Me-tooism

Next week's programme is one of peculiar interest. The following questions are announced for debate: The origin of "Me-tooism" in politics and "Too-tooism" in æsthetics, with reference to the study of modern history.

Senator [Arthur] Vandenberg answered critics who say the bipartisan foreign policy has produced mere Republican “me tooism” with the assertion that unity is vital if any policy is to get results. He declared: “If that's ‘me tooism’, then any unity is me tooism.”

For some elections past the Republican party has appeared to be acting on the fatuous theory that it could lure the labor leaders away from their Democratic alliance. Of all the "metooisms" that the Republicans have committed this one was the most transparent and the least effective.

I believe [Dean] Rusk has abdicated. Rusk merely follows [Robert] McNamara. It is McNamara who is calling the shots in South Vietnam. [...] The South Vietnamese program is McNamara's program. I am not interested in Rusk's "me-too-isms" in regard to it.

Having [Richard] Nixon woo the hard-shell Republicans and ardent anti-Communists and pleasing [Robert Alphonso] Taft and [Joseph] McCarthy, however useful for expunging "me-tooism" from the campaign, constantly threatened to jeopardize the greatest potential source of [Dwight David] Eisenhower's political strength: that fickle, uncommitted, apolitical, independent vote.

For some time there has ceased to be any significant difference between the Democrats and the Republicans; they are best thought of as two branches of the same party. [...] The depoliticization of most of the American intelligensia merely reflects the conformism and convergence—the "me-tooism"—of political life in general.

Republican domestic stands of the time were called "me-tooism," saying about each of the popular domestic innovations of FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] and the Democrats, "we support that too."

In socialist societies, there is a ‘me tooism’, a complex which startles the sensitive observer. Here despite social controls, the cities rise like jungles, the traffic jams are consciously sought, and so are the wasteful standards. No genuine alternative is posed. The choice before man remains what it has always been—conform or perish.