Long overdue reforms to a Dickensian legal system. Pending hikes in health insurance premiums. A potentially seismic shift in Bermuda’s energy policy. There’s been a flurry of genuinely important developments on the political front in recent days.

But did any of these issues actually get the Island’s chattering classes chattering, tweeting and blogging?

Hardly. Instead, a profoundly and maliciously stupid meme inexplicably recirculated on social media by the One Bermuda Alliance and an equally vicious, ripped-out-of-context photograph of the Premier disseminated by Opposition supporters had the Island’s commentariat abuzz all weekend.

Both the photo used in the offensively captioned meme and the image of the Premier were taken at last week’s Bras For A Cause rally at the Cabinet Office.

Both attempted to score the cheapest imaginable political points by exploiting a hugely sensitive women’s health issue.

Both were deliberately and knowingly used as accelerants by social media’s answer to firebugs to start online wildfires which later spread to the traditional media.

The sheer crassness of these duelling images makes it difficult to determine if the party propagandists have become completely desensitised to the increasingly idiotic nature of the material they traffic in, or if they have concluded voters have become completely desensitised to being treated like idiots.

While neither option is particularly savoury, one or the other must be correct.

Equally incontestable is the fact that when it comes to the race to the bottom in terms of bad taste and poor judgment in the public relations arena, it’s now a neck-and-neck affair between Bermuda’s two parties.

Increasingly toxic Caps-Lock rants, highly developed senses of grievance and a take-no-prisoners approach to all those who do not rigidly toe one or other party line are becoming the unpleasant hallmarks of their propagandising and fear-mongering.

Routinely caricaturing and demonising political opponents and lampooning their positions simply serves to reinforce existing biases while lowering the political discourse to the level of cruel and childish ridicule.

Focusing so intently on grotesque distortions and cartoonish oversimplifications, such tactics invariably exaggerate some salient features of the real personalities and issues to hand while minimising — or entirely eliminating — a whole range of others.

By choosing to fight their battles with spin and image rather than substance and reality, the public is hardly well served by its political parties and their tacticians — and it certainly isn’t left better informed.

But while it’s tempting to level all the blame for the coarsening of what now passes for public debate in Bermuda on the politicians and their propagandists, the buck does not actually stop with them.

“We citizens need to look inward a little,” said New York Times contributor Arthur C Brooks this week in a commentary titled The Thrill Of Political Hating.

“Whether or not we want to admit it, political hate is a demand-driven phenomenon. We are the ones creating a big market for it [in an age when the internet] has scaled up our ability to express political hate with astonishing efficiency …”

Indeed, we were the ones who reached for our virtual pitchforks and joined the online lynch mobs at the weekend.

We are the ones who overreacted to images that were, in terms of sophistication and critical acuity, the digital equivalent of graffiti scrawled on the wall of a high school locker room.

At a time when we should be concentrating on sustaining Bermuda’s fundamental infrastructure needs while meeting the budget’s increasing stretched bottom line, we are the ones who are allowing our politicians to repeatedly trivialise and sideline the matters we should be discussing.

Political discourse as it once existed in Bermuda has given way to fixed positions, mutual antipathy and an excess of shrill rhetoric.

Two polarised and intractable monologues do not actually make for dialogue — frankly, such bellowing is the political equivalent to drunken barroom blather. And only about as edifying.

Arthur Brooks urged his readers to “declare your independence by not consuming, celebrating or sharing the overheated outrage and negative punditry — even if it comes from those with whom you agree”.

“Avoid indulging in snarky, contemptuous dismissals of [those] on the other side. And always own up to your views.”

This is sage advice we would all do well to follow if we ever hope to turn down the booming background noise of Bermuda’s political squabbling a few notches.

On the other hand, as Mr Brooks concluded, if you disagree please feel free to leave a comment — even if it is under one of the assumed noms de guerre used by the paid trolls who profit by fomenting political polarisation and gridlock both online and off.