I n the run-up to this year’s election, the past became the present political weapon of choice. Everything in politics, it seems, has a historical analogy. Consider first a speech this summer by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld before a gathering of the American Legion. It revolved around an analogy between the appeasement of fascism in the 1930s and the critics of the Iraq war. Both then and today, he said, appeasers hold a belief that "if only the growing threats " could be accommodated, then the carnage " could be avoided." Or take a recent column by Slate Editor Jacob Weisberg that compared Ned Lamont’s victory over Joe Lieberman in Connecticut’s Democratic senatorial primary to the 1972 choice of George McGovern, a "na‘ve and honorable anti-war idealist," as the Democratic presidential candidate. McGovern lost the general election in a landslide and left behind a lasting impression that Democrats were weak on foreign affairs. Weisberg intoned that, therefore, Lamont’s nomination would have a similarly "huge and lasting negative impact on the Democratic Party." Or recall how the death of Iraqi civilians at Haditha was touted as a modern-day My Lai, how Democrats are told to be more like Harry Truman, and how George W. Bush is scolded for being too much like Woodrow Wilson.

Just as the stakes for the future of America seem to have become greater, the country has been looking back as it tries to move forward. Yet in this respect, hindsight is hardly 20-20. Neither Rumsfeld’s nor Weisberg’s historical analogies, for example, work very well when put to even quick examination: Adolf Hitler was expanding throughout Central Europe during the late 1930s, while Saddam Hussein had been sufficiently contained after the first Gulf war and had nothing to do with the attacks of September 11. Lamont was not, as McGovern was, running for president at the height of a conservative backlash, but rather for the Senate in a deeply blue state and in a political party that, unlike with Vietnam, is not the key instigator of the war in question.

But if such analogies are so specious, why do politicians and pundits continue to deploy them? Simply put, because they can. Today the public, even the educated public, has little knowledge of history, or even an appreciation of history as anything other than a grab bag of unrelated facts to be picked from as one sees fit. These days, who knows much about the ins and outs of British appeasement or McGovern’s 1972 campaign (hardly ancient history)? But even in their ignorance, audiences are still sufficiently impressed by history’s power that even the weakest analogies provide immediate faux expertise, an instant credibility. Thus history is both poorly understood and everywhere present; we shape our public discourse with a discipline we don’t understand.

And where are the professional historians who are trained to understand the past and could scrutinize such claims? They’re in academia, churning out esoteric articles that move fast onto resumes but rarely into public debate. Go to recent issues of the American Historical Review and you’ll find articles like "Big Hair: A Wig History of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France," "Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics," and "The Disruptive Comforts of Drag: (Trans)Gender Performances among Prisoners of War in Russia, 1914–1920"–and those are just the titles. If you make it through them, you’ll face the back of the journal where there are reviewed, literally, hundreds of books with similarly arcane titles, all of which give a sense of the overwhelming amount of scholarship out there on topics that few people know exist, let alone care about.

To be sure, there is something to be said for professionalism; professions, after all, help members learn the skills of research, objectivity, and balance. But they also press members to take their cues from other professionals, not the public. Today historians learn to frame their writing from the research concerns (including theoretical ones) delimited by the academy. To be "presentist," to care about what the public is thinking and worried about and to try to shed historical light on such concerns, is to perform career suicide. Granted, there are a few noteworthy exceptions of academic historians who have written works of political significance: Dan T. Carter, Michael Kazin, and Alan Brinkley come to mind. Yet no junior faculty member will be serving his or her quest for tenure following such a path.

Four months before his then-boss, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. argued in the Atlantic that when scholars abandon engaged history and leave public life behind, they empower "prophetic historians" who replace complexity with a big overarching idea (Schlesinger had in mind Marxism). Today, scholars are leaving behind the public world not to communist theory but to the History Channel, where the imperative of entertainment trumps veracity, where shows about absurd conspiracy theories run alongside more serious fare, all formatted to work in between commercials. Or they leave it behind to blockbuster historians–think David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin, or the recently deceased Stephen Ambrose–whose books, though widely bought, lack analytical power and critical insight. But most worrisome of all (and here is where Schlesinger was most prescient), professional historians have left a void to be filled by radical historians, who eschew nuance and objectivity in favor of simplistic morality tales.

It wasn’t always this way. In the postwar era, there was a generation of historians–like C. Vann Woodward, Henry Steele Commager, Richard Hofstadter, and Schlesinger himself–who were consummate professionals and engaged in the important matters of the day. These historians benefited from the stringent demands of professional objectivity, a tradition that had solidified during the early years of the twentieth century with the growth of the modern university as well as the founding of numerous graduate programs in history and professional associations like the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. Yet historians like Woodward, Commager, and Hofstadter did not believe that objectivity and professionalism required locking themselves up in an ivory tower–just the opposite. Objectivity and the broad perspective that a training in history provided made these intellectuals’ engagement in public life an imperative. Now, as professionalization and objectivity–and the cruel realities of limited academic jobs for young historians–exert more pressures than before, we are forgetting the balancing act carried out by a previous generation. Fewer and fewer historians have the skills or ambition–let alone incentives–to make history speak to a wider public world. This leaves public engagement to those who are willing to cheapen the historian’s craft and play political football with the past. Both our understanding of history and our public discussion are the worse for it.

Ironically, the person who best embodies this unfortunate transformation of history is arguably the most famous American historian alive: Howard Zinn. As Michael Kazin recently pointed out in Dissent, Zinn’s most popular book, A People’s History of the United States, "has gone through five editions and multiple printings, been assigned in thousands of college courses, sold more than a million copies, and made the author something of a celebrity." The book even had a cameo in the Oscar-winning film Good Will Hunting. Zinn–who earned his Ph.D. from Columbia–cut his teeth in the early days of the civil rights movement while a professor at Spelman College, an all-female African-American institution in Atlanta. As he became more involved in the movement and active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Zinn, now professor emeritus at Boston University, made a decision about the way he would "do" history in the future. "There was never, for me as a teacher and writer," he later explained, "an obsession with ‘objectivity,’ which I considered neither possible nor desirable." For Zinn, writing history was synonymous with doing politics. As he states in A People’s History, there is an inevitable "taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history." In other words, history can never be the disinterested pursuit of truth but is rather a radical project, from the very beginning an exercise in spin rather than scholarship.

Riding a wave of "social history" that overtook academe in the wake of the 1960s, Zinn told stories about people neglected in more traditional political and intellectual histories. Instead of the Founding Fathers, readers of A People’s History learn about the urban working class during the American Revolution, Native American resistance to white settlers moving west, and a handful of slave revolts in the South. Telling these stories proved a form of political therapy for Zinn–a way of cheering on ordinary citizens for future political battles. "If history is to be creative," Zinn explained, "it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion."