"We'll just keep cucking along!"'

I have been looking at stuff from American Mind only recently because of the discussion of Vermeule, so I wasn't aware of this piece which was published in Dec. 2019, written by a Straussian, I presume.
A Reconquista of American Culture? by Jeremy Carl

In it he talks about "conservatives" undertaking a decisive action in the culture war but it ends up being just self-promotion and an attempt at gate-keeping.

Indeed, this is true, but one should add that those Americans will need leadership from intellectuals and other leaders within the corridors of power who are brave enough to stand up against the Left’s cultural tyranny. It is to these people that Claremont can speak when it refers to “Recovering the American Idea”—understanding, as Don Pelayo did, that something has been lost and must be recaptured.

and

Institutions such as Claremont represent this Covadonga in the mountains: perhaps outnumbered and outgunned, but willing to fight smartly and fiercely from our redoubt, picking up allies along the way and targeting our message to talented people marginalized by the increasingly tyrannical and hysterical reign of the left.

West-coast Straussians are not the culture warriors we are looking for. After all, what  have the Straussian done to capture institutions (other than poli. sci. departments) or mass culture from the revolutionaries?

But Hearns wisely does not simply lay the blame for these defeats at the feet of Trump—instead, he lambasts conservatives’ poor to non-existent efforts to win over the organs of cultural transmission (media, Hollywood, schools and universities, etc.) that influence the preferences of high-status individuals from whom average citizens, too busy to involve themselves with politics, determine their own views. And he points out, correctly, how anomalous this particular affectation of the American Right is, observing that “Practically every significant movement—whether ancient or modern, religious or secular, totalitarian or liberal—knew that to succeed in the long run it needed to gain control of the institutions that manufacture public opinion.”

Tea kettles and pots.