I see that you do not like philosophy very much. There is nothing wrong with that, of course. From the people you listed, I am only really familiar with Keith Woods and to a much lesser extent, Joel Davis. I have seen very little from Hamilton, since I don't like his work. For the rest, besides Spencer, I don't know anything about them. Personally, I don't consider Spencer a philosopher though.

It should be acknowledged that philosophy is not always useful, especially not when it is wrong. As with everything, a lot of people who engage with philosophy are wrong. It is not hard to understand why people dislike it. Still, I think there is merit in studying the meaning and history of ideas. To give one example, Freudianism was precisely an obscure intellectual fad limited to elite liberal circles, yet it has come to completely shape the popular understanding of the mind in recent decades. These revolutions in the way we understand the world are fairly frequent, and often have negative consequences. People who attempt to trace remote ideological causes for European decline typically do this because they believe that this can be helpful with returning to an original state of truth and health. I think that is a respectable mentality, although often there are all sorts of confusions and diversions.