It truly is fascinating how even the blue-coastal commentariat are discerning and even embracing the merits of secession. At this rate, public awareness of long-term unsustainability of American unity will soon be regarded as the proverbial elephant in the room.

I have been fighting this battle with my very modest resources more than a quarter century now.

As endeavors go, it hasn’t always been pleasant. My father, a retired U.S. Army Reserve Lt. Colonel and staunch American nationalist, became so exasperated with my Jeffersonian/secessionist views at one point that he jumped out of his seat, flailed his arms and called me a traitor. We eventually made up.

Today, I feel largely vindicated. In fact, I am more convinced now than a quarter century ago that the moral and intellectual underpinnings that have sustained American unity, however tenuously, for the last almost quarter millennium are fraying rapidly. As this author, who writes from an unmistakably center-left, blue-coastal perspective, readily perceives, many of us already have reached a kind of intellectual separation with the rest of the country. And it likely will not be too much longer before formal calls for a political solution to these deep cleavages emerge.

Yet, as I have argued time and again, the pace of events may outstrip our ability to react quickly enough. We are fast approaching what I have come to call our Gorbachev moment – the point at which we must improvise provisions for what was previously considered unthinkable, a national breakup – though, unlike the ill-fated Soviet president, we haven’t begun to conceive anything resembling a contingency plan.