Bad Analogies Will Be the Death of Us

S ticks and stones might break your bones, but bad historical analogies can bring entire nations to their knees. We know this in the United States, but we don’t like to talk about it very much. After all, it’s comforting to compare present challenges with those of the past. It allows us to read the historical record as a kind of instruction manual that will tell us what to do and what not to do.

John Stuart Mill called this approach to current affairs “the science of history.” We distill general principles from the historical record and apply them to solve political problems in the present. Of course, if history were actually a science, and could be mastered and wielded by the human will like chemistry or physics, then the century separating us from Mill probably wouldn’t be piled high with hundreds of millions of bloody and emaciated corpses. But unfortunately for us, human affairs are defined by indeterminacy, contingency, and particularity. Reality is always distinctly granular and impossibly complex. As a result, the principles we abstract from one situation and apply to another only ever pertain imperfectly at best.

Still, we prefer to deal with life and politics at the level of analogy and abstraction. Staring down the unique complexity of each new situation we find ourselves in is difficult, scary, and taxing on our mental powers. It takes an Orwell or a Dostoevsky to do it consistently and well. Instead of trying to parcel out what is novel and what is familiar about each new challenge we face and, consequently, where the limits are on what history can teach us, most of us prefer to see present situations in terms wholly defined by the past.

In politics, this phenomenon is often described as “fighting the last war.” Sometimes, however, the metaphor is drained out of the phrase and it becomes a cruelly literal descriptor. After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, for example, the United States pursued a policy known as “de-Baathification.” Iraq had been a one-party state, with Saddam Hussein’s Baath party running the government, the military, the civil service, and every other functioning institution. This arrangement was thought by many in Washington to be analogous to the one-party state that existed in Nazi Germany prior to 1945. After the Second World War was won, the Allies pursued a very successful policy of denazification in West Germany, banning active members of the Nazi party from working in the government, the military, and the civil service.

Unable to resist the temptation to analogize, George W. Bush and his advisers downplayed the many important ways in which Saddam’s Iraq differed from post-war Germany, and they formulated and executed policy on the basis of the similarities between the two. Since denazification worked in Germany, de-Baathification would be pursued in Iraq. The results were catastrophic.

Bush soon faced a robust rear-guard action from reality. Whereas there had been many able and competent Germans in 1945 who hadn’t been active in the Nazi party, and who were ready and willing to staff the country’s new institutions, the same was not true in Iraq. Almost every Iraqi capable of running the country’s institutions was a member of the Baath party. After the party was banned, there was simply no one left in the country who could operate the levers of power effectively, and Americans were never going to take up the imperial mantle themselves. Iraqi government and society simply collapsed.

The resort to analogy has also been hazardous on the home front. For American progressives, it is always 1932: Every Democratic presidential nominee is the once and future FDR. Every Republican is Herbert Hoover, fiddling while Rome burns, and the economy always calls for another New Deal (see the Great Society, the Obama stimulus, and, just this month, Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion “COVID relief” bill). The particularities of the state of the American economy in different times are ignored. Gargantuan spending packages that compromise the constitutional integrity of the republic and sentence the United States to life as a permanent debtor nation are always the answer.

This misbegotten mania for analogy is related to our increased preference for thinking about everything in life in strictly ideological terms. Regardless of its particular circumstances, an event is immediately absorbed into a pre-existing abstraction that casts it in such a way as to rid it of all complexity, making it easy to grasp and our enemies easy to blame. This happens every time a white police officer shoots a young black man in America. No one on the left or the right waits for the concrete facts; instead they rush to man the #BlackLivesMatter or #BackTheBlue battle stations. The issue is a snowball of accruing analogies gathering momentum over time.

The ideological approach to life certainly owes its origins to the Left. The term “ideology” was coined in the first place by the Jacobin revolutionary Destutt de Tracy in 1796. If we could only correctly reorganize our governing ideas and abstractions, he thought, the betterment of our concrete, individual lives would ineluctably follow. The liberal Mill was of a similar, though more moderate, school. As David Sorensen and Brent Kinser have observed, to Mill “the past is wholly subservient to philosophy, and facts derive their importance in relation to a universal pattern.” This neatly expresses the progressive attitude toward history — an attitude that has dominated the Western world since the 18th century and begotten an inveterate analogizing tendency. Conservatives have often been forced to play by their opponents’ rules, formulating counter-ideologies of their own.

At its most profound, however, conservatism is about opposing the creeping encroachment of ideology into the intimate regions of human relations, or at least it should be. The better angels of the conservative sensibility prefer the particular to the universal, the concrete to the abstract, and each unique and unrepeatable human soul to whatever larger category they might be grouped under. The long argument between Mill and his great friend and rival Thomas Carlyle over the nature of the French Revolution shows us how liberal and conservative dispositions differ at these fundamental levels of analysis. Mill saw the revolution as an example of how mankind’s philosophical grasp of the principles of liberty was progressing over time. It could be analogized with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution of 1776 in that respect. Carlyle disagreed strenuously. He thought Mill’s “scientific” analogies were blinding him to what was really taking place in France. Carlyle told his brother John in 1835, “It strikes me very much how all these people look forever at some theory of a thing, never at any thing,” which might be the most quintessentially conservative complaint ever made.

Carlyle went on to lament the way in which Mill’s analysis ignored the “jarring that went on under every French roof, in every French heart” during the Revolution. In other words, it ignored the unrepeatable uniqueness of every person and situation — a uniqueness that spells doom for the technocratic aspirations that overextended analogies serve.

History has a lot to teach us about our present discontents and about how we might navigate our way out of them. But its lessons will always be limited, partial, and fragmentary. If we insist on making the present a symbol of the past, we’ll keep arriving late to the history that’s unfolding before us, in our own time. We’ll always be fighting the last war and we’ll always be losing the current one.