Lindsey Graham Knew the Secret About Sucking Up

The literature on sycophancy suggests it’s a more successful strategy than we want to know.

Senator Lindsey Graham died Saturday evening from a sudden tear in his aorta. He was 71, making his death an untimely one. But we can regret Graham’s misfortune without admiring his political journey, the lesson of which is that kissing up works much better as a way to get ahead in life than most of us wish to believe.

As TNR’s Michael Tomasky noted Monday, Graham’s legacy is that he groveled before a president whom he knew to be a very bad man, and in doing so played no small role in the Republican Party’s collective surrender to MAGA authoritarianism. We knew Graham thought Trump was a creep because he said so. “Trump’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” Graham said in 2015. “He doesn’t represent my party.” But five years later Graham tried to help Trump steal the 2020 election, and last month Graham said, “Mr. President, you’re not far behind God.” Had he lived, this Trump toady would have been a shoo-in for re-election in November.

“How can he be honoured,” asked Ralph Waldo Emerson, “when he does not honour himself, when he loses himself in the crowd; when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public; when he must sustain with shameless advocacy some bad government?” The answer, O Sage of Concord, lies in your very word “shameless.” In this century at least, he who conducts himself without shame will seldom be held to account.

A 1996 meta-analysis on the literature of sucking-up by Randall A. Gordon, professor of psychology of the University of Minnesota, Duluth, confirms this. “The possibility that tactical ingratiation may become completely transparent (especially in situations in which the ingratiator is highly dependent on the target for rewards)” is identified as the “ingratiator’s dilemma.’” But it turns out not to be much of a dilemma. “The high status recipient of agreement,” writes Gordon, quoting a 1964 study, “is not likely to suspect the tactical origin because, from his perspective, it is gratifying, but hardly surprising when people believe what is correct.”

Gordon concluded that sucking up had “a........

© New Republic