Bermudian politics once held the anticipatory suspense of an empty stage at curtain time along with the unlimited promise of freeing the Island from the heavy burden of its past.

In the 1960s and ’70s Parliament went from being a rubber-stamp for decisions already arrived at in the Men’s Bar of the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club to being an agent of accelerated and meaningful change. The Island’s political leadership stewarded Bermuda through a period of such rapid and profound social and economic transformation that what took place during those decades amounted to a largely peaceful cultural revolution.

Politicians were attuned to the need for change and reacted rapidly to issues and events. There was little lag-time between the proposal and execution of long-overdue reforms. While there were clear differences between them both in terms of style and substance, the then Government and Opposition — the United Bermuda Party and the Progressive Labour Party — were, by and large, pursuing the same ends by somewhat different means.

Bermuda discarded its traditional political structure, based on the supremacy of oligarchic interests and sometimes autocratic principles, and replaced it with the modern political doctrine of rule grounded only on popular consent.

But perhaps Bermuda succeeded too well. We have now caught up with the outside world to the extent the Island’s political landscape has increasingly come to resemble a pocket version of the increasingly degraded and corrupted American political culture.

The romantic sense of the possible which used to be the animating principle of most Bermudian politicians has, in all too many cases, been replaced by the monstrous sense of entitlement so very evident among today’s cadre of professional politicians. Riven by hyper-partisanship, incessant propagandising and increasingly outlandish personal attacks, contemporary Bermudian politics has become as sterile and forlorn an arena as any imaginable.

Minor issues (and complete non-issues) are enormously magnified thanks to the power and reach of social media. Enormously consequential matters — the Government debt, the social consequences of long-term unemployment, the flatlining economy — are either responded to with superficial generalities or simply ignored.

Experience, judgement, discretion, prudence, reflection — the raw material of good policy and good politics which, as someone said, need to be repeatedly hammered “on the anvils of the mind” are too often conspicuous by their complete absence from the current disorderly scene.

The non-stop barrage of jeering, heckling and demonisation largely drowns out the rational voices which can still be heard on both sides of the Island’s political divide; the lowest-common denominator grandstanding ensures those most capable of contributing to Bermuda’s civic life are increasingly less likely to do so given the extremely short shrift measured debate and thoughtful compromise receive from the more zealous boosters of one political party or another.

With only the most cosmetic differences in ideology separating the two parties, personality- and narrative-driven driven politics have increasingly filled the void. And the results are all too predictable.

Melodrama has much to recommend it — if you are scripting a soap opera. But it is of extremely limited utility as a tool for political problem-solving. And in a complex and sophisticated jurisdiction like Bermuda, boasting a population of a small North American town but shouldering some of the responsibilities of a much larger country, politics cannot afford to be reduced to a series of duelling narratives and counter-narratives featuring larger-than-life heroes, hissable villains and plot points which can be neatly resolved, supposedly, before the next commercial break. Or election.

But the chief drawback with attempting to straitjacket the dynamics of politics within static, agreed-upon narratives expressly designed to play on the emotions, prejudices and fears of voters is that it reduces people on the other side to caricatures. Instead of being independent actors or thoughtful participants, they immediately become the antagonists in a struggle we know our designated heroes will ultimately win because, after all, they’re our heroes.

If you assume there must be some way for your preferred good guys to, say, slash Government spending to 1980 levels without seriously disrupting public services or to grow the economy without growing the population, then of course, these soap operatics are perfectly acceptable. But if you acknowledge the possibility such goals might not actually be possible in a representative democracy, one in which there are actually far more thoughtful, independent-minded voters and concerned special interest groups than party faithful, then you immediately risk being tarred as an obstructionist, a naysayer and a doubter.

The politics of smear actually do as much to besmirch the credibility of those doing the smearing as the intended targets. You enhance your bona fides and, ultimately, your electability by advancing smarter arguments, staking out more credible positions and crafting sounder policies than your opponents, not by rolling up your pant legs and wading into the gutter for some no-holds-barred brawling with them in the traditional and new media.

And the recent emergence of paid social media propagandists in Bermuda who are entirely reliant on such tactics has only served to further coarsen the Island’s political discourse. Another unwanted import from the North American scene, a Canadian political scientist recently said of these online shock troops: “They are like trolls, in the sense that they are not interested in engaging in discussion with the other commentators … The net effect is just to flood the comments on (websites) with junk and to sidetrack serious discussion. This dramatically diminishes the value of the internet as a tool for political discussion and debate. Bad talk drives out good, and so the only people left on the site are those who are too naive to realise that they’re arguing with paid political hacks.”

As the great moral philosopher Henry David Thoreau observed, there’s nothing at all wrong with building your castles in the clouds as long as the foundations for them are firmly put in place on earth. And it is the special duty of legislators to pursue lofty ambitions, to try and realise impossible dreams.

Certainly the revolution which got underway here in the ‘60s and which culminated in the unprecedented prosperity and social stability Bermuda enjoyed in the 1990s and early 21st century would seem to bear this out.

It would mark a welcome return to form if our politicians once again raised their sights and began to pursue objectives of more long-term consequence than simply winning the next election. If they were to do so, they would inevitably raise their standards as well.