If you do a search for the term “anti-politician,” you will – apart from a personal website for Pat Buchanan that probably should have a lot of white space – find article after article about Donald Trump. And Ben Carson. And sometimes Carly Fiorina. The rise of the anti-politician. The year of the anti-politician. Does anti-politician Donald Trump signal the collapse of movement conservatism?

Given the parade of think pieces, you’d think all the interest in non-political politicians must’ve started sometime in July. But as sexy as it is for the American left to think that Donald Trump represents some self-consuming metastasis of movement conservatism, his is an old story. The Republican Party has been hoodwinking its base for years, and the Democrats have been doing much the same, all in a government designed and further manipulated to inhibit any possible change. People don’t like politicians now, but adding the “now” suggests that anyone had reason to somewhat recently.

Most presidential campaigns have almost no politicians there, at least not normal ones; if you’re lucky, you might find A Different Kind of Politician, mostly because both parties and politicians in general were polling slightly below “giving children Lunchables full of typhus”. That is why Scott Walker, a man who has run for office every cycle since the age of 22 and held elected office consistently since the age of 25, tried to claim he wasn’t a career politician. It is why Marco Rubio, a man who who spent a “career” in the private sector only slightly longer than a wealthy dowager’s accidental belch in a children’s movie and now holds federal office, keeps claiming that Washington is the problem and that politicians are out of touch.

On the face of it, anti-politician posturing by politicians borders on the frightening or the ridiculous. Like any complex job, being a politician should be something that we acknowledge gets better with a little practice and a lot of study – if not in the history of political theory, then at least in the core distribution requirements of a university. (A real university, that is, not Liberty University or some other place where your paper passes or fails depending on whether your teacher puts a sticker of Jesus smiling or frowning on it.)

It’s nice for Doctor Ben Carson that he wants to carve open the body politic as an anti-politician politician (whatever that is), but, in any other profession, we’d all concede just how absurd his utter disregard for how a job works would seem. Imagine sidling up to Ben and the trepanned head of some unfortunate toddler and saying, “I’m really more of an anti-medicine doctor. Let’s throw radium water on its brain.”

In politics though, anti-politician rhetoric works, because our political system has made it work. The Republicans are just a more obvious case than the Democrats in 2015.

After years of politicians promising them the destruction of all entitlements except for the ones that Republican voters already have or are about to receive, the end of the deficit and a simultaneous expansion of the military, a restoration of both hands-off government and an American caliphate, movement conservatives are reasonably disappointed. Moreover, some conservative evangelical Christian voters have had occasion to suspect they were being taken for a ride. They may even be suspicious when an extremely smart Harvard Law-educated senator acts as if the First Amendment is just the entire Bible in extremely small type.

The Republicans have only aggravated their policy problem – 50% of what they promised their base is antipodal to the other 50% – with politicking tautologies, simple answers for simple problems that leave representatives no simple solutions after they’re forced to contend with the way that the world of grown-ups actually works. They’ve first told constituents that insufficient conservatism explains any failure. Then, through the miracle of gerrymandering, they’ve created enough districts whose control is determined solely by the Republican primary so that, like Ivory soap, they end up testing and challenging their own leaders until the party is 99% pure – resulting in moments like the ouster of Eric Cantor, who was demonized as a squish despite being politically somewhere barely to the left of Strom Thurmond. Finally, at every step of the way, when faced with failures of their own policies, ideology or leaders, they’ve declared that politicians are the real problem.

But if the Republican Party is effectively in control of government, and the voters have filled their ranks with the best, purest conservatives available, then maybe those rank-and-file Republicans aren’t the solution to the perceived policy problems either.

The Democrats aren’t much better when it comes to the uncomfortable tension between what you promise to win an election and then wind up actually doing. Having a Clinton in the race is an uncomfortable reminder that Bill Clinton won his last presidential contest by positioning himself barely to the left of Bob Dole, co-opting the center-right with a long arm while waving at his left. Hillary Clinton will spend this campaign explaining her support or lack of critique for her husband’s welfare reform, the omnibus crime bills that greatly expanded the carceral state, financial industry and commodity market deregulations and more: We meant well, she’ll say, mistakes were made, it was the 90s.

Even the existence of Bernie Sanders represents something like a leftist anti-politician: he seems so generally uninterested in staple political speak that he just constantly reiterates concrete platforms in which the Democratic Party used to believe before the Clinton era of appearing serious by appearing similar to a Republican.

And even if we had the leaders that we say we want but rarely get a chance to vote for, many voters know that standing in the way of those leaders are, for instance, a Senate created to inhibit democracy, special interests that can do things like derail all but child-like daydreaming about gun control, and an oligarchy that tolerates reform only insofar as it accords with its interests.

Given that, why not back an anti-politician? If you’re going to get nothing, you might as well try anything: the worst outcome is just what you’re already accustomed to not getting. Why not a happy fantasy of someone who can build a beautiful wall to keep out immigrants, or send the guy who wrecked TWA to convince China to stop doing things in its own interest, or be the best president for the military and for women and for putting marble in the bathrooms of all federal rest stops? (Everyone tells me they pull over to pee in them, it’s tremendous.) Or why not a guy from Brooklyn and Vermont, who isn’t ashamed of social democracy and who speaks with the emphatic staccato delivery?

This desire for outsiders to run our country is born of a very old, very familiar impatience with the people who are currently running it. Even the conventional candidates who you would think most at risk from this kind of sentiment have already internalized its styling: Jeb Bush is not even a Bush and is just Jeb!, painting himself as something like a statesman (which used to just mean “dead politician”) or a leader. The latter word wonderfully accomplishes things without specifying what kind: If you elect Jeb! Bush, he will lead – the what and where aren’t important. Knowing where we’re going is not what America need right now; that’s just politics as usual.

It used to be that a politician was someone who ran for office; now that politics has made the word an epithet, everyone is running for office, but no one is a politician. They’ll be whatever you want them to be, as long as you elect them to office: there are no wrong answers when they have already rejected any minimal standard.