OPINION: For the life of me, I can't see what's wrong with our prime minister – or any prime minister, for that matter – featuring in magazine spreads. But it clearly irritates some critics of Jacinda Ardern, much as it did a fraction of Labour supporters when John Key was the subject.

So while I have studiously avoided the debate thus far over the #TurnArdern campaign – whereby diehard Nats flipped magazines, or at least claimed to, in newsagents over the Christmas holidays – I was no more than faintly bemused by the whole exercise. In any event, it's about as gentle as civic protests get.

The online reaction to the effort, however, was something else altogether: vitriolic, disproportionate and counterproductive. Particularly loathsome were attempts to demonise the instigator of the campaign, by revealing his hitherto concealed identity, exposing his address and phone number, belittling his occupation and trawling his social media history to attack him as, among other things, "racist", "sexist", "misogynistic" and "transphobic".

Philippa Duffy/UBS Otago Michelle Duff's biography of Jacinda Ardern turned back-to-front in the University Book Shop Otago.

This is not to defend the tweets he sent, let alone endorse the political worldview they expose – in fact, I reject it outright. But the performative nastiness of the counter-campaign – directed not just against the instigator, but anyone who dared support him – starkly underscores a crisis in our political discourse, Left and Right.

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No doubt Ardern's inner circle would have preferred it if #TurnArdern had simply run out of puff over the course of a couple of news cycles. But strategically wise silence is hard to pull off in the age of social media, with its perverse and damaging incentives. Instead, the PM's self-appointed cheerleaders took rapaciously to Twitter, drumming up likes and retweets by dialling the spiteful rhetoric to eleventy-stupid.

123rf Partisan bickering on social media drives the political news cycle. But it alienates the wider public.

"In an era of data overload and short attention spans," New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani writes in a superb decade's-end wrap-up, "it's not the most reliable, trustworthy material that goes viral – it's the loudest voices, the angriest, most outrageous posts that get clicked and shared." (On the upside, the sheer ugliness of #TurnArdern inspired me to undertake a Christmas detox from social media, something I'd recommend to everyone from time to time).

Given the season, I briefly wondered whether these Twitter "activists" carry over their favoured modus operandi of "dismiss, demean and disparage" to face-to-face interactions. But of course they don't – unless they want to be shunned from any future Christmas get-togethers. Conversations have few places to go when you scream "transphobic" at your 80-year-old in-laws.

In real life, we simply don't treat others that way, not only to avoid offence, but also because we know in our personal and family lives that people are not the sum of their most objectionable views. When I came out as gay in the 90s, it was my godmother, a fairly doctrinaire Catholic, who was first to call me, offering her love.

British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn reflects on his party's election loss last month.

You might be asking, why should we even care about the histrionics of a tiny cabal of swivel-eyed keyboard warriors? The truth is we can't afford to look away. While it's the case that most people have better things to do than engage in partisan online bickering, we shouldn't ignore the outsized role social media plays in setting the tone of the discourse.

Increasingly, it drives the news cycle – and most politicians can barely take their eyes off Twitter for long enough to Google themselves. Most worryingly of all, this all serves to inspire cynicism, apathy, even disgust, among the wider public – conditions that always, always, serve the cause of the regressive politics.

Much has been written, including by me, about the troubling rise of populist Right-wing and nationalist sentiment across the West. Reactionaries are emboldened like never before, in my lifetime at least. Who knows whether the clamour they generate is the death rattle of a beleaguered elite or the roaring engines of a new and enduring conservatism? Certainly, I don't; my once-sharpish political instincts are scrambled beyond recognition.

ROSS GIBLIN/STUFF Phil Quin: "Casting our adversaries as stupid bigots strikes me as obviously misguided."

But, on the Left, casting our adversaries as stupid bigots strikes me as obviously misguided. Likewise, our tendency to lord it over others with a hyper-abundance of certainty in our superior virtue is obnoxious; our refusal to contemplate the possibility of good faith among those with whom we disagree, alienating. Liberal condescension, paired with an unforgiving approach to ideological purity, risks sending perfectly well-meaning people into the arms of our adversaries or to retreat from politics altogether.

The recently shellacked Jeremy Corbyn offered himself as a case-study in Left-wing hubris when he recently claimed Boris Johnson may have won the British election, but Labour "won the argument". In one soundbite, he managed to convey staggering arrogance, self-delusion, insufferable smugness and, ultimately, defeatism. It's a recipe for electoral irrelevance that too many seem eager to replicate.