Role of literature and literary analyst

How has Academics vis-a-vis humanities become a closed social sector/space in modern societies? It has been ‘acknowledged’ and ‘accepted’ as an oppositional form, precisely because it is in the realm of philosophy (vs. technology in modern societies), and because it has no power to subvert as it once did. Thus Edward Said and Raymond Williams can write against cultural hegemony and yet not be persecuted.
(Another analogy is the ‘freedom’ that the media ‘enjoys’ in democracies.) A major factor because of which cultural analysis has lost its power to subvert is its institution in modern society within the realm of the intelligentsia, a closed, self-sustaining (vis-a-vis ideas) group. True, Raymond Williams effected the rise of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, and practitioners of both schools do connect the analysis of the past to their effect on the present, and true also that Said changed the way literary analysis looked at post-colonial texts as well as post-colonial society per se, but these changes have largely remained within the realm of the intelligentsia.
The intelligentsia, though it is almost always in opposition to the dominant culture has been incorporated into the fabric of the social structure so much so that it has lost its ’sting’, if i may say so. (After all, researches are ‘funded’; universities are owned (indirectly) by social groups.) Though the intelligentsia uses culture and society as text, it has no social or political power. So Barkha Dutt (We the People) can keep having her debates on debatable issues, and yes, people are listening, but is anything changing?
The question is, does the intelligentsia as a social group form a part of residual or emergent culture? It is instituted now. Are we able to subvert the hegemony of dominant cultures, or have we been incorporated into the social fabric to an extent that literary theory and criticism have lost their potential of subversion, which they once had? Or can we simplify the workings of society and say that even though academics with its philosophers and the intelligentsia remains a subversive force, the dominant culture is (and will always be) a stronger force? The point is, I think, that a literary critic, analyst, theorist is incomplete without a social activist function.