesting as it is very different demographics than philadelphia, where i live, and may provide a much better sense of what america is really like. at least, america that is not the sort of east coast urban america. but we live in relatively isolated ways, and i think it is part of the problem of why we see the world so differently, why we trust so little across those divides. know, got it you all wrong. even journalists at 8:00 on the night of the last presidential election were still insisting that it was absolutely impossible that hillary clinton wasn't going to win. they read the material wrong. i don't think that means that people were lying when they took polls.

it means they didn't quite understand what was happening. and that is why i want to tell this story in such a way as to say that there are kind of two sides to this. one might be this populist resurgence that many people, myself included, worried about what this means for lots of different reasons. but i don't think that should let off the hook people like me, university professors, or living in cities, from the fact that they also have an obligation to try to hear and change our political institutions so that we are not living in such isolated ways. not just in this media sense of internet bubbles, but even more in terms of how institutions, our cultural life, our everyday interactions with people, too.

>> i am wondering, as historians like yourself have looked back at populist movements, is it possible to gauge how frequently the leaders, spokespeople for those movements, have been what i might call true believers in what they are saying as compared to more or less cynically trying to message in a way to manipulate the people that they are trying to move around? and what difference does that make in terms of outcomes? sophia: that is a really interesting question, because often the spokespeople for populism are not themselves a part of the sociological group that you might call, the demographic group they are speaking for. talking about boris johnson or somebody like that, or perhaps president trump would be a good example. he is not a man from a rural place. he is not a person from ordinary income.

he doesn't in any way exemplify the ordinary person, yet he set himself up as an exalted version of a spokesperson for the ordinary person. does he believe it, or is he purely cynical? that i will leave you to decide. but that is a pattern in that it is often adopted as a rhetoric, or a framework, five people for whom it is simply instrumental. it does not mean that the people who espouse it do not believe it. many of them. but the person who comes to incarnate it best is often themselves actually a member of the elite. in many ways, donald trump could be described as coming as much from that elite as not, and not just on financial grounds. but geography, education -- he is a graduate of an ivy league university. there are other -- yes and no. it is a mixture.

but that is not uncommon that populist leaders all over the inld, from the perons argentina, examples of elites who talk the language of non-elites, and use it is kind of a political tool, either because they have come to believe it, or because it is purely cynically adopted. that is an interesting question, for sure. >> my question is not as cynical as it's going to sound. [laughter] [laughter] sophia: ok, i am prepared. >> how do we keep calling ourselves a democracy when we have so, so few people who vote in our area here? very, very low turnout. sophia: yes. that is a very important question, of course.

i even try to say on a few occasions what we call democracy, because what we call democracy is not in any sense a pure democracy. it might be in theory, it is a representative democracy, but the practice of it is riddled with all kinds of inequalities. and one of the features of that is not only that many people are disenfranchised, but there are people who have the vote and don't exercise it. in fact, about half the people eligible to vote, depending on what kind of election and where, don't actually exercise their right to vote. so, can we be a democracy? in a sense, i think you answer your own question. in any pure form, no. some places in the world have taken up compulsory voting. australia, for instance. that is an interesting case. you can vote none of the above, but you must show up and vote. it would transform american political life.

whether we would then come to wiser decisions, i don't know. not necessarily, because many nonvoters are also what we call low information voters who may not follow politics at all and don't have much to say that would necessarily be valuable. on the other hand, it means that many people are not being represented or heard. and even in our votes, some people might argue that because of the role of money in politics, all votes are not essentially equal either, that there are many -- the most commonly cited example is gun safety measures, that something that 90% of population in polls will support, background checks or certain gun safety measures. it is not radical kinds of gun legislation, but certain small improvements in safety questions. and the great question is, why given those polling numbers is

there so little legislative action on that front? is that because people don't vote? is that because the institutions we have are not actually that democratic? is it because of the role of money or outside influence place -- plays in politics? it is probably some of all those things. but it does make one wonder what constitutes democracy in this world. >> great lecture. thank you. my simplistic view of democracy is by the people, for the people. yet, we see this trend by the politicians for the corporations. i wonder what you think the role of capitalism has in that trend? sophia: yes. this is a complicated story, and you are absolutely right. i did not say that much about the role of money or capitalism broadly, although i tried to suggest a little bit that part

of the story of the growth of bureaucracy and experts is linked also to the development of capitalism, not simply to things internal to politics. of course, it is vital. politics has never been separate from economics, and it is impossible to imagine how it really fundamentally could be. however, there are ways to make business interests more or less important in political life. there are certain goods that can be distributed widely that we can or cannot go through markets to get. there are different kinds of health care, market-based and not. i think it is a truism in politics today, and most people will say -- interesting, i think it was in "the times" this week. both the right and the left feel the corruption theme plays well.

to say special interests, business interests of some kind are polluting politics. what they mean by that turns out to be quite different. but that is the theme of the moment. it is not justice or equality or something like that, it is about getting rid of corruption. appeals on both the left and the right for different reasons. interestingly, the thing that used to be absolutely sacrosanct that you could not say in politics was anything that sounded anticapitalist. that is an interesting development as politics to the right have moved further to the right, politics on the left have moved further to the left, and there is a space today in people american political life today especially among young people who are interested in what europeans would call social democracy. it is not really not capitalist. it is not socialism at all, it is capitalism tempered by some socialist programs. welfare benefits, public health, provisions, schooling through the university level.

that is on the table, which is interesting. people used to say the two parties were so close there is no debate in political life. i don't think that is really true right now. [laughter] >> i have had the good fortune to read your book already, and i want to say -- [coughing] excuse me. it is not only brilliantly lucid and you think like a philosopher more than a historian, but you are both. it is an intellectual thriller. but i want to ask you about the scariest observation i found in it. i want to hear your take. you say in talking about hannah arendt's essays and pieces on lying, which you do in a couple places, you said that what she couldn't see was the number of people -- i think you were speaking of the president -- who know they are lies, and still, it doesn't matter.

do you remember that? i mean, i'm sure you remember it. [laughter] i mean, i hope i said it as you wrote it. sophia: that is absolutely right. she wrote in an interesting moment. most of her writing on lying is from the late 1960's, early 1970's, the height of the vietnam era. she is really interested in this phenomenon of who tells the truth. the pentagon papers, for instance. and why there seems to be so much lying in public life. she has really insightful things to say. i found her endlessly interesting to read on these questions. she is difficult. she does not get at them in a straightforward way. they are sort of oblique. but they are full of interesting insights. the one thing that never comes up is what if the people discover they are being lied to , and they don't care? and i really wrestled with that

, as perhaps something of a novel development. that has something to do with this post-truth idea, too, not that there is simply more lying in politics, it is this idea that a lot of people don't care, that some people might say, i know -- i will pick my example sharpie example again. you might think, i know the president altered the weather map with a sharpie, but so what? it is kind of funny to do that. that is a hypothetical person. i don't know if somebody said that exactly. but one could imagine somebody who said, why is that a problem? you might think superficially, it is not that big of a deal. he altered a map. unless you think that it stands for something larger, which is what i was sort of hinting at, that it stands for a willingness to bend reality to fit political needs. and if people don't care about that, it seems to me rather

serious. and i don't think arendt had in front of her an example of that, so i think she didn't contemplate it, because she didn't know and example where people said, she was writing about nixon eventually, too, he lied, but so what? one question for us, i think, is precisely that. how do we, and that's where i really don't have great solutions, because my solutions depend in some ways on inculcating values where these things do matter. if people say so what, that's a harder matter to address. it might be why so many of these investigations seem to so often fall flat these days, because you have to care that the results in a courtroom will determine truth or dishonesty. and will respond accordingly. result -- is the end

yeah. right. particularly worrisome. but as you bring it up, and i think that might be more alarming than simply the existence of a lot unverified information. so, thank you. >> sort of wondering on that same page, what you think about its, peoplee in pund from both sides, because there are two sides of the spectrum. c-span, the notion seems to be that we take people from the side of the aisle, that side of the aisle, and their truths are equally valid, equally supportable and

defensible. i wonder what you think that has to do with this notion that the truth doesn't really exist because i have mine and you have yours, and it gets validated every day depending on who i am listening to. sophia: thank you for asking that. that's a really great last question, insofar as that has become the kind of dominant mode of are politics. people scream at each other in boxes on a tv, and represent two different points of view. i think there is some confusion in this idea of balance between opinion and knowledge. let's take, for example, climate science. if 98% of scientists believe that something is happening to our world that is increasing temperatures, climate change of various kinds, that's not really up for grabs as a "point of view." i think you would have to say, the overwhelming scientific consensus with a few outliers is largely that the planet is warming through human activity. so you don't really need people

to debate is it happening or not. now, you could have a very good debate about what we should do about it, and there i would be very interested to hear two people on the right and the left of any position who might have very different solutions. maybe one market-based, maybe one has a technological solution, maybe another is imagining new kinds of legislation. that would be a case in which hearing multiple points of view would be valuable. but the idea that something has basically become scientific truth, now, all scientific truth is subject to revision, nothing set in stone. but let's say the best guess we possibly have at the moment is this is what is happening. that seems to be a place in which offering two sides is misplaced, because it suggests that everything is loose and up for grabs. so i would make that kind of distinction, and i think we make that too little and assume that

everything is opinion. [applause] sophia: thank you. thank you for the thoughtful questions, too. >> i am going to exert executive privilege and ask one last question. [laughter] which is to say, as you are asking these questions and following the talk and reading the book, what was in my head was the humanities. i wonder, in this moment on college campuses across the country and across the world, where humanities are not popular on multiple levels, if you could speak to the role of the humanities in helping move us toward a space where maybe we are better-equipped, and young people are better have been equipped to deal with this? sophia: i will answer briefly because i am sure everyone is getting tired. of course i am biased on this.

i am a history professor. and a historian asking a historian, how do you feel about the humanities? i will definitely not say useless. but more seriously, i think the humanities is where you learn how to think. [cell phone ringing] sophia: does that mean i won was right, that i won something? [laughter] [laughter] something good. it is important for people to be educated to understand data. we need water quality -- we need what are called the "stem" disciplines these days. but if you don't have a way to analyze that material, to put it in any human perspective, to imagine how it could be used, how it could be misused, how it was used in the past, without something on how human societies have thought and felt and talked in the past, around the world, in the present. knowledge, i think education is only partial, whether it is in nursing, or

dentistry, or data science, or technology, without some graft, even a piece of it. read some 19th-century novels, or study anthropology, consider african culture, something that allows you to get outside the present and imagine other formulations of the world, and how things get thought about and used. history lets us get out of our present a little bit. we also get out of the present and we start to see things differently when we are not always in our own world. i think that's kind of a great gift, that sometimes gets wasted on students if they don't come to it. but sometimes you see students have a revelation where they imagine, i thought families always looked like mine. what if a family looked like something else? i wonder how that ever worked out. and that is a wonderful moment. and that really only happens

through the study, and it doesn't matter which one, or how, of the humanities, i believe. [applause] >> we have snacks, and you can buy the book. [laughter] >> ok. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2019] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> this is american history tv on c-span3, where each weekend we feature 48 hours of programs exploring our nation's past.

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discussed the trump impeachment inquiry with the chair of the american conservative union, and then "demand justice" co-founder will be on to talk about this up in court. we would also talk about ohio's role as a campaign 2020 battleground state with cleveland.com's seth richardson. watch c-span "washington journal," live, 7:00 eastern monday morning. join the discussion. american history tv "reel america" shows films that provide context for today's public affairs issues. >> on may 29, 1933 after weeks of discussion, there was a meeting on the outskirts of jeddah. there, saudi arab government officials resenting his majesty signed a concession of 320

,000 square miles, the starting point of a new american business venture abroad. but ahead, there was a long distance to travel. a huge investment. years of effort, and no end of patience and perseverance. most of all, the job would require men, hardy men, determined men, men willing to leave families and friends and journey halfway around the world on a quest that might end in failure. men who could face hardship and monotony, and still take it. men like paul strong. paul strong had never heard of saudi arabia, when he was asked in 1938 if he would like to go there. that answer was easy for him. he would not like to go. for his money, give him the peace, quiet and comfort of the

small american town where he lived since he finished college just a few years before. the company sought out other men. men are always found when the chance of pioneering is offered. across the breadth and depth of america. on farms. in small towns. in great cities. each man had his own problems to weigh, each his own decision to make, for they were being asked to make a life career of oil in arabia. and weighed, and decided, gradually they began to arrive. carpenters, machinists, rigg ers, technicians, drillers, executives, too eager to extend a welcoming hand clasp to the new arrivals. and who is that over there? sure enough, paul strong. paul had forgotten back in the

states that he had that traditional american characteristic, a hunger for adventure and challenge. he and the others had come to learn of the middle east, and they found the going was tough. few outsiders had ever before been beyond the port of jeddah. and the arabs were suspicious of these strange newcomers. many of them were frankly hostile, and were quite ready to show their feelings. even the extended hand of friendship was accepted grudgingly, in the early days. on top of all this, it was hot. 120 in the shade on many a day in summer, sometimes soaring to 140 in the sun, with high humidity to make it even worse. there were flies, and the

housing was makeshift. there was little to do except work, and life seemed rugged city theyre in such a prepared to search for oil,. on our weekly series reel america on american history tv. next on the presidency, we continue our coverage of a daylong conference on herbert hoover during the two world wars. in about 40 minutes all four , conference speakers answer audience questions, but first, we hear from a kansas city art institute professor emeritus. he talks about the views and policies president franklin d . roosevelt and former president hoover on war-torn europe and the ti