That's where you got it all backwards. Lisp (as an idea) after six decades is still thriving. There is a Lisp dialect for almost any platform. Clojure surpassed in popularity languages like F#, OCaml and Haskell, even though they are older than Clojure. There are more Clojure conferences, more meetups, more podcasts and more jobs. There are regular conferences in the US, Canada, Brazil, India and in almost every European country. Some of them have multiple Clojure-focused conferences. Emacs and emacs-lisp is still being developed and used by thousands around the world. Common Lisp is still in use. Racket is pretty popular in academia and beyond.

Again, Lisp is just an idea. If you grok the awesomeness of that idea you may someday find what makes it so powerful. Lispers often talk about "enlightenment" and call Lisp "a secret alien technology". They don't do it simply to justify their choices or to create aura with elitist attitude to scare outsiders.

Akin to the idea of Vim as a modal text editing - it takes time to get it, to learn it, to understand it. But one day you may realize the power behind it. Most people, being spectators don't get it. Sometimes people would learn just the basics of Vim, move onto something else and would be like "meh". But those who stick around, they soon may find an incredible new world that changes their subjective view and understanding of how things work. And they realize that there's nothing that can convince them to "unsee" this new world of possibilities. And just like there are many Lisp dialects, there are many ways to run Vim. You can do it in almost any modern IDE and editor.

Lisp is the same. It is a simple but quite powerful idea, if you don't see its power - perhaps because you haven't really looked.

Unfortunately yes, that's not the best way to "sell it", but that's the truth. You have to be a Vimmer to see the power behind modal editing, you need to become a Lisper to see true power of Lisp. That is why neither Lispers nor Vimmers have any illusions - they know, their way of thinking will never become mainstream.