When Trump was elected Orange County, California, a bastion of conservatism in the state that propelled Nixon to the Senate and Reagan to the governor’s office, voted for a Democrat at the presidential level for the first time since the dawn of the Great Depression. This replicated itself in a few places I used to use as bellwethers of enthusiasm for that year’s election among Republicans, and I credit this phenomenon to what other people call cuckservatives, and which I call Nice Republicans.

I’m assuming you’re familiar with the nice guy archetype so I won’t explain that. How this translates to self-identifying Republicans (and almost never conservatives, but that’s another conversation) is that it manifests itself in a pathological need to be liked, the pursuit of policy “compromises” to further that end, and more recently a disavowal of the president and his methodology. They perceive themselves to have moved beyond all his “ugly” machinations while simultaneously falling victim to it continuously from Democrats. The affection they seek is often courted from people that they are ostensibly in diametric opposition to, both in matters of lifestyle and principle. Lindsay Graham, a Senator from South Carolina, is one such person who yearns for the approval of people who hate both him and his party. He is one of a handful of Republican Senators, which also includes John McCain, who often abandon principle to achieve policy ends. This week George Will, a prominent columnist, has also seen fit to say that Trump is so reprehensible that good Nice Republicans should abandon the party altogether and vote for Democrats in November to teach him a lesson and act as a drag on whatever power he wields. This amounts to an endorsement of the patently uncivil opposition and the abandonment of principle because Will finds his own side to have been uncivil and bereft of principle.

At this point you’re probably wondering why I told you this would be of benefit to you in your personal and professional life. All of the things that happened above you are not immune to no matter what circles you run in. These behaviors make themselves known in the personal long before they surface in the political. The backbiting, the horse trading and the dishonesty, conscious and unconscious, will all increase in frequency the further up the ladder you climb. You shouldn’t assume any positive qualities because of feigned political leanings, and your ability to see things and people for what they are will determine how bogged down you get by these things.