>> Kevin Butterfield: Welcome to 
this Kluge conversation.
My name is Kevin Butterfield, the 
director of the John W Kluge Center
at the Library of Congress. 
We're joined today by
Sophia Rosenfeld, Walter
Annenberg, Professor of History
at the University of Pennsylvania, 
and Kluge Chair
and countries and 
cultures of the North.
And we're going to explore the
question, are conspiracy
theories inevitable in a
democratic society?
Thanks for being here with me.
>> Sophia Rosenfeld:
Thanks for inviting me.
>> Kevin Butterfield: I want to start with 
this this big question by exploring
something that you've written
about in different ways in a
couple of your works, this
question of how we know what's
true and in a 
democratic society.
I think if someone stops and
thinks about it for a minute,
there is a basic question of
who gets to decide what's true.
Can we start there? This
question of truth in a
democracy?
>> Sophia Rosenfeld: Sure. I mean, one 
of the really interesting things about
democracy is that nobody really
gets to say what's true.
No one person, no one
institution, no one method even
is been established as 
the arbiter for truth.
So that makes getting to truth
always a kind of a messy
business. And it's a business
that involves experts of
different kinds, but 
also ordinary people.
And ideally they come to some
kind of loose consensus and we
get kind of established truths.
But it's sometimes pretty hard
to get there in a democracy.
>> Kevin Butterfield: When we talk 
about monopolies on truth, what
what has served as monopolies 
on truth in the past?
>> Sophia Rosenfeld: Well, in a society 
that has a single source of authority,
say there's a king or a religious
leader or somebody that gets to
be the arbiter of what's 
true and what's correct.
It's pretty clear where
authority lies.
But one of the principles of
American and really other
democratic cultures to life has
established as far back as the
18th century was that authority
wouldn't be vested in any really
single place, and that in fact,
there'd be pretty wide leeway
for people to disagree and
simply have to agree on some
very low level premises, not on
sort of fundamental truths at
all. And even those low level
agreements are kind of hard to
arrive at.
>> Kevin Butterfield: When you talk about 
a source of truth or a source of authority
in a democracy, I think the
people and I think majority rule
when you and you mentioned 
a sort of a consensus, a loose
consensus or an agreement 
that we can disagree a bit.
Could you talk a little bit
about where majoritarian
democracy fits into what 
you're describing?
>> Sophia Rosenfeld: Yes, that's really 
an important question, because what
we don't vote on is what's true.
We vote for representatives who
we hope will make good decisions
on our behalf, but we don't
ever kind of sit down and say,
let's vote this up or down
cigarettes or bad for your
health. True or false?
We have a much looser way of
getting there, though it's not
completely removed from the
political process because, of
course, it's upon various kinds
of truths that good policy is
made. So we disagree sometimes
about what's true, and sometimes
we agree what's true, but
disagree about what to do about
it. And those are kind of
different steps in the process.
>> Kevin Butterfield: And if we take us to 
the current moment, what's a good
example of something where we agree 
what's true, but we disagree on how to
resolve or how to 
deal with that issue?
>> Sophia Rosenfeld: Yeah, so a basic 
idea might be something like this.
The unemployment rate is
announced at certain intervals.
We don't think of that as
partisan information.
We think of that as expert
arrived at information.
Now we know that what we count
as an unemployment rate is
already could be 
subject to dispute.
Do you only count people 
who are looking for work?
Do you count all people who are
unemployed say, But if we agree
on that sort of basic fact and
we treat it as a fact, we would
then go on to have ideally a
kind of productive dispute,
let's say, or even conversation
about what's the best thing to
do in the circumstances, given
this given we want to increase
employment, say, but if we if
half the people in the room
thought unemployment were up
and half thought unemployment
were down, it would be very
hard to have a very good
discussion about what to do
because you haven't agreed on
the sort of starting premises.
>> Kevin Butterfield: Let's start let's 
dive into this question that is all
over your more recent book, Democracy 
and Truth, this question of
expertise and understanding
intellectual authority in some
ways and where that fits into a
democracy and we haven't really
talked about this specifically
yet in this conversation is
experts, people that have
studied a particular subject and
how much the people broadly or
individually should defer to
them. I think very famously of
Thomas Jefferson talking about a
plowman and a professor and and
he would trust the judgment of
the plowman, not the professor.
Is is this question of of
deference to intellectual
authority related to 
what we're describing?
>> Sophia Rosenfeld: Absolutely. It is
because even in the 18th century,
we'll go back to your 
Jefferson example.
There's a strong sense that both 
expertise and what was even
by Jefferson referred to as
common sense need to sort of
find a meeting ground.
So government was never it was
never thought that would be
possible to run the country
entirely without any kind of
expertise. You needed doctors
to solve medical problems, for
instance, you needed mapmakers
to figure out what the terrain
looked like. There's a reason
there's a Library of Congress.
It is, in fact, to provide
information to government
initially. So there's been a
strong preference for
information and expert
information at that as a kind of
driver of political life.
But that said, there's also
been a strong skepticism from
the beginning of experts,
sometimes because they're
connected to government,
sometimes just because they seem
like highfalutin people with a
lot of jargon that doesn't add
up to a lot of common sense.
And those things are always 
in some kind of tension.
In some moments, there may 
be more of a preference for
expertise. If you took expertise
to its extreme end, it
would be something like a
technocracy. And then there are
moments when there's a kind of
bias towards the plowman, the
common sense of the farmer who
goes out and knows what's.
Going on better in a kind of
experiential way than the expert
sitting in a library.
And those might be moments
where we start talking about
something more like populism.
>> Kevin Butterfield: And that's 
exactly where I was thinking we
might go, because this question 
of populism is it's certainly the
case that when you make appeals
to the common sense of the masses
of the people, that you're
assuming a couple of things.
And one of them is defining who
the people are, who's included
and who's not included.
And another one is that this is
going to that common sense, that
wisdom of the people 
must prevail.
There's the sort of
authoritative force, because of
what we've already said about
democracy, vox populi, Vox day.
And so with that, when we have
this preference as, say, an
American culture or another
Western cultures for the common
sense of the masses of the
people doesn't necessarily turn
into a populist argument, 
a populist position.
How has it taken 
shape historically?
>> Sophia Rosenfeld:
Yeah.
So it's in some ways getting to
even who the people are has
gotten harder over time 
rather than easier.
In the 18th century, it was
pretty obvious who that was and
it excluded a tremendous 
number of people.
Today, we would like to think
of the people in a much more
expansive way, but that also
means a greater diversity of
points of view and lived
experience so that getting to
anything like a a loose
consensus, a common sense, is
actually a harder thing and 
for some very good reasons.
But the the question of whether
this has to be an exclusionary
idea, common sense is and
therefore lead to a kind of
populism is an important one
because in an ideal expression,
maybe we would be able to say
the people's wisdom helps us
sort of take experts down to
size, gets us back to something
like real experience.
But in practice, often it's been 
wielded to do something
quite different, which is to
say we're the real people.
And those people aren't.
And that exclusionary part
about who counts as the
people has often made appeals to
common sense turn into a kind of
populism, a populism that not
only rejects, experts say, but
might reject whole other
segments of the population as
not real, not the true people,
not the people who really know
what's going on.
>> Kevin Butterfield:This question 
of that we're here to talk about
today of conspiracy theories, I 
think we can bring in at this point
because the origins of these
conspiracy theories, whether
we're in the 18th century or
the 21st, obviously, they can
come from all kinds of places.
But I think people often think
of them as coming from a kind of
reactionary anxiety, anxious
people who are trying to make
sense of this complicated world
around them, trying to make
sense of of who's really
pulling the levers of power.
Is. Is that the case?
First of all, historically, our
conspiracy theories, do they
typically come from people
outside of a power trying to
make sense of what's happening?
And is it is it necessarily or
often is it coming from ordinary
people that we've 
been talking about?
>> Sophia Rosenfeld: So conspiracy
theories, I think, can come from
anywhere They can come from the 
highest reaches of power and they
can come from below and they 
can also show up in all kinds of
different kinds of societies
and governments.
They have two basic 
kinds of appeal.
One is that you get something
very complicated and hard to
understand. And if you can find
just the right culprit, you've
sort of simplified 
the whole thing.
So everything starts 
to make sense.
And they also give you a little
bit of a personal superiority,
the sense that everybody else
has had the wool pulled over
their eyes. But, you know, and
you're in touch with the other
like minded people who know
something everybody else doesn't
know. So you can see why
conspiracy theories are
appealing, particularly in
periods when it's hard to
make sense of 
what's happening.
Sometimes they thrive in what 
I would call information poor
environments. So say a
dictatorship where it's hard to
or in going back if 
we want to go back.
Historically, societies in
which there's not much, it's
hard to get your hands on the
news. Everything's rumor, say
so. Conspiracies are kind of a
natural outgrowth, you know, I
heard somebody told me and 
they told this other person.
But you think, why are
conspiracy theories flourishing
now? It's a harder question in
a way, because we're in this
sort of information 
rich moment.
Yeah, right. Get out my phone.
I could have access to every
newspaper in the world and every
news source. But on the other
hand, it's harder and harder to
know what to trust.
Who's telling you something
that counts as truth and what?
And the issues in many cases
have gotten so complicated.
Our world is so diverse and
complex that the appeal of
conspiracy theories has 
in a sense, blossomed.
>> Kevin Butterfield: Let's dive back 
in To a period that I know well,  the
which American Revolution or a 
period like the French Revolution.
In the American Revolution.
There are conspiracy theories
swirling on both sides of the
Atlantic. The British believe
this about the Americans.
The Americans believe 
that about the British.
The Declaration of Independence
has a little bit of conspiracy
theory mixed in with the opening 
paragraphs the French Revolution
people making sense 
of this massive, earth
shattering moment.
And I'm thinking of some of the
subsequent explanations, like
the Illuminati stories that
people were telling in the
1790s. Are these are these the
same thing essentially as what
we see in the 21st century, or
are they something different?
>> Sophia Rosenfeld: So one reason 
I  think conspiracy theories were so
rich in the late 18th century and
absolutely on both sides of the
Atlantic has to do with 
the idea that monarchies
traditionally prided themselves
in a way on their secrecy.
There was no tradition of sort
of publicity that everything had
to be made evident to 
everyone everywhere.
Transparency. So one way that
people advocating for republics
could make their case was to 
say, you don't know what's going
on behind those closed doors,
and they're not about to tell
us. And it a sort of challenge
to monarchical and aristocratic
authority involved in a certain
way, a kind of conspiracy
thinking that said something
nefarious is going on, something
bad. And when we get power,
we're going to tear off the
curtain and show you the what
real true Republican virtue
looks like.
>> Kevin Butterfield: It's what 
republicans were saying to
monarchists.
>> Sophia Rosenfeld: It's exactly what 
Republicans were basically saying to
monarchists. And they weren't
entirely wrong because one of
the principles of governing under 
monarchy was that monarchy
shouldn't be entirely public.
Dissimulation is a good tactic.
For instance, there's no reason
for this kind of publicity.
So there were good reasons 
for 18th century conspiracy
theories. And in some ways
conspiracy theories have never
gone away. They wane and wax,
but they never really go away.
At this moment, I think they
are back with something of a
vengeance for a 
variety of reasons.
Some of them had, as I mentioned, 
having to do with the
complexity of the issues of the
moment, some of them having to
do with the ease with 
which they can circulate.
The Internet has been a great
gift to information, good
information, but also 
bad information.
>> Kevin Butterfield: And that's also 
an if I can keep you in the 18th
century for one more minute, that's 
also an element then as well, Right?
The the growing numbers of
newspapers and pamphlets and
various media by which 
these are circulating, that's a
historical phenomenon that
wasn't as true in 1710 as it was
in 1790.
>> Sophia Rosenfeld:Absolutely. So 
what I referred to as a rumor, we
often think of something that's orally
transmitted and rumors can have
a life of their own, but they
travel pretty slowly because
they have to go person to
person to person with
newspapers. And when  
they started circulating
Transatlantic early and
sometimes then also north
northern southern hemisphere
into Latin America, in the age
of revolutions in Latin
America, there was much of the
panic people feel now, which 
is these all kinds of terrible
things are going to circulate
along with good things.
And newspapers, as you 
know well as I do in the 18th
century, were highly polemical.
They were not 
filled with truths.
They were filled with scurrilous, 
horrible attacks on
people. And any idea that
everything was sort of nice and
neat and polite until the 21st
century is definitely wrong.
>> Kevin Butterfield:I found this in 
your in your book, George Washington
in 1796, describing newspapers.
They've teamed with all the
invective that disappointment,
ignorance of facts and malicious
 falsehoods can invent
to misrepresent my politics 
and affections, to wound my
reputation and feelings, and 
to weaken, if not entirely
destroyed, the confidence that
you, the people, have been
pleased to repose in me.
Exactly. To your point.
>> Sophia Rosenfeld: He sounds like 
he could be talking about the newspaper
today. Any president of any
president can say, I cannot
believe they would write 
that about me.
Right. And I mean, the Alien and 
Sedition Act moment, there's
a huge debate. Our newspapers
really destroying democracy.
Are we? We want dissent, but
not this much dissent and is a
very interesting question is
sort of at what point are our
newspapers protectors of
democratic life and at what
point are they kind of eating
away at the fabric of the
political culture?
>> Kevin Butterfield: You've taken 
me into a second area I wanted to
explore with you the spread of 
information, the circulation of ideas,
of of of false and true things is
actual information warfare, for
lack of a better word. I'm
thinking of cyber warfare as a
term we might use today.
Is that a part of the history
of conspiracy theories?
From the 18th century to today.
The deliberate sowing of false
explanations for things in order
to just wreak havoc.
Is that something that's 
always been here?
Is it something new 
to our moment?
>> Sophia Rosenfeld: So it's 
interesting to to think about
that question of whether
disinformation gets circulated
more often to persuade somebody
of something that isn't true or
just to wreak havoc as you're
putting it, just to sort of
undercut everything.
And I think some of both 
have long been the case I.
In our current media
environment, one problem is
misinformation, which 
is just bad information.
A second problem is deliberate
disinformation, and that's when
somebody really knows they're
spreading bad information and is
doing it usually for some bad
purpose, which is to say either
to deceive people or to cause
something to happen that
otherwise wouldn't.
And we can find a 
lot of both these days.
One reason they seem to 
be prevalent, I think, is also
because our new forms of
communication don't involve a
lot of vetting. And early
newspapers, of course, didn't
either. But something like 
The New York Times or
The Washington Post involves a 
level of fact checking and care
about what ideas 
are disseminated.
That is not the norm for
everything that one finds
online. That's pretty obvious.
But the disappearance in a way
of vetted information has been a
real problem, I think, for  our 
political culture. I you used to go
somewhere like this, 
the Library of Congress
to look for good information, 
go to a reference
librarian. That person is pulling 
from information that's
been vetted at every stage,
including by the person who's an
authority on producing
information that's usable.
Yeah, I go online, I Google
something, all this stuff comes
up. I don't know what's a
reputable source unless I
recognize exactly 
where it's coming from.
And I might be easily become 
a purveyor of misinformation
myself without realizing that
I'm disseminating either
misinformation or
disinformation.
>> Kevin Butterfield: The swirl of 
highly and politically charged, highly
inflammatory and politically
charged news or opinion seems
to be part of the story, too.
George Washington Washington's
talking about it in 1796.
But I'm curious about 
your thoughts.
Some people that teach the the
rise of political polarization,
but also the rise of conspiracy
thinking in in in our modern
moment point to the demise of
the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 by
the FCC, which sort of required
news agencies to speak on both
sides of an issue as opposed to
what Rush Limbaugh, who went
national the very next year it
was able to do, which is to sit
and just hold court.
Is this related to the story?
>> Sophia Rosenfeld: Do think this is 
really important? Because I don't think
the technology by itself going
back to printing presses all the
way to electronic
communications, I don't think
there's much of a political sort 
of bias towards any kind of
government built into these
modes of communication.
But around all of them, we
erect kind of different kinds of
use principles and 
huge legal structures.
Yeah, and radio, for instance,
which might have been the big
mass media before the Internet,
television too, had a lot of
rules around it that 
are not there today.
Rules about balance and
fairness, rules about what kind
of advertising could 
go, couldn't go.
So we've watched the sort of
deregulation of radio, then the
deregulation of television.
We didn't have news that was 
as specifically partisan until
quite recently on 
television either.
And then the Internet basically
doing its the sort of the end of
any kind of rules, privately
owned public sphere at this
point, with rules created
basically in a corporate
headquarters with very little
oversight from the government
and very few penalties 
for problems.
And I think that has 
had a big role to play.
And it does pose some
interesting questions for
future. I'm not a lawyer, but
for future lawyers about exactly
what kind of regulation 
the world of electronic
communications needs and what
that should look like, the old
rules of intellectual property,
even the ways we've thought
about the First Amendment 
may need to change.
>> Kevin Butterfield: The the first 
part of our conversation, we
talked about the lack of a 
monopoly on truth, the the
democratic formulation of 
what we can agree on as
being true. In some ways, the 
Internet would seem to fulfill
that right, this mass 
swirl of ideas.
And there is one example that
people, I think a very smart
people have pointed to as as an
example of the success of the
Internet and reaching that. And
that's Wikipedia, this place
where people are sharing the
creation of of knowledge and
putting it in a place 
somehow it works, I think.
>> Sophia Rosenfeld: And it took 
to a surprising degree it does.
>> Kevin Butterfield: Is that an 
exception that proves the rule or
what's going on?
>> Sophia Rosenfeld: Both things 
are completely possible and they're
not really mutually exclusive.
So if you look back at the
1990s now isn't that long ago,
but they're the kind of techno
utopianism of that moment was
amazing. People thought, you
know, there'll be no barriers to
information. Democracy is going
to spring up all over the world
because how are you going to
keep people in places, even
North Korea, say when people
would have access to
information, the people would
be able to sort of seize power
in this way, organize, know
what's happening elsewhere.
And it now seems a little bit
naive because we've also noticed
that, say dictators,
authoritarians can also harness
the power of the Internet.
All kinds of repressive forces
can, bad information can
circulate as well as good.
And it's interesting, I think
that Wikipedia is a very
interesting institution because
somehow the kind of
crowdsourcing model has 
there largely worked.
Now, it's not perfect, but we're 
not looking for perfection
here. But largely it's been a
success and so have a large
variety of other kinds of sites
that spew bad information at us
and without much recourse.
>> Kevin Butterfield: One of the key 
points that I think we need to explore
and thinking about the rise of
conspiracy theories, whether
it's in the 18th or the 21st
century or in between, is just a
basic level of trust in
authority, trust and the
government trust that you, as
an ordinary person, are being
shown a reasonable
approximation of what's true out
there by the people that are
sharing information, whether
it's the news media or 
those in government.
A recent Pew Research poll
found that only two in ten
Americans say they trust the
government in Washington to do
what is right just about 
always or most of the time.
Only 2%, by the way, said just
about always, but 19% said most
of the time that that level of
trust where just one in five has
a basic trust in government.
This is this feels measurably
lower than it has been a
different points in American
history and probably in other
countries as well.
How do you connect this this
demise, this decline in trust
for governmental institutions,
in particular to the story we're
trying to understand about
conspiracy theories is as
conspiracy theory swirl does,
trust in government decline
because there are all these
anxieties about who's saying
what and who to believe is is
one producing the other?
>> Sophia Rosenfeld: It's a very good 
question, and I think there's a bit of a
chicken and egg thing here about 
our hyper partisan ship at the
moment and its relation 
to  this question of trust
And you can imagine that 
sort of if you think that all
information is partisan in a
way and specific to a party or a
person or a faction, then it's
hard to trust the other side.
>> Kevin Butterfield:
Yeah.
>> Sophia Rosenfeld: But if you are 
experts, even if they're experts, the
interesting thing is when people 
answer, answer a survey like that, do
they mean do they trust elected
officials or do they trust or
are they talking about trust in the 
whole government apparatus?
And traditionally, we have
tried to make some distinctions
in that regard, that many parts
of what we call the government
here in Washington provide
nonpartisan information that's
useful for the doing of policy.
And civil servants are largely
people who are not political but
are in the business of making
the nation or the world run
well. When people are asked
about government, I think
they're not necessarily 
making that distinction.
And one problem seems to be the
sense that everybody is up to
something political 
all the time.
Right? And therefore, even your
doctor gives you COVID
information or the
environmental scientist who
tells you about global warming
or the analyst at the CIA who
tells you about international
politics, that these people
can't be providing something
like non partisan information,
It has to be an 
element of spin.
It's political, and I'm only
going to trust essentially my
own team.
>> Kevin Butterfield: Yeah. If you 
look at polls of American trust and
government across decades, of 
course, Watergate is a key moment
where there's a massive decline.
It simultaneous with the
Vietnam War and growing sense
that the the United States
government is not sharing
complete information and that
there actually are conspiracies
happening. Watergate is a
genuine conspiracy.
>> Sophia Rosenfeld:
The Vietnam War before that.
>> Kevin Butterfield: Exactly right. 
That's that decline.
You if I understand you right,
you're saying that as people
began to then see political
spin and political and partisan
political thinking in every
aspect of what government is
happening, it's only going to
continue to decline.
>> Sophia Rosenfeld:
It's a very.
>> Kevin Butterfield: There's a 
hopelessness to. What you're.
>> Sophia Rosenfeld: No, I mean, I do
think these things wax and wane.
I don't think there's a story
in American or international
life about a kind of
democracies always getting
better and better or
democracies always on the way
down. And we've seen 
ups and downs.
And of course, the moment
you've pointed to I said
Vietnam, you said Watergate are
moments that felt like Nadir is
in their moment. And of course,
there was a rebounding of
democracy. So I think it's very
important that we not sort of
decide this is hopeless and
some of this is just part of the
price we pay for living in a
relatively free society is a
very robust debate about what
counts as truth all the time.
That doesn't mean it's not
better or worse or more
worrisome than at some 
times than others.
It also doesn't mean that
democracy is permanent.
I mean, we I think we're all
become a little bit more aware
than we had been, say, ten
years ago that democracy can be
precarious, that it's not a
kind of once you get there, this
is it for the next few hundred
years, you know, So I think we
can both be hopeful, not give
up the sense there's something
can be done and also clear eyed
enough to see the problems in
our moment, because only if
you're clear eyed enough and
take this kind of historical
perspective, I think that you
can start to think about
remedies. You know, do the
remedies lie in the world of
law and regulation?
Do they lie in the world of
education?
Do they lie in institutions?
Is there something governments
themselves can do to address
these questions?
>> Kevin Butterfield:
Well, let's stay there then.
What kind of opportunities are
there to improve this
hyper-partisan politicalization
and the and the idea of really
rebuilding trust are there.
You mentioned lots of possible
ways, but what's a way that
makes sense to you to rebuild.
>> Sophia Rosenfeld: Trust, I think is a 
key word here, because we can't this
idea of, you know, I'll find out for
myself or I'll do the research
myself, it's not 
really possible.
Our world is too complex.
I can't tell you about the
paths of diseases or about
climate change or a 
variety of other things.
I have to have some 
trust in expertise.
Yeah, None of us can find out
everything for themselves.
You're just. It just means
you're trusting some other
source rather than the 
source you started with.
So the question, the big
question is how do we keep, in
some ways enough skepticism as
Democrats in the broadest sense,
people who believe in
democracy, We are supposed to
keep a little bit of skepticism
all the time, which means, you
know, always distrust authority
a little bit and always ask, are
those people being level with
us, not take things at face
value, but too much 
skepticism, sort of.
Everybody's lying all the time.
It's all propaganda would get
you deep into conspiracy theory
land. So where would how do we
get somewhere where there's
enough trust that people can
say, you know, I don't I'm going
to have to go with the sort of
basic scientific consensus on
this because I 
don't have a way.
And they might change their
mind down the line, too.
But I don't really have a way
to know better myself.
And so I think this is very hard
to get back now that we're sort
of lost a lot of it.
I don't think we can be ever
imagined sort of entire success.
As I said before, I think our
world is too complicated with
too many the issues and the
diversity of people and
inequality of experience, that
we've had such different
educations, different lived
experiences, different levels of
affluence that we don't seem to
share enough to make it easy to
get to any kind of consensus 
at the moment.
But if we have to think about
kind of what can we do in this
sort of middle level, I would
point to, I guess, two places
that I think might 
make a difference.
One is education.
I think we need new kinds of
education that really address
head on this question of how do
we know things and teaching
students whether they're in
kindergarten or they're graduate
students, something about 
both how to challenge ideas
effectively, but also how sound
information is created across
different disciplines 
and in different ways.
And teaching what good
information looks like, how you
verify it.
I think we need this more 
than we've done in the past,
precisely because we're not,
say, all embedded in reference
desks where we might have been
once, where that was kind of
done for us.
>> Kevin Butterfield:
Is this happening.
>> Sophia Rosenfeld:
Less than you'd think?
I think that there's really I
mean, education is slow to turn
as a whole, but it is a place
that I would look and I don't
mean simply. Classrooms.
I mean, all kinds of
institutions museums, libraries,
research centers, trying to
rebuild a sense of what is fact.
For instance, that 
would be one place.
And the second place that I
would look is perhaps more
complicated. But I do think
that we'll have to, over time,
think about the ways in which
our legal structures and our
economic models aren't really
working in the Internet age,
that the public sphere, as it's
become electronic, is not really
the same as the street corner,
the street corners, public
space. And the Google 
isn't right and Twitter isn't.
And I don't have really 
good solutions here.
But there's been some very
interesting work lately about
thinking what if the Internet
became a public utility, for
instance? What would 
that look like?
What would a different version
of our understanding of certain
kinds of First Amendment
jurisprudence look like in which
we thought we'd continue to
protect dissent but didn't have
as robust protection for 
lies of different kinds?
Could we rethink the penalties
around lying or disseminate
disseminating disinformation?
I think there's a lot of 
work to be done there.
>> Kevin Butterfield: It's certainly 
rue that the American model is
exceptional.
>> Sophia Rosenfeld:
It is. It is.
And Europe, for instance, has
done much more in this regard in
terms of regulating the
Internet. And I think we'll have
to look internationally.
I'm not saying that there's a
solution sitting there on the
table, but it will be a problem
for the next generation.
Those people who are being
trained right now in this in the
world of American law will have
to certainly tackle some of this
in new ways.
So I see these as kind of  
long term challenges.
These are not quick panaceas.
I don't think, you know, fact
checking is great, but we're not
going to all be convinced because 
The New York Times has a
fact checker working there or a
fact check or says something.
>> Kevin Butterfield: So you've given 
us a bit of a path forward, an
opportunity to look at ways to 
rebuild trust, education, thinking
about also
we that we should as a people
think critically about how we
exchange and share information
and maybe find ways to help
alleviate some of the the
challenges that we face.
When you look at some of the
prevalent conspiracy theories of
our own moment, and I know the
names of some of them, although
I don't even know the details,
but something like Qanon or a
similar thing, do these 
things have a lifespan?
When you look at them as a
historian, do you see do you see
this as running a probably
running a certain course, or is
it anybody's guess as to what
happens to these kinds of
individual conspiracy theories?
>> Sophia Rosenfeld: Qanon is 
very interesting because it picks
up so many elements of traditional
conspiracy theories and reworks
them to fit this moment.
But it's full of things from
the child trafficking to the
role of to forms of Jewish
conspiracy theory.
And the focus on Soros, for
instance, that you can see
reappearing at intervals
through the last, I'm going to
say, more than 300 years, I
mean, before the age of
democratic revolutions.
So these are many of the
elements just keep coming back
in new forms, in 
invaders at the borders.
That's one of the 
oldest tropes there is.
So in some ways we're not going
to get rid of them, but they
thrive in moments of
uncertainty, and they thrive
when people feel the ground
beneath them shifting.
So you mentioned earlier the
American and French revolutions.
Those were moments when 
people thought, what the heck
is happening, right?
I can't make sense of 
my daily life anymore.
Conspiracy theories 
help with that.
And we've obviously reached a
moment when people feel that
way. Something's disappearing
about the world that I know.
The problems seem intractable.
I don't know who to trust.
I'm not sure government 
is the place.
I want to look for answers.
All those things, when you put
them together, make conspiracy
theories. Not that surprising.
And and the Internet gives them
this incredible reach and speed,
but they're very, very
traditional in form.
So one of the weirdest things
about Qanon is actually just how
old fashioned it looks.
>> Kevin Butterfield: Well, thank you 
for diving into this with me.
I feel more hopeful and
certainly better informed about
the the role of conspiracy
theories in a democratic
society. Any last thoughts when
you if you are talking to
students or people across the
country as you talk about your
work? Any last thoughts about
where you see ideas like the
truth and trust?
And in some ways, going back to
your first book, Common Sense
Heading in the Future, 
the 21st Century.
>> Sophia Rosenfeld: You know, I'm a 
historian, so I'm better talking about the
past than what's going 
to come, don't it?
Not a great sorry
prognosticator.
That said, I actually think
thinking about the past helps
you think about what's to come.
It doesn't tell you what will
happen, for sure, but it gives
you tools for kind of analyzing
where we are, what's new, what's
not looking for patterns.
There aren't solutions in
history, but they give you
amazingly good tools for sort
of, I think, perceiving the
world that you're in 
and where it's going.
So the reason I've wanted to
think about and write about
concepts that you just
mentioned, like truth, like
democracy, like common sense 
in recent years, is that I think.
Conceptualizing these in
clearer terms, the kinds of
things we don't really think
about until they're in crisis.
Truth, it's a good thing, but
what is it helps you sort of see
where they're where they've
been, what they might look like
and where they might go.
And I don't think truth is going 
to disappear anytime soon.
I'm not sure we're really
post-truth, as the expression
goes, because that suggests
there was sort of one thing here
and now we've passed it.
But I do think it helps us see
that truth can be a lot of
different things. There isn't
one way of getting there.
There isn't one set of ideas,
and we are going to have to put
some actual work into restoring
some kind of shared knowledge in
the future. And it's, I think,
one of the great challenges of
the next epoch.
>> Kevin Butterfield: Let me 
ask you one last question.
You are, of course, our Kluge chair
in countries and cultures of the
North here at the Library of
Congress. Has there been any
anything that you've discovered
at the Library of Congress that
has just been revelatory for
you particular document or
source or time that you spent
here at the library that opened
up a new way of thinking?
>> Sophia Rosenfeld:
Yes, actually.
I mean, it's marvelous 
to be here.
It's absolutely marvelous.
It's marvelous in 
two different axes.
One is personally the ability
to find sources that I would
never have found, including
incredible visual material,
extraordinary looking this week
at a website that's actually
about women getting the vote 
as expressed in sheet music.
You think really there were
songs and you could buy a polka
in 1852 about women's rights.
Yes, you could. And the library
has a wonderful collection of
them. I don't think there's
anywhere else you could find
this. So there are just
incredible riches here.
But the other thing that's for
me been maybe just as important
since I'm interested in these
questions of truth, is knowing
more about the library does,
and the ways in which the
library serves both the general
public and researchers who are
citizens like me, but also
serves the rest of the US
government. The discovery of
the size of the Congressional
Research Service, for instance,
and the range of things that
they do, the way that knowledge
production is part of.
When people say, Do you 
trust the government?
Part of what the government 
is is knowledge production.
And a lot of it happens here.
And I don't think I realized just 
how connected it was to the
legislative process.
I knew it was across the street
from the Capitol, but exactly
how intertwined those were was
to me something of a discovery
and in a strange way that gives
me incredible hope for the idea
that politics and knowledge
production are linked processes.
They shouldn't pollute each
other, but they both have an
important role to play.
And the Library of Congress is
in some ways seems to me, the
kind of place 
where  that happens.
So I've found that to be as
exciting as the documents.
>> Kevin Butterfield: Well, thank you 
Sophia Rosenfeld. This has been a
fascinating conversation, 
and I'm so glad we had an
opportunity to dive into your
work during your time here at
the Library of Congress.
>> Sophia Rosenfeld: And thank 
you so much. It's been a wonderful
pleasure to be here.
>> Kevin Butterfield:
Thank you.