And so one of the longest running dramas in British political history reaches yet another act. Some of the cast are locked into much the same roles as ever: Gina Miller is once again striding off to the courts; the great urban remain armies are turning out with their homemade placards, while the People’s Vote campaign sends out emails signed by Michael Heseltine; front-rank Tory politicians are apparently prepared to trade in whatever faint principles they once claimed to hold dear, in the hope of holding their party together, whatever the price.

Other characters seem to be changing. Jeremy Corbyn and his aides may have belatedly discovered the art of reaching out to people beyond their inner circle. Militant Labourites who have mostly affected indifference about Brexit and told us that parliament was a rat’s nest of ruling class interests stuffed full of centrists are suddenly barging their way to the front, suddenly convinced that the traditions of representative democracy might actually be worth defending.

The idea that senior politicians break the rules and do whatever they want is, to use a modern phrase, priced in

That this is a moment of huge importance and Boris Johnson’s suspension of parliament is outrageous are beyond doubt. But in the resulting noise about an alleged coup and the need to take to the streets, too much of the country remains uninterested, and plenty of other people have concluded that Johnson has done the right thing. Listen to the voices my Guardian colleague Ben Quinn heard this week in the Brexit-supporting constituency of Thurrock: “I’ll tell you what’s undemocratic: not finally delivering on what the people voted for back in 2016 … the MPs need to deliver what the people voted for, and if he thinks that he can do it this way then people are not really going to care.” On Friday, I had a conversation with a leave-voting friend who said that both sides of the Brexit argument had long since tumbled into farce and perhaps the referendum should never have happened, but he seemed prepared to give the prime minister the benefit of the doubt. “At least he’s getting stuff done,” he said. “That’s the thing.”

These are the people at the centre of Johnson’s thoughts – and for him, trampling over some of the most basic tenets of democracy comes easy. To believe in the sanctity of parliament and understand the dangers of the current moment involves a certain mixture of humility, deference and aversion to danger – precisely the qualities that Eton, Oxford and an apparently deep belief in his own brilliance and the idea of politics as a mere game were always going to rule out. David Cameron had some of the same stuff, exemplified by his “Flashman” persona and the idiotic decision to call the 2016 referendum in the first place. But Johnson is something else again. Encouraged by his close adviser, Dominic Cummings (who seems to me not so much the genius of Tory imaginings, but someone who has cottoned on to the fact that if the modern political right is to win, it has to be utterly reckless), he has seemingly decided not just that Brexit must happen at the end of October, but that what he does between now and the conclusion of a general election will be based on the supposed division between “the people” and parliament, with the latter portrayed as the acme of all the liberal arrogance that Brexiteers have projected on to remain supporters.

It says something about the decay of our most basic democratic institutions that the House of Commons presents such an easy target. If we have had any recent national conversation about the state of our democracy, by far the loudest voices have been those dismal provocateurs concentrated in the rightwing press, who would have you believe that MPs are corrupt, entitled people who should be paid as little as possible. For these people, Brexit was a gift: a chance to take the supposed division to its logical conclusion, while performing a classic act of bullying: giving a body of people an impossible job, and then raging at them for their inability to do it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The only coherent vision of the future of power and politics is currently being offered by irresponsible chancers whose chief concern is their own survival.’ Photograph: Rui Vieira/AP

But there is also something deeper at play. For all that it remains the best model of government and politics human beings have yet come up with, in the 21st century, representative democracy is a very tough sell. When people spend half their lives online and can experience at least the sensation of agency and instant gratification, the idea that we elect MPs to exercise their own judgment and then eventually submit their record for approval or rejection can easily seem woefully old-fashioned. I have lost count of the number of people I have met over the last few years who have angrily told me that the function of the Commons was to simply “do our bidding”.

In a recent YouGov poll, 63% of respondents agreed that MPs must “act according to the wishes of their constituents, even when this goes against their own judgment”, a figure that reached 78% among leave voters and – at which point Edmund Burke spins in his grave – 81% of Tory supporters. It is no accident that, like so many populist forces, Nigel Farage’s Brexit party claims to be in favour of direct democracy. Whatever its dangers, it is an idea that may be perfectly suited to a future of easy and instant everything, and the clarion call Amazon now suggests its customers ask their digital assistants: “Alexa, where’s my stuff?”

And so to something even more insidious. It is right to rage at a prime minister behaving arbitrarily and unaccountably, but also worth noting that there are plenty of other recent examples. It is less than 20 years since the UK was taken to war on the basis of a set of lies, which is one of the reasons why the central presence in the People’s Vote campaign of Tony Blair and some his former aides and allies is so damaging. If you want to experience power without constraint as a daily experience, try being a benefit claimant. Given the broken state of most local government, moreover, most people inevitably understand power as something located in distant, unreachable places.

As a result, the idea that senior politicians break the rules and do whatever they want is, to use a modern phrase, priced in; what makes the difference between winning and losing is the stories they weave into their manoeuvres, which is Johnson’s basic calculation.

These things threaten to further the development of a turbulent, volatile, almost amoral politics. If we are going to stand any chance of averting such disasters, we will have to not just make the case for representative government, but rebuild and reform the local, regional and national institutions of our democracy, a task every bit as urgent as the need to make the UK more economically equal, and one that the political left has so far not paid nearly enough attention to.

Parliament had failed on Brexit long before this prorogation | Vernon Bogdanor Read more

In contrast to the forces on the other side who are currently running rampant, so far, we have neither the ideas nor the language to even start – so, in the meantime, politics is going to carry on channelling awful division and opening up profound dangers. To paraphrase the 20th-century communist Antonio Gramsci, it is not so much that the old world is dying and the new cannot be born: it is that the only vivid and coherent vision of the future of power and politics on offer is currently being offered by irresponsible chancers, whose chief concern is not the ghouls they are letting loose, but their own survival.

Their opportunity lies in the chasm between this week’s protests and the millions of people who either avert their eyes or see them as so much liberal, remainer nonsense; it is also our side’s greatest challenge, whose urgency, even now, has yet to sink in.

• John Harris is a Guardian columnist