Contradictory political and cultural trends seem to be playing out all around us.  For example, CNN’s Don Lemon, who remains, bar none, the dumbest and most untalented individual in cable news, urges the left to pack the courts as a first step toward abolishing the Electoral College.

It apparently has never occurred to him and to many others among our national commentariat class that the Electoral College underscores a vital truth: that the Constitution preceded the Union – or, to express it another way, that there is no such thing as a Union without safeguards such as the Electoral College.

Indeed, one could make case that Constitution and the Union, far from comprising a symbiotic relationship, are one in the same. The original 13 states joined the Union out of assurance that their sovereignty and independence would be protected. The remaining 37 that that joined over the next two centuries did so with the same convictions.

Lemon’s entirely uninformed argument about packing the federal courts partly with aim of subverting the Electoral College is tantamount to dissolving the Union.

With prominent news anchors calling for the dismantling of a vital safeguard of liberty, perhaps it’s not that surprising that another liberal columnist has  weighed in favorably on secession as a means of resolving this failing polity’s intractable divisions.

“Seventy percent of Americans are angry at a political system that is just not working for them,” writes  Chuck Bonfig, a small businessman and freelance photographer.

It seems that growing numbers of Americans on both ends of the political spectrum are coming to terms with what has heretofore been a rather unpalatable truth: that this country is simply too damned big and culturally diverse to be governed on the basis of an antiquated 100-year old Wilsonian centralist model.