American billionaires who intervened in their newspapers' endorsements know that the orange guy is a vindictive prat, unlike Harris. Nonetheless, their actions and Musk’s murder of Twitter ought to lead to legislation that limits or undercuts the concentration of media ownership, regardless of who the owners support. We cannot become another oligarchy à la Autocracy, Inc.

I suspect, though, that this is a fight for another day, if ever. The electorate needs Harris to come through on important bread-and-butter issues first; Harris will need to work coalitions in Congress to increase pressure on Russia’s terrorist regime; and on and on.

It seems as if there is always a big and urgent need. So how do we address the fundamentals, including not only media concentration but also campaign finance, gerrymandering, Supreme Court oversight, the Electoral College, a primary system that favors ideological purity over substance, minority rule by those who win only a plurality of votes, and statehood for DC and for any other territories who desire it? Where do we start?

If Republicans were really concerned about media bias, that could form a basis for bipartisan work on media concentration. The past decade or so has shown, however, that they do not want free and fair discussions. Recently, “free speech” absolutists have given the lie to that notion with Twitter’s metamorphosis into X(itter), which followed on the heels of “alternative facts” and a cultural shift that privileges personal belief over all forms of evidence. Consider, too, the pressure to ban books and not teach darker chapters of our history.

So where or how do we start? Republicans' singular focus on attaining power in the states, in the judiciary, and in the federal government paid off, at least in the short term. They ended Roe; they’ve come close to establishing presidential immunity; and they have big plans to blow up most of our remaining institutions. They’ve also enabled the blossoming of unregulated militias with freely available assault rifles.

My hope is that enough Americans see through the orange one’s grift to put an end to his ambitions for a second term once and for all. I would then like to see Harris appointees hold the worst of the conspiring putschists and domestic terrorists to account in timely fashion so as to delegitimize that kind of opposition. But how do we get from there to a culture that rewards candidates who respect the Constitution and their fellow human beings enough to get the people’s work done?