Constitution Day Lecture: Disinformation, Demagoguery, and the First Amendment

Tue, September 17, 2024 5:00 PM - Tue, September 17, 2024 7:00 PM at Club Spartan, 338 Case Hall

James Madison College welcomes Dr. Charles Zug, Kinder Assistant Professor of Constitutional Democracy and Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Truman School of Government and Public Affairs, for the 2024 Constitution Day Lecture.

This year's event will be held on Sept. 17 at 5 p.m. in Club Spartan (338 Case Hall).

Disinformation, Demagoguery, and the First Amendment

The rise of misinformation—deceptive speech with mass appeal—has provoked a renewed interest in the purposes of the Constitution's First Amendment. And yet, attempts to reconcile the freedom of speech and healthy public discourse have ignored the concept of demagoguery. Dr. Charles Zug's talk will try to show why demagoguery has all but ceased to be intelligible to us—even in cases where it is obviously relevant, like misinformation in the 21st Century. 

Traditionally defined as destabilizing speech used to obtain influence and power, demagoguery was a central preoccupation of the founders of the US Constitution, who worried that free speech would degenerate into misinformation that would, in turn, empower authoritarian leaders. These concerns were subsequently embodied in a tradition of politics and jurisprudence that authorized repressive state interventions in the realm of speech; examples include the Sedition Acts of 1798, the seizure of telegraph lines and closure of newspapers during the Civil War, and the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918. Zug argues that the concept of demagoguery lost intelligibility as a consequence of the American state's approach to speech. In dealing with speech issues, government policy has tended to oscillate between the legal extremes of free speech absolutism and criminalization (e.g., sedition and libel laws). And because demagoguery is fundamentally a political concept, the legalization of speech issues in America has, with a few important exceptions, eroded our capacity to reason about speech as a political phenomenon.