It’s a time of searing political attacks, angry partisan passions and fevered conspiracy theories.

It’s a time of sometimes unrestrained hysteria and outbreaks of what can only be described as galloping paranoia.

It’s a time when politicians, their propagandists and surrogates will routinely move to a war footing against one another over any issue, no matter how trivial, tangential or entirely irrelevant to the public interest, if they believe it will secure them even the most minor electoral advantage.

Those few broad brushstrokes are probably sufficient to capture the increasingly frenzied nature of the American political scene as the presidential election nears.

But elements of the same cartoonish and tabloid-y approach to politics are also in evidence much closer to home.

Retail politics in Bermuda seem to be increasingly predicated on selling voters a similar kind of nightmare vision of a society perched on the edge of chaos and dissolution.

A number of political figures from both ends of the spectrum now appear intent on persuading Bermudians that if they don’t cast their ballots a certain way, they’re fated to swap an earthly paradise for a mid-Atlantic hellscape.

The situation would be laughable if it wasn’t so truly sad — and so very distracting.

Bermuda, of course, is the most politically over-represented jurisdiction in the world, with 36 elected parliamentarians and another 11 appointed Senate members representing just 60,000 or so people.

And too many of the idle hands who populate our political landscape often find it easier to fill their time not with work but in producing empty, often poisonous rhetoric. Increasingly that rhetoric seems expressly intended to divide and demoralise the rest of us while keeping those doing the finger-pointing best placed to remain in office and on the public payroll.

Their language is calibrated to instil fear without offering any solutions. It’s intended to demonise and debase their political opponents without actually doing much in the way of shoring up their own bona fides.

In essence those shouting the loudest are urging the electorate to vote resoundingly against another party they depict as a harbinger of doom without bothering to tell Bermudians in much detail what they will be voting for instead.

It amounts to divide and rule, Bermudian style: an endless campaign to polarise voters and the community on the basis of race and class and sometimes cultural or religious affiliation with a bemused, Devil-take-the-hindmost disregard for the consequences — consequences which should be of increasing relevance and concern to every single Bermuda resident.

For the reality is with so much rancour and energy being directed into what amounts to permanent campaigning, very little constructive action is being taken to avoid what could be even the gravest of those consequences.

It’s not that we are lacking in sufficient knowledge of the tasks to hand. It’s not that we are wanting when it comes to either the quality or sheer quantity of the data available to us.

After all we have at our disposal an entire library of documents ranging from the encyclopaedic final report of the Spending & Government Efficiency (Sage) commission to a slew of other official and unofficial analyses detailing Bermuda’s economic and social conditions and highlighting key areas concern.

And it’s certainly not that we have a complete dearth of competent leaders: there are vigorous, forward-looking and well informed figures still to be found in the ranks of both political parties.

In addition cool-headed, even-handed veterans of the political fray, including former Premiers John Swan and Alex Scott and One Bermuda Alliance founding father John Barritt, routinely offer pragmatic suggestions for how best to move the island out of its current post-recessionary doldrums.

Yet too often in recent times successive governments have preferred to talk around a mounting and increasingly unsustainable debt, a civil service which has grown beyond both our needs and our ability to pay for and a patchwork immigration policy which runs counter to our obligations to long-term residents as well as to Bermuda’s economic interests.

In some instances, though, it’s hard to blame legislators who do have an eye on the likely future ramifications of present-day concerns for sometimes opting to sit on their hands.

For example, although abruptly and clumsily introduced, the Pathways to Status initiative did attempt to rationalise at least some aspects of the vexed immigration issue.

But the very existence of the bill created a fever-pitch atmosphere of community hysteria and widespread civil disturbances. That situation stemmed, in large measure, from the superheated rhetoric of critics of the legislation who offered few logical analyses of the proposal let alone any practical alternatives.

Going forward it can never be sufficient to just oppose and attempt to shout down any given course of action; coherent counter-proposals must be advanced as well because the clock is not on our side. Obstructionism and ongoing paralysis are simply not viable options given the magnitude of some of the challenges confronting Bermuda.

A great statesman once said “the unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong — these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history”. They are also features, he might have added, which have repeatedly sounded the death-knells of societies down through history.

We can no longer tolerate having the divisiveness, chauvinism and hyper-partisanship which has always existed at the fringes of public life here risk becoming the new centre of political gravity in Bermuda.

For reasons of perceived political advantage, some of our elected officials may choose to inhabit the nightmarish tabloid versions of Bermuda they invoke in their speeches and other public pronouncements. Bermudians as a whole now have to make clear we’d rather they didn’t drag the rest of us into those overwrought fever-dreams with them.