Dear Political Commentators: Get Better Analogies
Your uncle has a mustache, but do you know who else had a mustache? That’s right, Adolf Hitler, ergo you’re uncle is just like Hitler. But wait, you’re probably saying to yourself right now, that’s a garbage analogy. Also, how dare you compare my uncle to Hitler! And you would be right, and congratulations, you are now in better position to be a political commentator than many of those who get paid to give their opinions for a living, you should apply for a job at the New York Times or the Washington Post.
Analogies are like Twitter: the thing that makes them great is also what makes them terrible. On Twitter, it is great that everyone has a voice and that the traditional gatekeepers now longer have a monopoly on the dissemination of information. It is bad because everyone has a voice and vile ideologies can spread more easily and because people can play internet tough guy, hiding behind a computer they can, without ever having to confront real people in real life, say things to you on the internet they would never dare say to you in real life. So, it is with analogies. Analogies make arguments simple and easy to understand, but such simple mindedness is no substitute for nuance when presented with complicated problems. Analogies are also sometimes simply wrong.
For example, foreign policy is usually a hotbed for bad analogies and has been for quite some time. I remember in college having to read Analogies at War by National University of Singapore Professor Yuen Foong Khong which made the argument that a series of bad analogies, mainly Munich and Korea led to the decision to not only wage the Vietnam War, but wage it in such a way that made victory all but impossible. Even after the Vietnam War, the 1938 Munich Agreement with Neville Chamberlain and Hitler is still a synonym for “appeasement” and a catch-all analogy for “bad deal” with a bad guy who is going to start World War III if we allow him to get away with this, whatever this is and is still widely cited in conservative circles.
As part of the public reaction against the Vietnam War, “We don’t need another Vietnam” became its own analogy in liberal and progressive circles to oppose any military action. It suffered an intellectual setback after Desert Storm and the humanitarian interventions of the Bill Clinton years that saw the relied on dominant air power, only to come back into the public discourse after Iraq to where now the analogy is “We don’t need another Vietnam or Iraq.” Just as the users of Munich misuse their favorite analogy, the users of Vietnam/Iraq misuse their favorite analogy to say that anybody who takes a harder line than they do towards a given adversary either secretly wants war with said adversary or is bumbling their way into one.
Bad analogies are making their way into other areas of political discourse as well. Below are three examples taken over just the past two days.
MSNBC host Chris Hayes offered this hot take on the electoral college on Friday: “if you run for class president in the fourth grade, you are elected if and only if you get the most votes.” Yes, a fourth grade class that has 20–30 nine year-olds in a roughly 1,000 square foot classroom is completely analogous with a country of roughly 3.8 million square miles and roughly 330 million people spread out over 50 sub-national units. As an addendum, many, if not most free countries do not select their head of government via national popular vote. But Hayes’ analogy is simply silly, two other analogies were published in mainstream publications over the past couple of days that are more sinister and similar to the beginning of this piece where I compared your uncle to Hitler for simply having a mustache.
Over at the Washington Post, Eve Fairbanks compares conservatives to pro-slavery Confederates. Why? Because conservatives are trying to appeal to “reason” and “civility.” Yes, that’s right, if you want public discourse to be subject to facts and logic without all the ad-hominem cries of “racist,” “sexist,” etcetera, you’re just like John Wilkes Booth who is upset that polite society no longer views the buying and selling of fellow human beings as a moral good.
Meanwhile, at the New York Times, Bret Stephens, who is no stranger to bad analogies, is still outraged at being called a “bedbug” by a professor at George Washington University on Twitter. In a piece commemorating the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War entitled “World War II and the Ingredients of Slaughter,” Stephens cites an example from 1943, “Watching Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto burn that year, a Polish anti-Semite was overheard saying: “The bedbugs are on fire. The Germans are doing a great job.” Needless to say, it’s a bit of a stretch to compare this professor to a Nazi-sympathizer over a Twitter joke.
Analogies can be good, but be careful in using them for else you will be just like the NYT or WaPo and that is not a bad analogy.
