Ever since Donald Trump announced his Presidential candidacy, in June of 2015, there has been considerable concern about whether his allergy to truth is endangering American democracy. Without a public sphere dominated by agreed-upon-facts, many say, a healthy society—and wise polity—become impossible to sustain. In her new book, “Democracy and Truth: A Short History,” Sophia Rosenfeld, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that the relationship between truth and democracy was fraught for centuries before the time of Twitter and Trump. “Does democratic politics really ‘need truth to do its business well,’ as some have recently claimed?” she asks in the book. In addition to trying to answer that question, she argues that questions of truth have always been litigated and disputed, and that a politics dominated by shared notions of the truth has never really existed.
With Trump halfway through his four-year term in office, it seemed like a good time to talk about the state of truth in American society, so I called up Rosenfeld. During our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed whether it is healthy for a democratic society to debate issues like evolution and global warming, why people distrust experts, and whether public fact-checking is a good solution to the problem of fake news.
What came across from your book is that the fretting about the future of truth in a democracy, as it relates to Trump, has irked you, even though you’re obviously not a fan of the President. Is that fair?
Well, you’re right, I’m not a fan of the President, so I’m not in any way trying to excuse what I think is a demonstrably terrible Presidency. That said, I don’t think that we have to rush into the idea that we’re heading full force into fascism every time he opens his mouth, either. I do think that taking a longer historical look, not simply looking at the last two to five years, allows you to see the way even this moment, with all its obviously unusual features, still belongs to a much longer story.
What’s that story?
That story is twofold. One, it’s a story about how democracy itself is always based on uncertain notions of truth, in moral terms and in epistemological terms. The other is a story about a continual conflict between a kind of expert truth and a more populist, everyday, common-sense truth that supposedly stems not from experts but the wisdom of the crowd.
Even if truth in a democracy has always been up for grabs, and we’ve always had politicians use fake news, that still raises the question of whether we require some fundamental baseline of truth to have an actual democracy.
Right. It’s in some ways the great problem of democracy. Democracy insists on the idea that truth both matters and that nobody gets to say definitively what it is. That’s a tension that’s built into democracy from the beginning, and it’s not solvable but is, in fact, intrinsic to democracy. I think both things matter. We don’t want to have one definitive source of truth. Part of the reason ideas evolve and culture changes is that we’re constantly debating what is an accurate rendition of reality in some form. But, on the other hand, it makes for a lot of instability. That instability can be productive or unproductive at different moments and in different ways. You know, the aspiration for knowing more and getting closer to the truth is a really important one, because it lets us constantly rethink what we know to be true and often decide that what we know to be true isn’t.
Have there been societies that you would consider democracies whose foundations started to shake because that pursuit of truth stopped?
There’s always the risk that if there’s too much instability in truth, people will find life in general unstable, that you won’t know what to believe in at all. I do think there’s a serious risk in a politics anywhere that doesn’t have some agreed-upon foundation, even if it’s a loose consensus. The classic example would be something like Weimar Germany, when there ceases to be a real commitment to seeing the world collectively. Then you get some kind of revolution, you get some kind of really abrupt change. You might just get apathy. People stop caring about truth, as sometimes happened in former Eastern European states where people retreated into private life and dismissed public life as just filled with untruth. That’s the great risk, but democracies do thrive on a certain amount of combative truth claims, always. If you run through American history, you can see sometimes they’re explosive, but most of the time they’re part of public life.
What would be some examples of truth claims that you think are either important to the lifeblood of democracy or explosive and dangerous?
Something like Darwinian claims about evolution, which were heavily contested. To some degree, they still are, and they’ve been part of democratic life and part of legal life. Can we accept evolution as a set truth or not? They have not exploded to the point where they’ve destabilized our political or social life, but they’ve been a controversial question for over a hundred years. That’s a public contest that, actually, democracy’s pretty good for. You know, you contest things in court, you contest things in universities, you contest things in the public sphere.
You said democracy’s good for them, but are they good for democracy? Could I argue that the battle over evolution has not brought down American democracy or done damage in the way that other things have, but that, if everyone just accepted the broad claims of evolution, we would have a healthier democracy?
I’m not really sure. I think it’s important that there be a contest about what is true and also about, How do you know what’s true? Where does your information come from? I would say, largely, science has won. That is, that the mainstream educational institutions, the National Institutes of Health, et cetera, all accept that evolution is as close as we’re going to get to truth. Is it dangerous that there’s still some people who don’t believe that? Probably not really dangerous to democracy as a whole. We’ve long contested not just what’s true but how we know anything: What are the sources of truth? I think the issue today that has people most upset is not either of those questions as much as whether we’ve stopped caring about what’s true. The whole phenomenon of post-truth has taken us to the question of whether we’re indifferent to truth now, as opposed to contesting what it is and how we find it.
You could say that the battle over whether climate change is, in part, man-made is a contest over truth, and that’s a democracy. You could also say that, well, if everyone accepted that as true, the planet might be a lot safer.
Yes. I agree entirely. The question is: How do we find some way [to insure] that the better answer prevails? We’re not so upset that people are arguing about this. We’re upset that we haven’t been able to fashion policies that rest on what seems to be the consensus of ninety-nine per cent of scientists and almost anybody who’s had any involvement in climate-related issues. Why it is that so many people are not persuaded, at the moment, by what seems to be scientific consensus—and, in many cases, not persuaded even by the evidence that’s right in front of them?
This gets at some of the things you say in the book about experts. There are two current critiques of them, and I am wondering if you think they are worth distinguishing. The first would be that experts are often wrong, and so something that we view as technocratic actually brings about a bad result. The second critique would be that experts don’t bring about bad results, in terms of human flourishing, but they are unpopular or cause a populist backlash despite this.
That’s a really important and, I think, excellent distinction. One says that experts often make [bad] decisions because there’s been no popular input on them—not just because they don’t know enough but because they haven’t actually taken account of popular knowledge. The most common example involves things like the World Bank coming up with a plan about water use in some part of the world without studying how people actually think and use water, simply imagining a kind of technocratic solution with no local input, and it turns out to be totally ineffective because it runs contrary to cultural norms and everyday life. There’s every chance that experts alone get things wrong.
Your second point is really more of a social question. It’s the critique of people who are over-educated, generally wealthier than average, and, in some ways, not part of the mainstream, making decisions for everybody else. You see that in cases like the E.U., where, whether their policies are effective or not, there’s resentment at what’s called the democratic deficit, the fact that people have very little say, often, about what policies are enacted. That breeds resentment, too, whether or not the policies themselves result in beneficial outcomes.
The first critique you made is almost that experts are not expert enough. That these experts do not have enough expertise to get water to people properly, right?
It depends how you define expertise when you say they don’t have enough expertise at the World Bank—say, in a water program. They do, within the boundaries of what they consider to be expert. What they might not have is the voices of people who they wouldn’t consider experts but whose knowledge of things is local and specific and is valuable for knowing what to do.
To what degree do you think the general freak-out over truth has to do with the rise of social media?
Social media and the Internet more broadly have clearly had a rather revolutionary effect on not just what we take to be true but how truths circulate, what we believe, how we know anything. You know, we’re all addicted to these information streams. Rumors have always spread, but they spread person to person. Now a rumor can spread, and in some ways you might say this is a kind of atavistic technology, right? It’s making us act like we once did, before we had good sources of information.
The quickness and the spread is extraordinary, and we don’t have many tools, most of us, for distinguishing between legitimate stories and illegitimate ones, or we don’t care that much. The end result is a world of truth and falsehood all circulating, undifferentiated, globally.
Did you find other examples of new technology sparking panics about truth?
Yes. I would say every new technology causes certain kinds of panics about truth. The Internet is particularly important because of its reach and because of the algorithmic way in which it promotes what’s popular rather than what’s true. It creates a culture of untruth, probably, that other forms of publishing can’t easily. And the law’s always catching up. The law is always behind in trying to figure out new ways to regulate what is a changing public sphere. Certainly, I think the jury’s still out in modern law about what to do about Facebook, or Google, or anything else.
You said that there’s a fear about the distinction between truth and fiction disappearing in public life and people retreating into their own private lives, as you said happened in Eastern Europe. I had that fear, too, but Trump has been President for two years. His approval rating is pretty low. It seems like, on issues of public concern, sixty per cent of the country just tunes him out. So, in something like the government shutdown, he just can’t get his point across and no one thinks he’s honest. Far from being disengaged, we just had a midterm election with the highest turnout in decades. Where do you think we are after two years of Trump?
I think that the doomsayers may have been a bit premature, in that there certainly is a contest going on right now, and American political life is obviously very divided, but there’s also a contest even just about truth. Different people are looking to different places. New York Times subscriptions have soared. At the same time, Trump’s list of numbers of falsehoods has soared, as well, and his lies are repeated by many people. We are kind of in the balance between the two.
So I don’t think the idea we have all suddenly gone over to post-truth is accurate. [There is] resistance to both kinds of his untruths, by which I mean the moral position in which he lies as an opposite of truth, and the epistemological position in which he spouts false information or unverified beliefs in contrast to truth. There’s been a big pushback on both, and it comes in the form of journalism, it comes in the form of publishing of all kinds, and it comes in protests of various kinds, resistance both at the ballot box and in the street. We have not succumbed entirely to his charms or something like that. It’s hard to predict.
What have you made of the journalistic concept, seen more recently and often, of the public fact-check?
I actually approve of fact-checking, even if I think it’s often not very effective, because it doesn’t persuade people who aren’t already inclined to want to look at fact-checking. And I don’t think it’s much of a substitute for real politics. It’s not politics, and we don’t want to get caught up in the idea that simply correcting a record is a good way to counter anything. You have to make a persuasive argument. It’s a rhetorical field. That said, I do think it’s important to fact-check because, in some long-term way, it holds public figures accountable and provides a running record of both what was said and what actually happened.
I don’t think facts are pure in any sense. You know, if I give you something like an unemployment rate, it implies all kinds of interpretative work already about what is work and who should be looking for it and how old you should be when you’re working. All kinds of things are built into even what looks like a fact. That said, we can’t have a public life without any agreement on any set of facts. It’s impossible to build policy if some people think unemployment is up and some people think unemployment is down. Holding onto facts really does matter to democratic political life, though I do also think fact-checking by itself is no panacea for either political problems or truth problems.
What is the solution then?
The solution, to my mind, is both big and small. The small part is certainly continuing to engage in corrections of the record, but, by itself, that’s not a particularly effective solution. There also has to be a shoring up of institutions that try to provide shared norms of truth, whether that’s government agencies, scientific research institutions, universities, the press, elections, all the parts of the kind of democratic machinery that ostensibly work to provide some kind of shared truths.
Then probably there’s a piece that’s elusive but important, if we want to get past this moment, which is trying to do something about both the power of technology companies and reining in, in some ways, the free-market approach to communication, because I think the model of the free market that will regulate itself and produce truth is really obsolete. That’s not how online communication works. Then probably the last piece is the one that’s critical, I think, for politics in general, which is rethinking how we’ve gotten to a world with such enormous economic disparity and cultural disparity and disparity in opportunity that it looks so radically different to different citizens in the United States. Of course that applies to other places, too.
There seem, to me, to be fake news and falsehoods that arise organically, which is not to say they’re not stoked, but they have to do with suspicions of people from different places, or suspicions of people who are more educated. But something like belief that global warming is not happening, it seems to me, could only be believed if, basically, rich people, for their own interests, have convinced others that this is the case. I’m wondering if you think it’s worth distinguishing between those two types of things, because it does seem like there’s a difference there.
That’s actually a very interesting question, because of course not only are some conspiracies promoted from the top and some from below but some conspiracy theories turn out to be right, so you don’t want people to never be skeptical, right? It’s important that that’s part of democracy, too—questioning received wisdom. If somebody says that’s how it is, it’s correct to think, Is that really how it is? Do I have enough information to be sure that’s how it is?
Conspiracy theories, the complex ones that arise from the bottom, tend to involve seeing through official truths and often seeing how the rich and powerful have pulled the wool over people’s eyes, that what looked like this turned out to be that because there was a kind of subterfuge going on from above. Whereas, the climate-change one, which we know has been sort of promoted by the Koch brothers and others in business interest groups, as you say, didn’t start really organically as much as it became a kind of position of industry that then took on a life of its own because it got mixed in with a whole bunch of other assumptions, whether it was about political norms, government overreach, guns.
It’s part of a mix. Very few people are opposed to the idea that the planet is getting warmer and don’t hold any other part of a constellation of beliefs that go with it: that government is overreaching and that sort of thing, and that it’s a plot by the state to take away your autonomy, deny people jobs, take guns. Those obviously didn’t have a popular foundation to begin with.
