Last April, former Politico CEO Jim VandeHei had a really bad idea.

Outlined in a roundly pilloried Wall Street Journal op-ed, VandeHei proposed a new third party called the Innovation Party. His plan, simply put, was to take centrist dogma — means-tested Social Security and Medicare, “muscular” foreign policy — and dress it up in an anti-establishment costume.

Bernie Sanders’s social-democratic policies were only popular, VandeHei reasoned, because its spokesperson was “anti-establishment.” If the Innovation Party had its own anti-establishment figurehead, someone willing to “disrupt” the standard political theater — someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg — then that person could easily become president. After all, VandeHei wondered, “who is against innovation?”