It’s not TV, sports and porn, it’s life. People have bills and responsibilities and things that need to get done. You expect people to get evicted from their homes because they walked away from their jobs to go be part of the revolution? Really? We no longer live in a version of the world where you can just go alternative in your life, no longer can you build a cabin any old place plop the wife and kids down safely and go fight the good fight. The Industrial Revolution means we have jobs and paperwork that must be respected.
According to various circulation and ratings Kristol and Will have at least hundreds of thousand who pay attention to them.
People in 1776 and 1788 had plenty of bills and responsibilities, and lived far closer to the edge than almost anyone in America lives now.
You are correct in that it cannot be a man-the-barricades revolution. But imagining that everything will be OK by spending a few minutes in a voting booth a few times a decade, or spending a month or two promoting a secular messiah is foolish occupation.