I think it may come from the opposite of feeling safe. Losing a political dispute doesn't matter because the people actually in power don't give half a shit about what that (at best) 5% of the population who can understand a reasoned argument thinks. Arguing esp. online gives intellectuals an illusion of voice/power. Someone asks "Should we legalize drugs?" on Reddit and ten thousand people jump in the debate. But "we" have almost no say in whether drugs will ever get legalized or not. It is an illusion, it is a pretend-play at being democratic, a Toy Parliament. It is the people in power who decide and "we" have far less power to influence the public opinion than they do. Even if the public opinion is against it, that does not matter too much. In most countries we have either two large parties or two large coalition of smaller parties. Maybe three or four coalitions at best. What the public can do is to choose one over the other. They game is rigged so that newcomer parties have not much chance, it is established elites. So if they all agree they will legalize or not legalize drugs, they will not lose votes relative to each other. And even if they don't all agree e.g. in the UK Greens would legalize and others not, voting is a package deal anyway, every voter must decide to buy the whole package of Greens, economic policy, immigration policy, everything, so one or two issue does not matter so much.

So the main reason it does not matter is that we are more or less powerless. It is playing at a Toy Parliament, pretending to be a force to be reckoned with in a Toy Democracy.

Nota bene, I am not even that much bitter about it, even though it may sound like so. I am probably fucked in the mind enough to not find monarchy or aristocracy automatically bad systems, and this kind of "democracy" is more or less a somewhat competitive aristocracy. The same kind of people are always in power, but the people get to choose if a given group of elites are in power say 30% of the time or 70% of the time. This is not necessarily a horrible system, arguably Rome worked on a worse ones for long.