<p>This article analyzes the work of Portuguese writer, politician, and political theorist Bruno Maçães, who points us to something many observers miss in their analyses of political polarization or what is sometimes called the “epistemological crisis.” For Maçães, these problems are downstream from the emergent colonization of the real world by the virtual one. In response, he proposes a new philosophy, Virtualism. By escaping to imaginatively designed, limitless, virtual worlds like the Metaverse, Maçães suggests individuals may live out their ideological fantasies online and return to the real world without imposing their version of the truth on fellow citizens. In order to better appreciate this claim, we compare Maçães to James Madison, who understood faction as central to political life and proposed the extended republic to mitigate this challenge. While the extended republic and Virtualism have parallels, Maçães’s analysis insufficiently grapples with fundamental questions of sovereignty, which we argue is a failure on his part to think constitutionally. The paper concludes with a call for technologists and political scientists, or constitutionalists, to engage in more serious and concerted dialogue with one another. Without this interchange, constitutionalists will remain ignorant to the formidable effects of today’s technologies including emergent virtualism, and technologists will be oblivious to intractable political realities, thereby leaving remedies to present polarization elusive.</p>