In Ryan Murphy's Netflix show The Politician, the titular character embodies one of the most grotesque caricatures of ambition ever put in pixel form. Still in high school, he's obsessed with becoming president of the United States and picks everything—from his college to his girlfriend—with that goal in mind. He thinks he can improve the lives of his future constituents, but mostly he just wants power, and his machinations in service of power come off as both pathetic and terrifying. It's an exaggeration of an idea that most people probably have in their heads, which is that people who run for president have been laying the groundwork for years, decades probably, their every decision from childhood onward calculated and artificial.

So Warren's work as an adviser for Dow Chemical , for which she earned $20,000, could be seen as a sign she's just as selfish and venal as everyone else but is also a phony. Yes, she did a lot of legal work for a lot of different reasons, and sure, her views have changed over the years from Republican to progressive —but why couldn't she simply always be a true believer like Bernie Sanders, a lifelong left-wing activist so pure he once lived in a literal shack ?

In the past few days, Warren has said Buttigieg's consulting work could raise "possible conflicts of interest," while the South Bend mayor's adviser Lis Smith accused Warren of hiding "decades of tax returns" from the years she spent "defending the types of corporate bad actors she now denounces." (Warren has since released details of her compensation for her corporate work.) Both attacks boil down to accusations of hypocrisy, and it's easy to see why the campaigns would think that sort of tactic would be effective. Democrats build campaigns around caring about downtrodden people and promising to help them, so anything that indicates they don't actually care seems to smack of duplicity. (Donald Trump, who was mostly famous for being an asshole prior to his presidential campaign, is less vulnerable on that front.)

Both candidates stand accused of failing to live up to progressive values, of working for the odious institutions that a truly virtuous Democratic Party would burn to the ground. But the antagonists here should be those institutions, not individual consultant drones or hired-gun law professors. When confronting the vast and murky problem of corruption in elite American life, we shouldn't be talking about individual choices but about how the system placed those decisions before them.

It's a little bit ironic then that two of the leading Democratic contenders for president are now under assault for not being calculated enough, or at least being sloppy in their math. Elizabeth Warren, who is campaigning as a populist anti-corruption crusader, has been criticized for her work in past decades for corporations, including those fighting lawsuits over pollution , while she was a Harvard law professor. Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old who of all the candidates most resembles Murphy's Politician, has faced questions over his work for the infamous consulting firm McKinsey & Company as a fresh-out-of-Harvard twentysomething. (Buttigieg has just revealed which clients he worked for after McKinsey, where he signed a nondisclosure agreement, granted him permission.)

But charges of phoniness are easy to level against anyone. Everyone is impure in some way once you start looking for impurity. Sanders himself has been called out for being a millionaire and owning a $700 jacket while preaching democratic socialism. Even more absurdly, Sanders disciple Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was attacked for allegedly eating a hamburger while advocating a Green New Deal package that conservatives said would ban meat, or something.

Working for McKinsey, a firm most recently in the news for faking numbers while working on a project to reduce violence at the jail on Rikers Island, is more involved than eating a hamburger. But Harvard grads like Buttigieg are routinely encouraged to go into consulting at places like McKinsey, which are sold to students as offering the opportunity to learn about a wide variety of things while keeping their options open for the future—a natural continuation of an Ivy education, with the added bonus of a nice paycheck and a shiny resume item. Buttigieg's post-college career might not be as admirable as some, but it was utterly banal. Plenty of people would, and did, make exactly the same choice.

Similarly, Warren's work for corporations while she was at Harvard was the sort of thing that was encouraged by the law school, one of her colleagues told the New York Times. At Harvard, it is just the normal state of affairs for bright graduates to go off to consult for businesses, just as it's normal for law professors to lend their expertise to businesses. If some of those businesses are not exactly engaged in the most praiseworthy activities under the sun—well, who among us can claim our hands are truly clean?

It's notable that Warren and Buttigieg have likely targeted one another with charges of failing to be transparent about their past careers, probably because they see themselves as competing for the same group of white, college-educated voters in early primary states. That class of person is most likely to be familiar with the world both candidates inhabited. Maybe they didn't work for an elite consulting firm or make millions from dispensing legal advice, but these voters may be cogs in a law firm representing oil companies or Big Pharma. They might do PR for products that don't actually help anyone, or spend their days laboring for a monopolistic tech company. (Alphabet and Microsoft are at or near the top of the list of sources of donations to both Warren and Buttigieg.)