What a strange, unsettling, anxious moment this is. I mean that partly in the sense of vote, but also of the emotions that are still raw after the death of Jo Cox, and what the last month or so has highlighted about the state of what we must still call the United Kingdom. Many people knew the rough story, of course: of a country cleaved by rising inequality, prone to great outbursts of anger and frustration, and now in the midst of its own version of US-style culture wars – a picture, in fact, that now applies to much of Europe, and is coming into even sharper focus in America itself. But if the build-up to the referendum has told us anything, it is that all this has reached a disturbing peak.

On Tuesday I was in Northampton’s market square, and finding leave voters was a cinch. One or two, just to make this clear, were plain racist, but the majority were not: they talked about immigration, but in the context of jobs, housing and all the rest. An hour later I was on a London tube train sprinkled with successful-looking professionals, a few of whom had “Stronger in” stickers on their Herschel rucksacks and laptop bags. They would presumably echo the views of leave voters that a young woman about to go to university had expressed in Northampton. She talked about their supposed view of immigrants: “They think they’re stealing our jobs … bringing in crime and terrorism. It’s just nonsense.”

Two nations, in short, are staring at each other across a political chasm. To make things worse, while the rightwing press have been up to their usual disgraceful tricks, the parts of the media that might offer a counterbalance have mostly failed to understand that it is the restive mood of millions of people – not David Cameron or Jeremy Corbyn, or the late entry into the debate of David Beckham – that is the referendum’s main story. In the last week or so, this problem has turned nuclear: the awful events in Birstall have made “hate” a ubiquitous trope, and the prospect of any real understanding of the national mood has receded even further.

Broadcast journalism has a lot to answer for here. Far too much political coverage has only one way of framing its subject: riding the battlebuses, fixating on the polls, and being so obsessed with each side’s supposed figureheads that the whole thing starts to look like gladiatorial sport (witness Tuesday’s utterly absurd debate in that well-known home of meaningful discourse, Wembley Arena). In turn, in the wider world, that feeds into a tendency to conflate parties and campaigns with the people who vote for them. The result: people who want out are perceived as being made from the same stuff as the nastier elements of the leave campaign, endlessly ready to be “whipped up” into a steaming rage, and therefore worthy of the same mixture of bafflement and contempt.

This then blurs out into the online voices that these days act as the media’s outer ring. On Twitter last weekend I had a brief exchange with someone who said that Nigel Farage’s unbelievably ugly “Breaking point” poster stunt amounted to “mass hysteria”, to which there was only one reply. No, it was just one man standing in front of a poster. The reality of the coalition of people voting leave is much more complex and confounding – “hysteria” is the kind of word that speaks of a huge set of misunderstandings.

But these misapprehensions run deep, not least on the political left. Even those who understand that something seismic is afoot among predominantly working-class voters are still too keen on the idea that they are gullible enough to be led over a cliff by people with whom they would actually disagree, if only they knew the facts. But most people are not really being “led” by anyone. In my experience, Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove et al are viewed by most people with as much cynicism as the people fronting the remain campaign. Moreover, this argument is dangerously redolent of that lousy old Marxist trope of “false consciousness”, whereby people enthusiastically following the supposedly wrong cause are only a speech or poster away from enlightenment, and a sharp left turn.

We need to face up to two things. First, a lot of people want out of the EU because they are worried and angry about the consequences of the free movement of people, and in that sense they have made their choice rationally. Second, even if Farage, Johnson and Gove would doubtless use Brexit as an opportunity to further our journey towards an essentially sink-or-swim society, there are plenty of working-class voters who would probably go along with that.

I don’t write either of those things with any relish – I’m a remain voter who loathes modern Conservatism. But if my side of politics is even going to begin to revive itself, bracing thoughts like those are surely going to be obligatory.

Labour lost Scotland over the last decade, thanks partly to the very same mess of inequality, voicelessness, professionalised politics and dysfunctional economics that is now tearing England and Wales in two (or even three, or four). Thanks to a nationalism that was social-democratic and civic, politics was aligned in a generally progressive direction. The Scots’ political reformation underlined the sense that neoliberalism doesn’t work.

But what is now happening elsewhere in the UK underlines a tangle of other stuff – to do with culture, belonging and community – that is going to require a completely different level of response.

Even if the remain side wins, it will not say anything much about the essential condition of the country, aside from underlining how divided we are. So please: in that event, no crowing about a resounding triumph, or delusional thinking about a country miraculously restored by the weekend to a state of political harmony. We are in a terrible mess, and it is probably going to take decades to even begin to put things right.