I can certainly relate to the issue Umair is talking about, living in the USA, watching my own country - the UK - head along a similar trajectory. I think about this in terms of social capital - "the networks of relationships among people who live and work in a particular society, enabling that society to function effectively". Now, we need social capital to form resilient societies, just like we need natural capital and economic capital (actually, to be honest, expressing all these these concepts as if there's some kind of simple exchange rate among them makes me queezy, but that's a different essay), so there's an imperative to connect with one another. In a utopia, where everyone's good, social capital increases as the connectedness of society increases, and the imperative is unproblematic. But, we don't live in a utopia (no sh*t Sherlock...). When there are bad actors among us two problems arise in building social capital. First, connecting with malevolent individuals actually reduces social capital at an individual and collective level. Secondly, those malevolent actors can exploit our connectedness for their own purposes. There is a parallel between this social dilemma and the financial fragility that comes from connecting all the different types of bank together. And, on top of this undermining of the value of social capital, we are living through the consequences of a global pandemic which has itself imposed a disorientating series of choices on us. To achieve the collectively good thing, we have been required to reduce our social interactions, just when we need some social capital more than ever. Some might be tempted to say that, online tools and social media mean that we're more connected than we've ever been, so the problem can't be that our social capital account is overdrawn. I think the problem is, though, that it's not connections per se that generate social capital, it's bonds. We're more connected than we've ever been, but less bonded to one another. This is where the concept relates to what Umair is saying. The message that Trump and Johnson send out is that selfishness is acceptable, connections with other people are transactions not bonds - they echo Thatcher's infamous claim that there's no such thing as society. Worse, they send a very real, tangible, warning to us all that society - real, necessary, nurturing collective good that it is - contains some truly scary, nasty people; and bad things happen when they have power. Frozen? Yes. Yes, of course we are. The very collective processes that we would use to deal with the problems that we face have been high-jacked. No wonder so many people want nothing to do with politics.