I fear you are absolutely right about this. The left is relentless and their time horizon is as elastic as is necessary to accomplish their aims, witness their century long commitment to enact Obamacare. Their endurance would rival that of the Chinese. Their recent attempts to strangle free speech on the Internet is only the preliminary skirmish in a war which they are prepared to wage until we are exhausted. Most well-intentioned Americans are not even aware of what is coming.
If we are convinced that a top down approach to political sanity probably cannot work because the media dominates the process, we might feel one more layer of the onion and ask what influences the media? You properly point out the financial control progressives exert over the media. I had not been aware of Warren Buffett's purchase of Media General but that is very frightening. I had been aware of his participation in the Washington Post and its affiliated companies beginning with his relationship with Katharine Graham but I had not known that it had matured into ownership across the board.
Is there another layer below financial control of the media? I think there is the matter of intellectual conceit. If Harvard and Yale dominate American law, Columbia and a few other institutions dominate American media. The influence is subtle and I think best described as "intellectual conceit" which lays down a menu of political correctness which locks the media in place. We are all familiar with how the New York Times defines what is newsworthy for the day and we see how the electronic media conforms to that dictate. For a reporter or an editor in a lesser publication or in a regional television newsroom to deviate from the established order is to betray oneself as a Philistine.
We see this phenomenon at work in our eleemosynary institutions such as our great foundations like Ford, Rockefeller, Pew and others originally established by their benefactors with conservative values animating the gift but over time the professionals insinuate themselves onto the boards and guide the institutions to the left. This is also a matter of intellectual conceit.
We know this is at play in academia. The college campus has become one of the most fascistic pieces of geography in America. The intellectual conceit at work there is not covert but very much in your face. Gown seems to have a need to say, "fuck you" to town.
In many of these institutions, especially the college campuses, we see progressives somehow funding themselves with our money. College tuition costs have gone through the roof as academicians have learned how to farm the government. Our foundations flourish in a tax-free environment. So in peeling off layers of the onion, we see that we have multiple institutions, many not mentioned here such as unions, especially teachers unions, hospitals etc. funded with public monies in some manner or other which makes these institutions immune to the frictions of capitalism and, worse, insulates them from the popular will.
All of this comes together in Washington. We Americans somehow sense that this Leviathan is out of control and the visible evidence of it appears to be the shenanigans in Washington. So we blame Washington or we blame the politicians there when they are only the symptom of a progressive infiltration of our entire culture.
How then do we reform our politics if we cannot reform Washington? We know the top down approach will not work because it has not worked. The system is defended by the media, our own institutions and our own tax dollars. I do not think for a moment that even rank progressives who dominate the Senate are unaware of the looming threat represented by our $17 trillion debt and our $120 million or more set of unfunded liabilities. I cannot believe they do not care because they make a religion of "caring."
I think they are in a psychic cage and can do no other.
The only approach for which I see even a glimmer of hope is the Article V movement and that hope, as feeble as it is, exists only because it attempts reform from outside Washington.
