ROGER SIMON: Maskless in Nashville: Two Parties Attend Tennessee GOP Dinner.
The essence of the problem, in Tennessee and across the country, is that there are still two Republican parties that haven’t fully reconciled. Call them the old guard and the MAGA people. You could also call it Bush v. Trump.
The old guard think the MAGA people are just a bit too rowdy—we might also say indecorous or perhaps uneducated—although they need Trump’s army in order to win.
Meaning no disrespect—I admire the man—Lamar Alexander exemplifies that old guard and did the other night, calling for a middle of the road approach to everything that may have been justifiable a while back, but ran its course some time ago. Times have changed—bigly, as someone said.
You don’t fight Pelosi, Schiff, AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, the mainstream media gang, the Marxist professorate, Hollywood (need I go on?) via “business as usual.” They are about as interested in “business as usual” as most of us are in stomach cancer.
You hear talk in the grass roots these days that Republicans should adopt a little Alinsky of their own—not straight on ends-justify-the-means criminal Alinsky, but at least some of his willingness to fight and keep fighting until only one of us is standing.
Allowing them to win, even a little bit, is the direct road to Soviet America.
Robert Conquest—the historian of Stalinism and one of my personal heroes—explained the danger of the middle-of-the-road approach when he wrote years ago in the second of his Three Laws of Politics:
History has borne him out.
Lastly, while I am in the mood of recommending terrific articles by others, have a look at “It’s the Liberalism, Stupid” by Liel Leibovitz over at Tablet.
Related: How to win the culture war.