Bad Analogies Undermine our Understanding of History
The past is often a battleground, where claims about the proper way to understand history become proxies for contentions about what America is, who belongs here and what we should become. Inevitably, as we imbue these historical reference points with shared meaning, we end up deploying them as analogies in more contemporary debates, using them to insist that what’s happening right now is exactly like what happened back then. It’s not that comparisons to the past are off-limits, but that the work of history is never done, pushing us to shift our attention from what happened (the sequence of events) to why those events matter.
Those on the right routinely compare anti-racism efforts to McCarthyism, suggesting that their “free speech” is being infringed upon when others ask them to reflect on their words and actions. On the left, an active debate continues about whether to label the former Trump administration and its supporters as fascist, with some arguing against it because of the historical specificity in which the regimes of the early 20th century arose. More dramatically, coronavirus skeptics have compared mask mandates and proof of covid-19 vaccination to the yellow stars that Nazis forced Jews to wear in the 1930s and 1940s, pretending that they are a new persecuted minority.
But these arguments are only very rarely about the actual past. No one in the examples above is debating whether the Nazis did violence to the Jews, whether McCarthy led a witch hunt or whether Mussolini and Hitler were fascist leaders. Instead, it’s a process that makes a rhetorical end run around the real issue, and hence around real debate: If we all agree that a given development in the past was bad, then this more recent event that is supposedly like that earlier one must be bad, too.
When historical analogies are used to foreclose arguments, those analogies aren’t actually historical — they are attempts to leverage one contemporary group’s feelings to sell something. In what ways, really, is a mask mandate to help slow the spread of a deadly pandemic like a formal program of exclusion and, eventually, extermination waged against a group of people? (It’s not at all.) But preventing people from asking too many questions is the goal of those making the analogy in the first place. It’s an argumentative trick, in which the implicit logic is syllogistic rather than analogical: Nazis were bad. If we can liken something else to Nazism, it must therefore be bad, too.
This doesn’t mean historical analogies are necessarily bad. To the contrary, useful historical analogies lead to further questions, pushing us toward deeper analysis. For example, there was a lot of conversation in 2019 about using the phrase “concentration camps” to characterize detention facilities on the southern border under the Trump administration. Similarly, there has been theatrical outrage over labeling as a new Jim Crow the new voter suppression laws that were just passed in Georgia (and are being considered in several other states, as well).
Obviously, both comparisons rely on a logic wherein a current thing is bad because it is like a bad thing in the past, but both comparisons also reveal vital truths. In the case of the “concentration camps,” the comparison holds up because as one moves past the initial, visceral, comparison to the Holocaust, it pushes the reader to think about the long, very American history of this practice. In episodes of native genocide — the incarceration of Germans in World War I and the incarceration of Japanese during World War II, for example — the U.S. government created camps for arbitrary detentions without trials based on group identity. The historical analogy does work to both clarify what’s happening in the present and place it in a long specific history, making it more difficult to regard today’s camps as an aberration.