The traditional DNC/RNC campaign-finance and media-buy systems are not very efficient. They're also based on relationships. Candidates must appeal to broad coalitions of donors so that they can afford the TV airtime necessary to succeed. Ads must not be too damaging to the reputations of the career staffers and media companies putting them on the air. This tends to constrain the ideological space a successful candidate can occupy.

We saw a successful candidate from outside that space because the efficiency of Facebook's ad platform, plus a unique and possibly Russian-intelligence-supplied savvy in wielding it, obviated the need for (as much) donor consensus to achieve a winning level of influence. I don't know about "any mom and pop millionaire," but you need less of them in your court than you used to.

That scandal that has everyone up in arms is Facebook's complicity in Trump's election, which is a consequence of its enablement of extremists in general, which is a consequence of its ad platform's cost-efficiency, which is a consequence of its troves of user data. But it's not data that started a drumbeat of public intellectuals calling for heavy-handed intervention in the New York Times editorial section (a fingerprint we've seen before). It's influence. The establishment is (correctly) not trying to engage populism in a meme war. It's fighting back the way it knows how.