Is Bernie Sanders a Nazi? On our epidemic of bad analogies.

There is only so much usefulness in comparing Barack Obama to Neville Chamberlain

Bernie Sanders
(Image credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

The internet rewards hyperbole. Maybe that's why bad — incendiary, wildly inaccurate — analogies seem to be spreading throughout the media landscape, and especially on the right.

Analogies are an indispensable tool of reasoning and rhetoric, highlighting similarities between two or more things, people, or events. But deploying analogies can be complicated, since the things, people, or events being compared are invariably dissimilar in a multitude of ways. The trick in deploying an analogy effectively is to highlight a similarity that reveals something important and underappreciated about the main thing, person, or event. The key to making a mess of an analogy is drawing a comparison in which the dissimilarities are so vast that they overshadow and even undermine the comparison altogether.

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Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.