Sophomore year of college, I moved into a cool old rowhouse in Washington’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood along with four buddies.

At least, we were buddies in September. By May, not so much.

You see, while one of the other guys was fairly messy, like me, the others were fastidious and particular — the kind of fellows who gave you a good idea of what the “A” in “type-A personality” must have stood for.

Here’s what I learned about living with neat freaks: You can come 80 percent up from slovenliness. You can take your shift swabbing down the bathrooms, make sure your dishes are never left in the sink, and eschew wastebasket Jenga in favor of a fresh bag. But they can’t come down that 20 percent to meet you where you are. If your socks are still in the foyer next to your shoes, you might as well be living in a barn.

This is what it has felt like being a conservative critic of our current president these last four years. I’ve been pretty vocal about what I think of him (just ask his fans among my Twitter followers!). Haven’t pulled my punches on either policy or comportment. But because I also happen to have noticed that many of his archest critics on the left and the right have themselves abandoned all standards and succumbed to blabbering lunacy, somehow I’m still lumped in with the great unwashed.

I’ll never be clean enough for Jen Rubin or the “Lincoln” “Project” guys — and I’m good with that. They’re bonkers at best, and besides, only one of us still believes the same things in 2020 as in 2015. But near the end of this first term, and possibly this presidency, it is becoming clear just how stratified and balkanized the Right has become. Nobody’s in the mood to heed Reagan’s advice that “the person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally — not a 20 percent traitor.” And it’s not even the popular-front/“no enemies to the right” mentality that has taken its place. It’s more like one of those Internet memes that call upon you to identify which of 42 fine shades of brown represents the ideal slice of toast or cup of coffee. If you prefer “khaki,” you’ve made sworn enemies not just of the burnt-umber brigade, but also of the chestnuts and the chocolates and the russets and the wenges.

It’s exhausting. When I say that something POTUS did is “ill advised,” I’m harangued as an idiot for not recognizing its incisiveness and a coward for not seeing its indecency. When I say he “deserves credit,” I’m reliably informed by all comers that what he really deserves is the stockade or his face on the dollar bill.

I’m not immune to such fine slicing myself. That’s what really freaks me out. I regularly listen to a friend’s podcast. Though to some he’s an apostate, we agree on 80 percent of things — probably more like 95. And yet I find myself cringing when he takes some line of criticism three minutes of angle askew from what I just know is true north. “Don’t you see?” I scream into my car stereo. “You’re playing right into their hands!”

In this environment, sanctimony is almost unavoidable. Everyone becomes convinced that he alone can thread the needle of good conscience and strategic wisdom, and that anyone outside that narrow aperture is lost or evil. I hope this won’t outlive the current presidency. I don’t think it can. For one thing, the people whose grandiose reimagining of the proper priorities of the American Right (hi, common-good conservatives!) depends on the gutshot straight draw of the 2016 Electoral College may find that what they thought was necessary isn’t even possible in the absence of enduring governing majorities.

I won’t be so bold as to make any predictions about how long MAGAism will dominate Republican politics or conservative discourse. But I know that when it’s out of power, in four months or four years, both MAGAism and its critics will likely rediscover the benefits of coalitions.

Sometime in the spring of that sopho­more year, while I was visiting my girlfriend at her college, my roommates were busted for throwing a large but presumably quite tidy kegger, even though none of them were, strictly speaking, 21. The university owned the house, but it wasn’t technically a dormitory, which I guess we thought made the administration our landlords but not our proctors. The administration disagreed and asked us all to find someplace else to live.

I protested — I didn’t throw the party, I wasn’t even invited to it — and they granted me exemption. And so there was the awkward scene of my roommates’ silently packing their boxes and carting out their things while I did my best to pretend I wasn’t kind of a rat fink. When they’d all gone, I was left there in the big rowhouse, my dishes in the sink, my socks in the foyer. Short four friends.

And I can tell you: It’s a pain in the ass living with neat freaks. But it’s even worse living alone.