Today’s optional discussion topic: How useful are historical analogies? This was something I’d been thinking about already, but Foreign Policy published an article on this very subject yesterday. So, why not dive in wholeheartedly?

One of our natural tendencies in analyzing the present is to find historical parallels with past events. This is especially true in our fraught modern age, where everyone finds some historical touchstone, or a combination of many, whether it be within the confines of American history or something more extreme like Nazi Germany or the Fall of the Roman Empire. And of course, bad actors often draw historical analogies to bolster a dubious claim – witness the tendency of any warmonger to evoke Churchill, Neville Chamberlain and the “lessons” of appeasement and World War II, no matter how inappropriate the comparison (most recently, Andrew Roberts compared Trump bombing Iran to Churchill confronting the Nazis).

We all use common, familiar reference points as a way to frame and analyze issues. There’s nothing inherently wrong with doing so – there are always useful lessons to be mined from past events – so long as you recognize the limitations of such an approach. But it also runs the list of restricting the mind, encouraging simple comparisons that obscure than explain. The Munich analogy hindered generations of policymakers from Truman to Anthony Eden to George Bush, who found convenient echoes of the Nazis in the most ineffectual tinpot dictators. In recent domestic American politics, we can see compulsive invocations of the 1850s, the Gilded Age, the McCarthy era and Watergate, with varying degrees of applicability. At some point, history can seem less a useful basis for comparison than an even-nerdier variation of those dorks who compare every conceivable event and personality to Harry Potter, Game of Thrones or Star Wars.

When are historical analogies actually useful for discussion or understanding? I suspect part of your answer will come down to whether you think history ought to have practical utility, or whether it’s worth studying for its own sake.