Politicians Stand Up for What's Right and Left
By GEOFFREY NUNBERG - NEW YORK TIMES
"No more me-tooism," wrote John Hood in National Review recently, as President Bush was announcing his prescription drug program. That's the familiar charge when politicians seem to be sacrificing ideological commitment to expediency.
"I'm getting to the point where I think it's better to lose with someone like [Howard Dean]," one Democrat was quoted as saying, "than to have all this me-tooism."
"Me too" began its life as a verb. Just after the 1940 election, Harold Ickes, Franklin Roosevelt's adviser, wrote in his diary that the Republican candidate Wendell Willkie had "overlooked the best chance that he had by being content merely to `me too' the president . . . instead of striking out for himself in a bold and positive way."
The noun, me-tooism, followed in 1949. The postwar period was fond of using the suffix "-ism" to coin jaunty names for new trends and doctrines like me-firstism, eggheadism, momism, big-shotism, nice-Nellyism and go-it-aloneism. The names made light of the more portentous philosophical isms that were in vogue in the first half of the century, the fashion that Westbrook Pegler ridiculed in 1951 as "galloping ismatism."
But despite its form, "me-tooism" was really the ismatist's reproach to the apostasies of Republican centrists. Campaigning against Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1952 primaries, Senator Robert A. Taft warned that a "me too" strategy would alienate the Republican party's conservative base while making few inroads in the mugwump vote ? a type he defined as "an intellectual sitting on a fence with his mug on one side and his wump on another."
Eisenhower's me-tooism was both substantive and symbolic: the "welfare statism" of the New Deal programs, and the "middle-of-the-roadism" that he took for a motto, endorsing conservatism in economic matters and liberalism in "human affairs."
That strategy effectively undercut the liberal rhetoric of Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections, but over the coming decades the Republicans remained a minority party, rent by charges of me-tooism and extremism. Eisenhower never forgave Barry Goldwater for describing his administration as a "dime store New Deal." But Goldwater's resolutely un-me-too campaign of 1964 got nowhere with its slogan, "a choice, not an echo," and it wasn't until Ronald Reagan's victory in 1980 that the Republicans successfully reinvented themselves in what Ickes would have called a "bold and positive" way.
Charges of me-tooism didn't surface again until the 1990's, when another popular president faced with a large opposition majority adopted a strategy of "triangulation" between the left and right. President Clinton's middle-of-the-roadism riled not just his party's own left, but conservatives who saw it as a sign of devious pusillanimity.
"Clinton has become the first prominent `me too' Democrat," the conservative columnist Tony Snow wrote in 1994, "someone who accepts the fundamental rightness of his opponents' cause but doesn't have the stomach to go where the principles lead."
But when it became clear that the confrontational rhetoric of Newt Gingrich's Contract with America was alienating many voters, Republicans found themselves having to do some me-tooing of their own. The new look made its debut at the party's 1996 convention, and was in full display in George W. Bush's 2000 campaign. Democrats had their turn to become indignant when Mr. Bush's nomination acceptance speech appropriated some of Clinton's own phraseology, like "Medicare reflects our values as a society."
Since then Mr. Bush and the Republicans have proved adroit at neutralizing the Democrats' traditional rhetorical advantages on issues like education and the environment. Thanks to the wordsmith Frank Luntz, the Republicans have stopped talking about rolling back regulations in favor of appeals to "balanced, common-sense solutions."
And "inclusiveness" has never been so inclusive. At one time or another the White House has applied the word to Republican efforts to increase recruiting among women and minorities, the Homeland Security Department, Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force, the Coalition of the Willing, post-Hussein Iraq and Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania (an "inclusive man," Mr. Bush called him, after his remarks equating homosexuality with incest and bigamy).
Mr. Bush is hardly an Eisenhower Republican, of course. He's not about to style himself a "progressive moderate," much less warn against the dangers of the military-industrial complex. But even if his me-tooism is largely symbolic ? and highly selective, at that ? it has left the Democrats in a rhetorical bind. Unlike the 1950's, this is a period of sharp partisan divisions over most important issues, and yet the Democrats are struggling to find language that makes their differences with the administration clear. The phrases that signaled many of the great themes of liberalism ? "inclusiveness," "community," "corporate responsibility" ? have become bland, universally sanctioned values that no longer connote the political program that brought them to the ball.
For the first time in history, in fact, the `me too' label is as likely to be applied to one side as to the other. That doesn't signal a rush to the center, but it does mark the waning of another cycle of isms, as people weary of grand doctrines that offer themselves as the motor forces of history, and history takes one of its ideological breathers.
It's inevitable that "conservatism" will suffer the same decline as "liberalism." An oppositional label can't flourish for long when its contrary is ailing. (Nowadays, it's the right that is most responsible for keeping the liberal label alive.) Mr. Bush's use of "compassionate conservatism" was an implicit acknowledgment of the uneasiness that many voters have about the unqualified noun. And Mr. Luntz's recent advice to Republicans to refrain from describing opponents as liberals suggests his awareness of the public's increasing impatience with purely ideological wrangling.
In fact, the forces that severed liberal rhetoric from its underlying ideology cut both ways. As Democrats have begun to realize, traditional conservative themes like fiscal discipline, wealth creation and individual freedom are also up for grabs.
In the coming campaign, both sides will be trying to stake out a new political vocabulary, as they contest the meanings of words like "security," "opportunity," "responsibility" and "fairness." Those may seem like vague terms right now, but then so did "conservatism" and "liberalism" when the modern opposition between the two was taking shape in the early years of Roosevelt's presidency. As late as 1936, Herbert Hoover was accusing Roosevelt of a kind of me-tooism avant la lettre for hijacking the true meaning of "liberal."
Charges of me-tooism are inevitable in periods of terminological realignment. New political vocabularies always sound nebulous until debate gives them partisan shape and color. As no one knows better than we San Franciscans, the distinctive features of the landscape sooner or later emerge out of the fog.
Geoffrey Nunberg, a Stanford linguist, is heard regularly on NPR's "Fresh Air" and is the author of "The Way We Talk Now."
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