Flattery has never been a flattering idea, but now our slightly jaundiced, strategic view of it has tainted ordinary praise. For one thing, we all have a looser, more skeptical relationship with the truth. We are all moral relativists these days. The Enlightenment idea of truth as a supreme value has gone by the wayside. Nothing is completely straight anymore.
Nothing is unstrategic.
Irony always flourishes in ages when the idea of truth itself is relative. But pervasive irony engenders a kind of cynical moral lethargy. Ethical distinctions make us weary. Such fine differences are met either with a smirk or a shrug. If all truth is relative, flattery is just another way of massaging it.