Ideas matter - but they don't matter enough, if you don't have the institutions to propagate them. If you don't have schools, if you don't have public spheres, if you don't have places where dialogue can take place, and people can come together and question and analyze - those ideas begin to evaporate. In the US, most of the pedagogical institutions, from schools to the media, are dominated by a corporate elite - these are not public spheres anymore, these are toxic spheres that align themselves with market-driven values that cultivate an ideology in which people don't know how to deal with democracy and what its demands and responsibilities might look like.