Democracy and Truth

A Short History

Sophia Rosenfeld

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780812295856
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

"Fake news, " wild conspiracy theories, misleading claims, doctored photos, lies peddled as facts, facts dismissed as lies—citizens of democracies increasingly inhabit a public sphere teeming with competing claims and counterclaims, with no institution or person possessing the authority to settle basic disputes in a definitive way.The problem may be novel in some of its details—including the role of today's political leaders, along with broadcast and digital media, in intensifying the epistemic anarchy—but the challenge of determining truth in a democratic world has a backstory. In this lively and illuminating book, historian Sophia Rosenfeld explores a longstanding and largely unspoken tension at the heart of democracy between the supposed wisdom of the crowd and the need for information to be vetted and evaluated by a learned elite made up of trusted experts. What we are witnessing now is the unraveling of the détente between these competing aspects of democratic culture.In four bracing chapters, Rosenfeld substantiates her claim by tracing the history of the vexed relationship between democracy and truth. She begins with an examination of the period prior to the eighteenth-century Age of Revolutions, where she uncovers the political and epistemological foundations of our democratic world. Subsequent chapters move from the Enlightenment to the rise of both populist and technocratic notions of democracy between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the troubling trends—including the collapse of social trust—that have led to the rise of our "post-truth" public life. Rosenfeld concludes by offering suggestions for how to defend the idea of truth against the forces that would undermine it.

Chapter 1

The Problem of Democratic Truth

For the past few years, the mainstream press has repeatedly told us the same dark story. Democracy is in trouble in the United States—and the trouble extends to its very foundations. According to this narrative, citizens are losing their grip on any shared view of reality, the minimum requirement for the collective imagination and instantiation of a collective future.

The evidence appears to be everywhere. Think all the way back to Pizzagate, the bizarre, widely discussed 2016 story of an alleged child-sex ring being run by the Democratic Party out of the basement of a D.C. pizza joint. To this day, retellings—at least in the circles of the worried—inspire laughter, but also expressions of dismay. Laughter because, on the surface, the story is so preposterous. Dismay because, like many other such improbable, quasi-political hoaxes and conspiracy tales these days, it actually had its adherents, who can easily locate one another online. One believer even traveled to Washington, armed, looking to “self-investigate” on behalf of his aggrieved and mistrustful ideological compatriots. This is but the inverse of the hordes of school-shooting deniers who have been harassing teenagers in Parkland, Florida, convinced that the adolescent survivors of a 2018 high school mass murder aren’t traumatized activists but rather “crisis actors,” starring in an entirely faked piece of antigun propaganda.

We now know that many of these Internet-fueled fairytales were concocted with the support of Russian intelligence forces and disseminated with the help of bots or “troll-factories” aiming to spread chaos in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election and beyond.¹ But others have been scams promulgated by obscure, for-profit companies right here in the United States or by popular websites like Gateway Pundit, which has relentlessly pushed “false flag” narratives.² They have also been helped along by giant, international web-based media platforms like YouTube and Facebook and search engines like Google looking, as always, for profits. Today’s world of online news is full not just of partisan stories but also of false ones, designed to scare, anger, and mislead for political or mercenary ends.

It’s not just a question of new media, though. Cable TV, talk radio, and even much of print journalism also relentlessly generate and push misleading stories or exaggerate the significance of real ones, often with the claim that they are supplying “balance.” Spokespeople in Washington, from heads of advocacy groups to members of Congress, do the same. Fake audio and video may soon be so convincing that we will no longer be able to distinguish them from the real anyway.³

Then there is the current president himself, Donald Trump, widely considered both a symptom and an accelerant of our move away from any shared standards of truth. With his public pronouncements, whether on Twitter, at live rallies, or during visits to Fox & Friends, our former “reality TV”–star president has exacerbated the problem. He has also, with the support of a large cast of elected and unelected characters, added his own twists.

Trump, it is widely acknowledged, has always brazenly traded in misinformation. He makes up facts about his own past actions. He passes along tall tales from dubious sources. He denies the validity of legitimate information. And he keeps peddling these falsehoods even when they contradict his own or associates’ previous claims. That goes for accusations and self-justifications alike. You’ve heard them all before: he’s worth ten billion dollars; Muslims celebrated in New Jersey on 9/11; Obama isn’t an American citizen; the tax cuts are going to hurt his rich friends and his own bottom line; there are terrorists from the Middle East hiding out in a caravan of Central American invaders; he never referred to “shithole” countries in Africa; climate change is a Chinese hoax; voter fraud is rampant; his personal health is magnificent; Democrats forced the breakup of families at the southern border because it’s “their law”; he’s been exonerated in the Mueller investigation; 3,000 people didn’t die in a hurricane in Puerto Rico; and he doesn’t know Stormy Daniels, except when he does. The list is long. The Washington Post says he made more than 2,000 false or misleading (as in the case of extremely exaggerated or selective) statements in his first 355 days in office, or about 5.6 per day.⁴ The rate has increased substantially in year two of his presidency.⁵

But it is his response when shown legitimate proof to the contrary that draws our attention as much as the original lies. One of his favorite strategies when under fire is to suggest that all truth is slippery because it depends on whom one is talking to. Think of his predilection for statements beginning “Some people are saying . . . ,” or “I’ve been hearing . . . ,” or the comments delivered with a literal shrug or scare quotes suggesting “maybe” or “don’t take my words so literally, it’s all bullshit in the end.” Other times he insists that he knows best, evidence be damned (“Believe me . . .”). Or he throws out totally bogus forms of corroboration (an especially cold New Year’s Eve 2017 undermines claims of global warming; he might have audio recordings that would exonerate him from some act or other, though they never materialize) or implausible denials, as if it’s all part of one big substance-free game. Most frequently, he insists the so-called “authorities” aren’t actually authoritative at all, just more partisan players in a thoroughly political world. From the Congressional Budget Office to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the New York Times and other “mainstream” or establishment information sources, it’s “fake news” all the way down. In his telling, America’s primary media are so corrupt that he’s perfectly justified in lying to them.⁶ In Trumpland, truth becomes falsehood, and falsehood masquerades as truth. The credibility of any source, indeed the very idea of verified knowledge itself, is thus thrown into question.

Some of this looseness with truth is intended as a form of distraction or a way to sow confusion, doubt, and maybe even fatigue in the public. Some is a power game, especially when subordinates and others currying favor, from official spokespersons to hacks on television, are forced to repeat the lies. Trump demonstrates just how much he can get away with and ensures his lackeys’ loyalty along the way.⁷ Some might even stem from reverse pride—specifically the fact that the president sees himself as capable of deciding from the gut (aided by a lot of cable-news watching) and does not need to rely on fancy-pants studies or the opinions of the so-called informed. In seeming to cut through the official bullshit, he is taking the establishment down a peg, at least rhetorically, and elevating himself, like a king, as the real source of truth. He is also, in the process, throwing off one more undesirable form of restraint. Cue up the photos of Trump looking straight at the eclipse in 2017 when everyone else has been warned by scientists not to do so. It is sometimes hard to tell with these gestures what is shrewd attention-grabbing combined with old-fashioned deceit and what is insecurity, impetuosity, or actual self-delusion, fulfilling his own fantasies of himself and the world.

Regardless of motivation, though, it is very clear that this antitruth stance goes beyond a stylistic choice; it has been translated into a mode of governance for the Trump administration as a whole. The same indifference to the boundaries between truth and falsehood, information and know-nothingism, has led to an actual turn away from the cultivation of institutional expertise in areas like macroeconomic policy, foreign affairs, and climate science. The gutting, in terms of both dollars and personnel, of the State Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, and many other government agencies, including fact-finding ones, constitutes a form of opposition to the research protocols and evidence-based knowledge that has long informed democratic procedures and policy in practice.⁸ So does the elevation in their place of those who are, at all times, in the business of partisan pitching or selling, or what we might call political hacks, over experienced civil servants. Lying to cover up a culture of self-dealing—traditionally known in politics as corruption—seems to be another, closely related effect.

Yet what is perhaps most alarming, according to this narrative, is that many people in the United States and elsewhere appear not to care.⁹ On the contrary, they seem to embrace this approach to the realm of truth and falsehood. More and more citizens are convinced, according to recent studies, that there are no such things these days as impartial, consensual facts. More and more citizens are also convinced that there are no legitimate, trustworthy sources of disinterested information, only partisan propaganda machines spinning out obfuscation, lies, and biased claims to advance hidden causes. This is increasingly the case on both sides, but particularly so, studies have found, on the right, and especially when it comes to institutions that promote shared norms of inquiry, including government agencies, universities, scientific research centers, media, and publishing companies.¹⁰ In this context, what is important—indeed, what’s actually believable and convincing as truth—is that what’s stated feels authentic or conforms to a preexisting sentiment, not that it’s accurate in some demonstrable way. “Truth” has become personal, a matter of subjective feeling and taste and not much different from an opinion (think “my truth”).

Moreover, what counts as truth is now shaped to a substantial degree by group loyalty and partisanship—or what David Roberts, writing in Vox, calls “tribal epistemology.”¹¹ We don’t believe—which is to say, take to be true—that anyone on our team could do something illegal or say something deceptive, even when shown proof. That’s because it doesn’t fit our desired storyline. (Al Gore, referring to human-made environmental degradation, once called such information, cribbing from Max Weber, “inconvenient truth.”)¹² But we might believe that crime by immigrants, say, or the incidence of violent crime in general is up because that’s the way it seems in some impressionistic way—and also because it runs counter to the knowledge associated with our social and political enemies. This kind of confirmation bias is then reinforced in a media landscape in which we pick the news source that best matches our preexisting inclinations and affinities and dismiss the rest, à la Trump, as “garbage,” “nonsense,” or, most often, “fake news,” meaning these days something we just don’t want to hear. For like all successful slogans, the expression “fake news” has just enough truth to it—news reporting is, after all, often biased in different ways—to make it seem, if not accurate, then at least no more misleading than anything else.

Indeed, it is by this logic that Trump, with his blunt, knowledge-free, and often inaccurate pronouncements, can actually appear to a large segment of Americans to be more truthful than other politicians. In throwing over the social niceties and rejecting the euphemistic language of the educated establishment (otherwise known as “political correctness”), it looks to many people like he is actually telling it like it is, whether what he is saying is verifiable or not. Calling African countries “shitholes” may be unfounded and racist, but it is how “real” people think and talk in private. Trump is just brave enough to do so in public forums. Or so the thinking goes. Says presidential ally and long-time master of political dirty tricks Roger Stone, “Trump is a truth-teller. He calls it as he sees it. . . . To those who say this is divisive, well, we’re tired of polite.” As to the president’s eschewing of evidence and accuracy, Stone’s response is “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? It’s a question that can’t be answered. Facts are, obviously, in the eye of the beholder. You have an obligation to make a compelling case. Caveat emptor.”¹³ This deliberate elevation of emotional frankness and the salesman’s convincingness over veracity at a factual level also helps explain why, despite his history of outright prevarication about himself and the world, Trump was judged considerably more honest than his opponent, Hillary Clinton, right before the election that gave him the presidency.¹⁴

This all sounds peculiarly American perhaps—except the evidence suggests that it isn’t happening only here. Disinformation has gone global, and not only because of the workings of Russian agents eager to benefit from the disruption of politics as usual. Hoaxes and conspiracy theories have fueled support for right-wing parties in many parts of Europe, especially when they depend on anti-immigrant sentiment. Consider how Viktor Orbán and his far right Fidesz party have cemented power in Hungary by pushing the phony notion that the European Union, the United Nations, and George Soros are together waging a battle to force the nation to accept thousands of mainly Muslim migrants and become an “immigrant country” rather than a white, Christian one.¹⁵ Conversely, copycat charges of “fake news” on the part of quasi-authoritarian rulers all over the world looking to paper over corruption or to discredit unpleasant verities are now commonplace too. The leaders of Myanmar, including the Nobel Peace Prize–winning Aung San Suu Kyi, were, for example, quick to announce that there is “no such thing as the Rohingya,” and it was all “fake news” on the part of outsiders when accused by the foreign press of flirting with the genocide of the country’s Muslim minority this past year.¹⁶ Different publics around the globe have, in imitation, embraced these strategies too. Everywhere, extreme partisan politics seems to be eating away at the truths held in common, by ordinary people as well as experts and representatives of the state, that a robust democratic public sphere ostensibly requires.

But has the “reality-based community,” as a senior advisor to former President George W. Bush memorably dismissed those who remain wedded to a world of facts, actually become obsolete, a relic of a more naïve era? Are we really at the dawn of a brave new world of post-truth, to employ the 2016 Oxford English Dictionary word of the year, or an “epidemic of dishonesty,” in the expression of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg?¹⁷ And if so, is democracy (as we understand it today) doomed?

We can look at this question from several perspectives. Historians tend to be cynics. By their measure, there is rarely anything totally new under the sun. Truth and politics have, after all, never been on very good terms, and there has always been lying in politics, which depends at its core upon leaders skilled in the art of persuasion combined with a dose of hypocrisy for good measure. The ancients, starting with Plato and Aristotle, knew that well. An exceptional number of political leaders ever since, from kings to presidents and prime ministers, have provided us with shining examples across every kind of regime. The political theorist Hannah Arendt said it most famously in her great essay “Lying in Politics,” in which she insisted that “deception, the deliberate falsehood and the outright lie used as legitimate means to achieve political ends, have been with us since the beginning of recorded history. Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.”¹⁸

Real “fake news,” it turns out, is a very old phenomenon too. Pornographic libelles featuring a sex-obsessed Marie-Antoinette in the years before the French Revolution are simply the ancestors of today’s “news stories” claiming Michelle Obama or Melania Trump is actually a man, or a body double, or a lesbian, or anything else salacious.¹⁹ Conspiracies starring Jews have been a media staple from the Middle Ages to, well, the age of George Soros today.²⁰ Ditto for conspiracy theorists’ suggestions that what appears to be reality is, in fact, staged in the service of mass persuasion.²¹ In 1796, at the end of his presidency, in a passage that now sounds remarkably familiar, George Washington noted that during the previous few years the gazettes have “teemed with all the Invective that disappointment, ignorance of facts, and malicious falsehoods could invent, to misrepresent my politics and affections, to wound my reputation and feelings, and to weaken, if not entirely destroy, the confidence that you [the public] have been pleased to repose in me.”²² He wasn’t wrong. Subsequent presidents have often felt equally victimized by an unscrupulous and biased press. It is the idea of objectivity in news reporting that is historically anomalous and a relatively recent invention. The aim of entirely disinterested judgment only began to characterize any of the truth-related professions in the wake of the rise of new scientific ideals in the middle of the nineteenth century.²³

Moreover, it seems that many of us—despite this seemingly repetitive history—are always ready to declare ourselves seriously worried. In the modern world, concerned citizens and their journalistic spokespeople intermittently but serially go into mor...