If there’s a real third way in American politics—a genuinely viable means of mobilizing millions of voters into a new political party, rather than a cynical branding strategy for pro-business policies—we learned a lot about what it would look like over the past year.

The successes of the Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump campaigns have revealed large cross-ideological constituencies that are hostile to existing free trade regimes and suspicious of American military adventurism. They have additionally served as reminders that universal benefit programs, like Medicare and Social Security, are overwhelmingly popular, even as they inspire controversy on Capitol Hill. Neither Trump nor Sanders, nor Hillary Clinton for that matter, wants to cut them. Sanders wants to expand them, and only conservative ideologues (who are losing badly this cycle) want to roll them back meaningfully.

Why do experienced political journalists so often peer into the heart of whatever they think of as “real America” and come away with the sense that real America is clamoring for entitlement reform and new trade deals?

More abstractly, a hypothetical third way would be premised on the notion that the Democratic and Republican parties are incapable of governing well, each corrupted in its own way by special interest money. Both Sanders and Trump have succeeded in large measure by touting the different ways they are immune from the temptation: Trump because he’s already rich, Sanders because his financial supporters are extremely diffuse and equally committed to the goal of cleansing American politics.

How is it, then, that so much political punditry of the “America needs a third party” bent—a genre that surges in popularity every four years—skips over all of this, or worse, inverts it? Why do experienced political journalists so often peer into the heart of whatever they think of as “real America” and come away with the sense that real America is clamoring for entitlement reform and new trade deals?

At a trivial level, the third-party obsession is little different than any other form of collective projection undertaken by people with a worldview. What makes it unique is that the worldview’s adherents, though steeped in politics, somehow imagine that resolving American ideological conflict would be easy if only the right person or small group of people stepped forward. Students of American ideological history, as well as committed conservatives and liberals, understand how facile this proposition is. What’s missing is a convincing hypothesis that explains why these otherwise-fluent experts gravitate to such silly nostrums. Their naiveté points to a corollary familiar to media critics of all persuasions: that the journalistic wisemen who yearn quadrennially for a third-party disrupter have thrived in a profession that considers indifference to the substantive underpinnings of partisan politics to be a virtue, not a vice.