I don’t regularly read either the National Journal or the National Review, but based on recent articles that friends forwarded to me, perhaps I should look more often. First, in the September 23 National Journal, James Kitfield warns about the false analogy behind the label “Islamo-Fascist,” which he (like others) argues scores domestic political points but hurts U.S. efforts overseas (sadly, the article only seems available online to subscribers). Then, in the October 9 National Review, John Miller helps explain why we might be susceptible to such dangerous analogies: military history (and diplomatic history and other flavors of history dedicated to the study of traditional international affairs) is dying out in America’s universities.

Calling our terrorist extremist adversaries “fascists” is not entirely wrong. I certainly am not an expert on fascist philosophy or history, but it seems to me that a reasonable intuitive understanding of fascist ideology highlights its emphasis on community values over individual rights and fascism’s natural resonance with moral claims about “traditional” values and the “right” way to live your life. Violent advocates of fundamentalist Islam (that is, not even all advocates of fundamentalism let alone all Muslims) apparently share fascists’ willingness to use coercion to enforce their communitarian vision. Of course, fascism seems inherently tied to nationalism and the power of the state, while the fundamentalist Islamic vision presumably gives supreme power to religious rather than political leaders. And of course there are many other differences. But there is a natural resonance to language that defines the particular people who lead our nasty, violent opponents in the War on Terror as those Islamicists whose ideas are quasi-fascist.

Kitfield doesn’t explore that resonance. Instead, he points out (correctly) that the main point of the public use of the term “Islamo-fascist” is to draw another analogy between our current adversaries and Hitler et al. Pretty much everyone in the U.S. remembers World War II-era fascism as posing a serious, perhaps existential, threat to the United States. Fascists seem powerful and scary, and calling violent Islamists “fascist” might suggest that they are powerful and scary, too, which presumably would motivate Americans to accept setbacks in the War on Terror, to sacrifice civil liberties for the justifiable goal of bolstering our threatened national security, and, most cynically, to vote Republican because voters are thought to feel more comfortable with tough Republican handling of national security threats. Kitfield provides some evidence for this interpretation by quoting another journalist’s suggestion that the phrase “Islamo-fascist” came from Karl Rove-sponsored focus groups rather than from analysis of the philosophical links between Osama bin Ladin and Benito Mussolini.

Kitfield then goes on to explore the dangers of using rough analogies as the basis for foreign and military policy.

Perhaps the Bush administration is misanalyzing the threat (therefore fighting the wrong enemies), lumping adversaries with very different agendas together (thereby forcing them to unite against the United States and consequently making the threat worse), or otherwise undermining our international efforts (perhaps by making it harder to work with our friends overseas who don’t like the loose analogy). He quotes Professor Michael Desch of Texas A&M’s George H. W. Bush School of Government and Public Service, an important participant in a growing academic literature about the cost of flawed analogies in terms of their harm to realistic foreign policy debate (for an abstract of one of his important articles, click here; the article is available electronically for a fee).

The obvious question, though, is why flawed analogies “work” — that is, why they convince even educated people among the policy “elite?” Why can’t cooler heads point out the flaws and win over voters to their preferred policy alternative that is not influenced by the exaggerated rhetoric?

One obvious answer is the same one that many people use to explain why negative smear campaigns work to sway elections: the person who starts the clever (but false) analogy sets the agenda for debate, voters may react less to a detailed (even truthful) response than to the general emotional momentum of a campaign, and some voters may only see the initial statement but not the rebuttal, while those voters that see only the rebuttal inherently also get a repetition of the initial statement, too, when the rebutter explains the issue, meaning that the “debate” does not fairly give the two sides equal exposure.

On the other hand, decision-making elites ought to know better (and they apparently widely believe that they do know better than to let negative campaign ads influence their voting patterns, or so they would tell us). Elites generally have spent much more time in school than the average American. On the specific issue of whether Islamo-fascists pose as big a threat as the World War II fascists — or even a similar type of threat — most elites should remember a military history class in which they learned about the industrial might and technical prowess behind the Wehrmacht, the ability of a fascist government to mobilize the will of the people using the instruments of state power, and other key aspects of World War II. Many people argue that non-state actors (like al-Qaeda) have much more power than non-state actors had in the past. They may well be right, but that does not mean that non-state actors have as much power today as a mobilized nation-state had during World War II. And we all should know that.

And that’s where John Miller’s article comes in. Especially at top-tier universities across the United States, military historians are retiring, and history departments are not replacing them. When military history classes are offered, they tend to be extremely popular among students — and given the international situation today, they should be. Military history books sell well (which suggests that at least some people are at least somewhat informed on the topic, although independent reading of popular books is not a perfect substitute for classroom instruction and discussion led by an expert). But the politically correct intellectual fashion has turned against military history, despite its relevance and popularity.

Sure, in the short term, the big effect of introducing the analogy between violent Islamicists and fascists is to undercut the reasoned opposition to the administration — to gain partisan advantage. And so in the short-term, we should call for more civility in foreign policy debates and a better spirit of bipartisanship. But the real answer to at least this partisan tactic (if not to other forms of partisan rancor) will take longer. As a society, we need to bolster the serious study of international affairs at universities, including military, diplomatic, and international economic history.

Mike Desch (who is trained as a political scientist) and a few other experts in security studies (including my University of Texas colleague Frank Gavin, a diplomatic historian) have tried to organize to collect data on the state of the field and to begin fighting to reverse the current trend. At the University of Texas at Austin, our new president, Bill Powers, pressed for a new university-wide commitment to the serious study of international affairs as part of his first “state of the university” speech. The battle is not lost yet. But if trends continue, no future calls for short-term bipartisanship will do much to improve the quality of American foreign policy debates.

One parting irony: if I’m right that declining university education about traditional international history is one of the things that makes our policy debate susceptible to false analogies, then the left is helping the neoconservative administration that it so often attacks. Liberals, in the name of multi-culturalism and political correctness, are the primary group undermining academic military and diplomatic history. Serious students of international security (whether in history, political science, economics, or the hard sciences) are by no means monolithic in their political views; both liberals and conservatives populate the field. But (I’m about to make a gross generalization) liberals outside the field tend to see everyone interested in national security as conservative. And that assumption is hurting their side of contemporary policy debates.

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