“With slight shades of difference,” wrote George Washington in 1796, Americans “have the same religion, manners, habits and political principles.”

That is no longer true.

The inauguration of Donald Trump sparked national protests – obscene, vulgar, and crude -- by the Left. Over sixty congressional Democrats boycotted his inauguration. Plans to impeach him were in the works – before he had even done anything. And when Trump fulfilled a campaign promise by cracking down on immigration from Muslim countries – for the purpose of preventing jihadist terror attacks – the Left took to the streets once again.

And that was just Trump’s first week in office.

What do Americans of the Left and the Right have in common? Nothing  -- except hate for each other.

Washington was the chairman of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, where Americans met to hammer out a new social contract to replace the ill-fated Articles of Confederation. The Constitution was not only a work of pure genius, it was also a document of practical compromise. Severe differences existed between Federalists and Anti-Federalists, North and South, slaveowners and non-slaveowners. Yet the Americans of the Founding generation were able to agree upon a basic set of principles agreeable to all: limited government, separation of powers, enumerated powers of the Congress and the executive, limits on the powers of states, and a method for amending the document. In 1791, a Bill of Rights was added. The Constitution made the U.S. a “creedal” nation: agree with its principles, and anyone could become an American.

But the Constitution of 1787 no longer articulates a set of shared principles. For practical purposes, today there are two separate and unrelated constitutions – a constitution of the Left, and a constitution of the Right. The Leftist constitution includes the rights to abortion, anal intercourse, and gay marriage. The Right, reading the “supreme law of the land” as it was actually written, sees no such rights anywhere in the U.S. Constitution.

For the Right, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” means exactly what it says. The Left believes that government has complete authority to ban any and all guns and ammunition from anyone not a member of the military or the National Guard.

The Right believes that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was written to extend civil rights to freed blacks after the Civil War. The Left believes that the Fourteenth Amendment allows discrimination against white men and preferential treatment for women, blacks, and Hispanics, and that it requires that 50-year old male-to-female “transgenders” share public bathrooms with third-grade girls.

The constitution of the Right says that the candidate with a majority of the electoral vote becomes president. The constitution of the Left says that unless a candidate wins the “popular vote,” he is “illegitimate” and is “not my president.”

The constitution of the Right grants Congress the authority to “regulate Commerce with foreign nations,” “establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization” and “repel Invasions;” therefore, the government has the power to secure the border and halt illegal entry. The constitution of the Left, articulated by Emma Lazarus, insists that the U.S. must accept “the wretched refuse” and the “homeless” of the world.

These two constitutions reflect two distinct and unassimilable cultures. The culture of the Left is urban, agnostic, socialist, gay and queer. It fancies itself intellectually and morally superior to the culture of the Right, which is rural, traditionalist, Christian and heterosexual.

The Right regards America’s Founders as men of achievement, morality, and virtue. They see our European heritage as praiseworthy, for it gave us the Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, electricity, medicine, clean water, automobiles, powered flight, and landed men on the moon.

The Left sees the Founders as wicked, greedy men who cheated innocent Indians and enslaved innocent blacks. Whites of European descent raped and destroyed the pristine environment with global warming, imposed monogamy and heterosexuality upon women, and subordinated the “peaceful” cultures (like Islam) of black and brown people.

Leftists regard conservative, rural America as the land of snake-handling, gun-toting Klansmen, lying in wait to lynch innocent blacks for infractions as innocuous as jaywalking. Conservatives cannot fathom how any sane person could attend the Folsom Street Fair, the orgy tent at Burning Man, or promote late-term abortion. Some liberal Jews believe that the U.S. has actually elected a neo-Hitler; they fear hiring conservative, Southern plumbers to fix their pipes. Pro-life Christians were elated to have Vice-President Pence address their annual march on Washington, D.C.

There is not, and cannot be, any dialogue between these two groups.

The Founders at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 established the federal system, under which a narrow set of national powers would be agreed to by everybody, and state governments would have wide discretion to create policies suited to their local cultures. It was a “live and let live” philosophy.

Unfortunately, federalism failed – first over slavery, and later over abortion, busing, affirmative action, gay rights, and so on. The Left insisted on nationalizing as many policies as possible. It destroyed the government of limited and enumerated powers, and replaced it with a Leviathan, powerful enough to force its perceived moral superiority down the throats of its opponents. Now that Trump is in office and the Left no longer controls Leviathan, they are in a panic – and in the streets.

This cannot end well. Every campaign promise fulfilled by President Trump will be enthusiastically received by the Right, but will only serve to further enrage the left-wing freaks, dressed as giant labia, shrieking obscenities, smashing windows, and burning cars in the streets. Violence and lawlessness will increasingly be seen as a badge of honor.

These tens of millions of leftists will not go away. The next time their side wins, empowered by their rage, they will redouble their efforts to persecute the Right, and put conservatives out of business for good, so that no one like Trump can ever win again.

It seems that we will be left with three options in the near future: the Right under Trump utterly destroys the Left; the Left regains power and proceeds to exact revenge and utterly destroy the Right; or separate into three nations, West Coast, East Coast, and Heartland.

The first option is unlikely. It would require actions unpalatable to the Right, and probably could not be achieved without violating the principles of the Constitution of 1787. The second option is very likely. The Left has no constitutional scruples restraining it, and regards itself as so morally superior that its ends justify its means. And it has embraced the use of street violence to achieve its objectives ever since the 1960s.

Perhaps the best option is the third. Why waste time and effort trying to persuade people who cannot and will not be persuaded? If Californians want to ban guns, parade around in bondage leather, and allow illiterates and criminals to cross the border to receive government benefits, let them. Ohioans and Michiganders ought not be forced to go along with it.

But the present situation is untenable. The nation is like a car careening down the road, with two people fighting over the wheel. One pulls the car left, the other swerves back to the right.

Sooner or later, a crash is inevitable.