Connection isn’t just personal. It’s political.

I don’t need anything more to piss me off to keep writing about what’s broken right now, but after re-reading Why Are Democracies Reeling? I found more fuel for the fire.

The surface layer bullshit so prevalent today is damaging more than we know. It’s literally tearing apart democracy. From the good folks at Protect Democracy—

Recent decades have been marked… by the breakdown of some of the essential connective tissue of society… Americans are simply less closely connected to one another in meaningful ways. Civil society participation is down, feelings of social isolation or loneliness are up, and the physical spaces where Americans can meaningfully encounter and build relationships have significantly receded.

Online platforms are no substitute when social media algorithms ensure that users typically see only content with which they agree… As people become more isolated from one another and less connected to a sense of common purpose, polarization and divides grow. Leaders can exploit these dividing lines to solidify loyalty among supporters, selling a narrative of connection and meaning that pits them against the “other side,” with whom actual encounters are all too rare.

Let me translate that into plain English: We stopped showing up for each other. And now we don’t trust anyone. So the whole system is falling apart.

Shocker.

This isn’t just about social collapse, isolation, and burnout. It’s about power.

When we stopped engaging with each other—really engaging, in person, in conflict, and in community—we didn’t just lose connection. We’ve made choices and set preferences that are dismantling the scaffolding of democracy.

A healthy democracy requires relationships, trust, physical presence, and shared stakes. If we don’t have anyone in our lives who voted differently than we did, if the only time we talk to our neighbors is when we have something to complain about (if we even bother), if we haven’t been in a room with strangers in months trying to solve a real problem without a mute button or a string of emojis—then we are actively making it easier to divide. Easier to manipulate. Easier to radicalize. Easier to rule.

Last week two very different people shared their disbelief and shock about what’s happening to everything in our country. In both conversations they asked the same rhetorical question: What can we do?

My response to both people was the same—go to a protest. Be around people who feel the same as you but possibly for different reasons. Shout. Share your feelings and get them out there. Connect your fear and anger to other people. Let it out loud. Let it be heard. Remind yourself what it’s like to engage with people on this level. This is humanity one-zero-one. What we all learned in civics class in high school. Connecting to humans is democracy and it cannot exist without it.

The loneliness you feel? It’s not just yours—welcome to the club, snowflake. It’s systemic. It’s cultural. It’s political. It’s the result of following instead of conversing, liking instead of listening, posting instead of participating, submitting video instead of showing up.

And our disconnection is being weaponized by the dumbest people on the planet—Donny “Cheeto” Shitpants and his Kleptocracy Krëw. That’s how bad things have gotten. We’re being overthrown by clowns with fourth-grade reading levels and zero shame, and they’re pulling it off with ease. That should piss you off so much you want to throw your iPhone into the river. It sure as hell should make you lose sleep over why you didn’t delete your Facebook account years ago.

Disconnection creates a vacuum. And people with agendas will always rush in to fill it. When we don’t talk to each other, we stop trusting each other. When we stop trusting each other, we stop trusting anything —ballots, elections, basic facts. And when we lose trust, democracy doesn’t just wobble. It collapses.

We’re not going to fix this with an app. And for fucks sake, not another shiny new platform built by the same guys who broke the last one—Digg that mofos. We don’t need another campaign to raise “awareness.” We’re all drowning in Sarah McLachlan’s lyrics. We’re choking on think pieces and branded empathy. None of it matters if we’re still refusing to show up for each other in real life.

We’ve trained ourselves out of discomfort. We’ve made being a human optional. Everything’s curated now—our photos, our opinions, our connections. We’ve optimized ourselves into isolation. Actual connection? Feels like friction. And no one has the stamina for friction anymore. Hashtag friction. Hashtag resilience.

And it’s not like we haven’t been warned. Join or Die made it painfully clear: the less we engage, the faster everything falls apart. Not just politically—socially, psychologically, structurally.

I’m not saying this from the outside. I’ve been just as complicit. I’ve stayed quiet when I should’ve spoken. I’ve convinced myself a heart emoji counted as an actual response. I’ve kept things surface to multitask. And every time I’ve done that, I’ve made it easier for this shit to keep going.

If democracy is built on trust, and trust is built on relationship, then the collapse we’re living through isn’t just political—it’s personal. It’s relational. And it’s happening because we let disconnection become default.

We stopped talking to each other. We stopped listening. We stopped showing up. And now we’re shocked that nothing holds. Real human connection is more than a soft skill. It’s the foundation of the type of society we proclaim to want and support.