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 significantly positive effect on perceivers’ judgments” about 52 percent of the time, and a negative effect only about 14 percent of the time—and the latter statistic was not judged very robust. Of all the ways you can ingratiate yourself to the boss, Gordon found, flattery was the most effective—more so, for example, than simply doing favors (like making a phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state to ask whether he has the power to toss mail ballots).
When I was young I had the idea that if I ever sucked up to my boss he would see right through me and humiliate me. My vice was the opposite. I tended to treat my betters gruffly, even rudely, to demonstrate—to whom it was never clear—my fierce integrity. When I was 23 or so, I wrote a piece for this magazine that prompted a kind letter from a well-established journalist whom I very much admired. The gracious and common-sensical thing would have been to express my gratitude in reply. For precisely that reason, I did not. Eventually we became friends, but that was in spite of my infantile surliness, not because of it. Later I grew up enough to behave better, but I never mastered the art of what Harvard Business Review, in a July 1 article, called “Networking Up.”
The premise of the article, by Andy Lopata, co-author of The Financial Times Guide to Mentoring, is that sucking up is necessary but not sufficient. “While relationships with senior leaders matter,” Lopata wrote, “a career-defining reputation is rarely built solely at that level.” Where Gordon concluded 30 years ago that sucking up worked 52 percent of the time, today any serious analysis must start from the premise that sucking up works 100 percent of the time. So we set that tedious question aside to explore the only necessary caveat, which is not to do it to the exclusion of also building relationships with others. Graham followed that advice, as all politicians must. He sucked up to Trump, but he also courted voters in South Carolina.
I’m a little dismayed that the value of treating co-workers decently regardless of rank carries the force of revelation in a major business publication. “For high potentials,” wrote Lopata, “the key question is not Do senior leaders know me?’ but ‘How do the people I rely on describe working with me?’ So, it’s vital to invest time and thought in deepening relationships with the people you work with every day.” Well, duh. What monsters never learned this basic principle while being dandled on mommy’s or daddy’s knee? Suck-ups, I guess.
Lopata, I fear, overstates the practical utility (as opposed to the moral necessity) of behaving decently. We all know people who sucked up and kicked down and did just fine. I know somebody who as a young man arrived at an organization led by a guy who’d desperately wanted the top job for years and didn’t get it because the chairman of the board couldn’t stand him. This guy had been thrown off the fast track by a ghastly error of managerial judgment, then somehow clawed his way to the top through sheer grit. Still, most everyone at the organization, knowing the history, regarded the boss as kind of an amiable clown. Enter my very ambitious young friend. He quickly perceived a void—nobody was sucking up to the boss!—and filled it. At first his co-workers thought he was just weird; later they realized he’d seized an opportunity that never occurred to them. As this person climbed the greasy pole, he sucked up and kicked down. Nobody except the boss could stand him, but that turned out to be enough; eventually he became the boss himself, and, later, an éminence grise of remarkable distinction.
“It pays to kiss up and suck down,” wrote Pilita Clark in Financial Times on Sunday. Clark agreed with Lopata that “Being nice to everyone is far smarter than a lot of ambitious wannabes ever realize.” But like me, Clark found “one of the most infuriating aspects of the toadying sycophant is the extent to which they keep succeeding.” There are “moderately talented bootlickers who rise remorselessly through the ranks while bullying juniors with abandon.” There are middle managers who kiss “up and down” but kick “sideways at peers they deem a threat.” The vileness of such behavior is “obvious to anyone working closely with these people, yet so invisible to everyone else.” But is it really so invisible? There are some bosses—President Donald Trump is one, and the $900 billion man Elon Musk is another—who revel in seeing their workforces demoralized and depleted. For them, subordinates who suck up and kick down are exactly what they’re looking for.
Is playing the sycophant psychologically stressful? Might it even lead to bad health outcomes like, well, a sudden tear in your aorta? Ramani Durvasula, a professor of psychology at California State University, Los Angeles, told CNN in 2017 that sycophants “tend to devalue themselves or overvalue power and proximity or both,” which doesn’t sound very restful to me. A Dutch psychoanalyst named Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries further observed on Medium:
At the heart of sycophancy lies a fragile self — a structure held together not by confidence, but by chronic insecurity and an insatiable hunger for approval. The sycophant doesn’t just want validation — they need it…. At its core, it’s less a strategy than a wounded reflex, a leftover dance from early relationships with dominant figures like parents, teachers, and other authority figures…. In extreme cases, sycophantic behavior may reflect masochistic tendencies — a psychological structure where the individual unconsciously derives satisfaction from self-denial, humiliation, or submission.
So maybe I was right after all when I decided at an early age not to care that much what the boss thought of me. Or rather, maybe I should thank my parents for not warping me into somebody who is desperate to please. Though if I cared a little more, probably I’d have accumulated fewer bosses over my professional career. The ones I have now, incidentally, are perfect.
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