Gerry Garibaldi writes:

Since I started teaching several years ago, after 25 years in the movie business, I’ve come to learn firsthand that everything I’d heard about the feminization of our schools is real—and far more pernicious to boys than I had imagined.

In a very much related column, Mona Charen adds:

[A]cross the nation, public school students are being indoctrinated in "health" classes and other venues to treat their families with skepticism and to regard traditional mores as "dysfunctional." Liberals have achieved what the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci only dreamed about: They have completed "the long march through the institutions" and now control the commanding heights of the culture. Conservatives are going to have to figure out the same trick if they do not want to see the country drift irrevocably to the left.

While liberal teachers preach, conservative parents must teach their own kids to become screenwriters, journalists, professors, teachers and producers. The rallying cry of Gramsci's acolytes was "Capture the culture." Ours should be "Recapture the culture."

While I agree completely, in terms of mass culture, I fear it's obviously far too late. On the other hand, mass culture has become increasingly fractured over the past 25 years. As James Lileks said when I interviewed him last November:

With mass culture and mass media now fractured (not the least of which was via the Internet and the Blogosphere), Lileks wonders if there’s enough of any common culture left to allow for such retrospective japery, "other than making fun of the fact that we really lack a common culture", he says.

"In one respect, I like this", he understandably adds. "I like the fact that there are so many culture opportunities out there, that the monoculture no longer charges the whole show. But the death of the monoculture means that there is a less of a sense of common identity, and how that plays out is something that we are going to learn in the next ten to 15 years.

That has positive benefits to conservatism, which, (and I'm far from the first to note this), has numerous ties that help glue its followers together: faith, family, love of country, etc. That's a far cry from the modern state of "anything goes" leftwing nihilism (and its '60s/'70 Mobius loop and accompanying nostalgia) that began to replace New Deal-style liberalism shortly after JFK's death.

That the bonds on the right haven't been entirely erased since the late 1960s is proof of how strong these connections are. And, fortunately, an increasingly demassified culture, even if still dominated by the left, makes them that much harder to further weaken.

Hopefully.