I’ll say it again – as a matter of fact, I’ll keep saying it as I have for the last 25 years: We are approaching our own Gorbachev moment, the point at which we realize that this country’s political animosities and divisions have grown so deep and our the  mechanisms of compromise established in our constitutional framework so seemingly ineffective that compromise no longer seems possible

As conservative columnist and Alabama native Byron York intimated recently in the disturbing Tweet above, the impending presidential election may prove to be a catalyst for any number of things: a protracted constitutional crisis, massive rioting and perhaps even threats of nullification or even secession by one or more states.

We seem to be faced with a remarkably similar set of circumstances – something a handful of astute political sages perceived as far back as three decades ago but, predictably, were scarcely heeded.

Some 30 years ago Mikhail Gorbachev, faced with a somewhat similar set of deep social political divisions set out to negotiate a new Union Treaty that would have transformed the Soviet Union from a tightly knit federation into a loose Union of Sovereign States. But he was eventually outpaced by events.

The raging animosities so conspicuously evident in our poisoned and dysfunctional political discourse simply have underscored to millions of ordinary Americans that our divisions not only are perilously deep but also unbridgeable.