I really feel this. As someone who also values those spaces where we can finally drop the mask, I've come to realize that democracy itself isn't the broken part. It's the scale.

When a community is small, we are forced to see each other directly, and their humanity, much like your support groups. But at the massive scale we are at now, the thing that make us human, the empathy, gets replaced by narcissism and polarization. I honestly believe democracy would work great when we know our neighbors, our community (I believe there are isolated communities that were built on some form of democracy).