Let’s Be Pirates: A Boarding Party of Ideas

There is only one way to fix what’s broken in America. We need to become intellectual pirates.

There is only one way to fix what’s broken in America. We need to become intellectual pirates.

What America needs is buccaneers of ideas leaping onto the deck of our nation’s ship, their quick blades ready to pierce through dead orthodoxies. When they corner the zombies at the helm, they can fire flintlock pistols loaded with the black powder of fresh ideas directly into their rotting brains. It’s the only thing that will work.

Too many people looking to reform America are thinking politics-first and organization-down. They want to build third-party organizations. They want to finance independent candidates. They want to elect better people or defeat bad ones. They want to insert better policies into our political machines, expecting those malfunctioning enterprises to spit out something other than what they’re designed to produce. They want to use politics to fix politics. It won’t work.

You can’t build an organization and hope new ideas trickle up. You can’t insert fresh ideas into a machine built to yield outdated ones. The cause of our current disfunction isn’t the wrong messaging, candidates, or political organization. It’s a vacuum of ideas. We face monumental change requiring extraordinary leadership, skill, and innovation to navigate and nobody in charge has any idea what to do.

You can’t start with the politics and hope it eventually produces good ideas. You have to start with the ideas and let them seize control through politics.

For most of the twentieth century, America had working ideas developed to solve twentieth-century industrial-era problems. America today looks nothing like the one for which we built our current version of politics, government, industry, and society. Technology is racing toward a new reality we can hardly comprehend. The global order is in chaos. Our economic assumptions are grounded in a vanishing picture of the world. Our culture is transforming in ways someone living just a decade ago would find bewildering. New movements are springing up demanding we rearrange everything. None of the answers we learned about how the world works can handle any of this.

There’s no rule book you can follow for this new America. We no longer have a working model. There’s nothing you can study and apply because what everybody knows is out of date. Wherever you look—government, academia, businesses, media—you find leaders and institutions frantically trying to apply old and failing playbooks like the executives of Blockbuster Video at the dawn of streaming video. It’s no surprise America, the superpower that straddled the twentieth century like the Colossus, is now stumbling about like a drunk giant.

The intellectual center is vacant, which is why radicals, crazy people, ambitious sociopaths, grifters, and those with naïve and bad ideas can seize the public square. They have free reign to offer bad answers to new problems because the people who are supposed to be leading don’t even seem to see these problems, much less offer compelling solutions to address them with intelligence and competence. A terrible answer will beat no answer.

Our problems aren’t the kind you fix by buckling down, putting disagreements aside, and getting down to business. They require vision, leadership, and brilliant new ideas. That’s why America doesn’t need candidates or organizations but pirates.

By pirates, I mean thinkers and intellectual entrepreneurs willing to cast off prior commitments and develop new ideas to govern our next age. I mean outsiders willing to challenge the consensus. I mean free-thinking innovators, iconoclasts, and brave idea people determined to change things without asking the status quo’s permission. I mean a band of thoughtful warriors willing to offer new solutions no one in our old world could conceive.

These pirates need to develop a new ideology and political identity built for this post-industrial America, a successor to twentieth-century industrial-era conservatism and liberalism. It should break with dead orthodoxies. It should speak to younger generations. It should attract a new coalition around emerging common interests. It should create an entirely new ideological category that can bind Americans around novel solutions and ideas, a new identity to replace tired ones like twentieth-century liberalism and conservativism. It should actively solve neglected problems and lead to a flourishing America.

I don’t mean a think tank churning out wonky white papers nobody reads. I mean the founders of America’s next ideological age.

Once we have fresh ideas, we seize the floundering ship. The goal isn’t a new interest group raising money for solutions that will never happen. It isn’t to become a third party banging at the door of respectability and never getting in. The goal is to inject fresh ideas into America’s bloodstream that can seize control of everything—our existing political parties and all of our institutions—to reinvigorate them and America.

To a lot of people, that probably sounds idealistic, grandiose, impracticable, and naïve. Everyone knows politics is about power and identity and vibes, and nobody cares about ideas. Except, contrary to what people think, that’s how political change always happens in America.

Major American political reform has never come top-down from parties, influence brokers, or politicians. It has always trickled up from thinkers and intellectual entrepreneurs, which parties and politicians then adopt.

The clearest example is the historical Progressive Movement, a disparate array of thinkers, doers, writers, and policy entrepreneurs who united at the end of the nineteenth century around their shared disgust at a broken system. Industrialization was disrupting the middle class and leaving working people behind, and this group of outsiders was frustrated at a corrupt and useless Gilded Age system that had no answers. They developed new ideas and unleashed them on America. As their ideas swept over the country, they inspired a new Republican president, Teddy Roosevelt, who transformed his party. Not long after, a rising Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, jumped on board, and transformed his as well. These ideas spread and America cleaned up its corruption and abuses, revitalized politics, started solving neglected problems, and boomed into the global powerhouse it was always meant to be.

The Progressives were hardly our only intellectual pirates. There was also the Conservative Movement, which started as a group of writers and thinkers in the 1950s surrounding a little political magazine called National Review. The magazine’s founder, William F. Buckley, Jr., united squabbling factions around a new philosophy, “fusion conservatism.” It created a new political identity of “conservatives” and a new vision for government, which soon seized control of the Republican Party and became one of the two dominant philosophies of American government. After Ronald Reagan took the White House, it permanently changed America’s direction.

There are plenty more examples, from the Jacksonians, to the New Dealers, to the moral reformers who shook up the decaying 1850s with new ideas like abolition. They all had very different beliefs but shared a common strategy for success. In America, reform always starts with groups of outsiders and thinkers who invent new philosophies of government, develop fresh ideas where the establishment failed, and inject those ideas into politics where they seize control of the ship.

America is drifting like a ghost ship lost at sea. That’s why our institutions are broken. It’s why everything is increasingly corrupt. It’s behind the collapse in trust. It’s why the middle class is furious and struggling. Its why radicals, grifters, know-nothings, and attention-seekers are overrunning the public square. It’s why so many Americans are losing faith in America.

We need to stop thinking like insiders, bureaucrats, business leaders, policy wonks, and writers. We need to start thinking like pirates.

Everyone is understandably focused on the election ahead, as they should be. But what’s next? When do we move past rolling crises and into the rebuilding that will end them? When do we start the work of developing the solutions to new problems that will restore stability, and build the new frameworks around which America’s next generation of politics will be fought?

Building an ideological boarding party takes time, thought, and a lot of work. In six month or a year, when the election is over and America goes back to squabbling and drifting and stumbling over this changing world, America will scream out again for answers louder than before. A door will open. We must be ready to grab the opportunity.

We need pirates to create the new frameworks that will rebuild a new America. Then, once we form a new identity and pack our ship with exciting new ideas, let’s sail out on blue waters, hoist the Jolly Roger, look forward toward the horizon, and get to work.