“HOW is the career?” It is yonks since a respected colleague asked me this question.

I still sometimes think about it. Because, after decades earning a crust, it was the first time anybody had every framed my work life this way. I certainly never had. Am I alone in this? I doubt it.

Many of us – especially those who have never had managerial responsibility – think of ourselves as having jobs, not careers.

We work, we get paid. We try to keep working, and keep getting paid. Some of us learn a trade or two in the hope that keeps the jobs coming.

But a career? That is just something for smarter and pushier colleagues to pursue, right? Not really, no.

Yet this attitude is deeply ingrained in our culture. Is it a British thing? Scottish? Working class? Is it sometimes more female than male? Maybe all of the above, but certainly not exclusively so.

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Those of us who have “jobs” can be scathing about people with “careers”. This prejudice is written in to our language: the word “careerist” is firmly pejorative.

Don’t worry, this is not a column about Tall Poppy Syndrome, or Crab Mentality or what our neighbours across the North Sea call the Laws of Jante: the rules governing a fictional small Danish town where the locals are not allowed to get uppity.

No, what fascinates me is the role sometimes deep-seated anti-careerism plays in our public life. I guess it has always been there: “political careerism”, after all, to most ears sounds even worse than the regular variety.

But it is not exactly a secret that the internet, social media age has brought a rise in crude populism, of cynicism and conspiracism about elites, of anti-politics. This in turn has spawned hostility against real people who work for parties or governments. It is getting unhealthy. Very.

Take the current SNP leadership contest. You do not need me to tell you how dysfunctional the whole process has become. Michael Settle, on these very pages, last week talked of a “doom-loop” for the party. Another Michael, the SNP President Mike Russell, admitted “things have gone spectacularly wrong”. Yup.

Yet I think it is worth zooming on a single word that has kept cropping up in chat about the SNP: “careerist”.

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Scottish politics, especially its very online variety, is a dumpster fire right now. In the real world “Careers" are up in smoke in the fall-out from Sturgeon’s resignation. Fair enough. But so is the very idea you can or should pursue a professional life in a party or a government.

An anti-careerist narrative has been laced through social media posts, blogs, partisan rhetoric and even, occasionally, mainstream commentary on the SNP race.

Its thrust? That politicians and – surprisingly often – their staffers are working for cash, or careers, not the cause.

Visceral Yesser opponents of Ms Sturgeon and her allies see “careerists” as “devolutionary troughers” who have settled for the constitutional status quo. Jobs are described as “sinecures”, as if loyalists get paid to do nothing.

The veteran MP Pete Wishart has been dubbed “Slippers”. The implication: that the musician-turned-politician is so comfy at Westminster that he does not really want independence.

These are just dumb insults, more evidence of a debased public discourse. But it gets worse. It does not take long for online allegations of careerism to escalate in to another c-word: corruption.

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A lot of people have become remarkably casual about throwing around claims of graft. They rarely have any evidence, of course. They do not need it: for some online actors the very fact somebody pursues a career in politics is proof enough.

I am highlighting one dysfunctional narrative from one political contest, for the SNP leadership. Why? Because this is the news right now. But rhetoric about careerists, including corrupt careerists, is ubiquitous, across politics and parties.

It comes in some dangerously extreme forms.

A revolt against political pros helped to fuel Donald Trump’s far-right “Drain the Swamp” campaign ahead of the 2016 US presidential election. And the old rogue has been at it again this month, suggesting there is a sinister elite inside government working against America, and him.

Less alarmingly, there has long been some genuine discomfort about the rise of a professional political class, both of elected members and of their army of support staff, of constituency workers, of policy wonks.

Some on the right have fretted about a lack of business expertise in parliaments. Some on the left were uneasy with the breed of career politicians in New Labour who had, according to legend, never done a day’s honest grind in their puff.

Me? I would want a pretty diverse background for politicians and political professionals.

But does selling trainers – hopefully for more than you you paid for them – give some special insight in to the workings of governments or wider economies? Does mining coal or digging peat? Of course not. Modern politics is a trade you need to learn, whatever you used to do. Governing is hard. So is opposing.

Political rhetoric might be simple, political reality is not. Once you look under their hoods, governments, parliaments and parties are complicated machines with a lot of moving parts. It takes pros to make democracy work.

So here is the painfully obvious point of this column: there is nothing wrong with pursuing a career in politics, either as an elected member or a staffer. We need to detoxify our rhetoric about those who do so, whether we agree with them or not.

Sure, some political operatives are dingbats or deadbeats. A few will be bams, or bent. But we won’t get any closer to identifying and tackling problem individuals by blackening an entire trade.

A final nuance. Anti-careerist rhetoric is often whipped up by scorched-earth hyper-partisan bloggers. Why? Well, because such smears are both politically and commercially effective. There are – it is my job to remind you – careers to be made in anti-politics as well as in politics.