Journalists do know the score, the error is in the expectation that they will come around if only they are presented with the right argument. They, like the rest of the current intelligentsia, are actively advancing this state of affairs because they believe we need a strong, centralized state as the mechanism by which ordinary individuals will be divorced from the decision making process. They see themselves as part of an elite that has the divine right (or as close to "divine" as you'll ever get from these aggressive secularists) to be in positions of power over others. All the social and cultural ills are evidence to them that most people are too stupid and incapable to decide for themselves, and that these ills can be redressed by removing the power to decide from the individual and instead concentrating it among some modern day Druid caste. A good example is Thomas Friedman, who frequently laments that our system isn't more like China's. He marvels at the ability of the Chinese state to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and to whomever it wants. Rather than consider the human suffering that exists under such a system, he sees gleaming airports and highways and deems it superior to our system that necessarily sometimes encounters gridlock as a result of competing interests. It was the same in the 1930s when American journalists gushed with effusive praise for the Soviet Union and Comrade Stalin's 5 year plans of industrialization.
It's the fatal conceit of journalists, academics, bureaucrats, and other members of what Angelo Codevilla dubbed "the ruling class": they all believe in this radical transformation because they all believe they'll have a seat in the councils of power. The same was true of the Bolsheviks, many of whom promptly ended up in an unmarked grave or a Siberian gulag after the monster that they'd uncaged consumed its own revolutionaries.
As far as putting together a multi-generation pushback through education, I would certainly agree with that course of action. A few generations ago. I'm afraid we have already reached the critical mass required for the nuclear reaction that is about to take place. Speaking for myself, my overall posture and thought process have now shifted away from thinking in terms of correction, and instead to thinking in terms of survival. The opportunity to reclaim the heritage of our constitutional republic through "normal" means is now well and truly behind us, in my opinion. It is my hope that as this house of cards collapses, opportunities will present themselves to reassert classical American republicanism at least in certain regions and localities.
