Last Sunday, I went to a Brexit party rally in Frimley, Surrey. The venue was the Lakeside Hotel and Country Club complex, well known as the setting for international darts contests. Inside, 1,200 or so people had gathered to hear Nigel Farage and most of the party’s other would-be MEPs for the south-east region. The atmosphere was roughly as I had expected: highly charged, defiant, often strangely celebratory. But what was most striking was the slickness of the presentation: brisk, elegantly structured speeches and warm-up videos, and the clear sense that everyone had been told to lay off subjects that usually buzz around Farage – immigration, chiefly. Instead, they doubled down on the twin themes of Brexit being denied and delayed, and what that says about the people and institutions in charge of the country.

The first speaker was one Robert Rowland, a candidate with the face, haircut and stiff demeanour of a freshly bought Action Man. “If Brexit fails, we cease even to be a democracy,” he said. “The duplicitous professional political class will have prevailed. The last three years have seen Britain’s establishment – the civil servants, the majority of MPs from both parties, academia, the judiciary, and of course let’s not forget the BBC” – at this point, there were loud boos – “do their damnedest to delay, defuse and dilute Brexit. Parliament has abolished the referendum and declared war on the British people … There might not be tanks on the streets, but make no mistake: this is a coup against democracy.”

Farage’s greatest asset is a discourse full of crude binaries, deepened by the hardcore postures struck by Theresa May

Forty minutes later came a candidate called Matt Taylor. “Our democracy is young and we still have to fight for it,” he told the crowd. “Now, they call it representative democracy. And representative democracy means that the representatives can do what they like. I say, no, that’s not democracy. In a democracy, the people are the power.” Soon after, Farage appeared, grinning from ear to ear and bellowing out his super-charged version of the same messages. The chant that greeted him suggested that if some English people have embraced the politics of wild claims and demagoguery, it at least comes with a certain bathos: “Nigel! Nigel! Nigel!”

Not, of course, that anyone should be laughing. There is something very sobering indeed about watching a handful of chancers lay in to the fragile mesh of institutions and ideas that underpin our democracy, and a head-spinning quality in the fact that they do so in the name of democracy itself. It has echoes not just of the current darkness that defines the US and much of mainland Europe, but things that go much further back. Among the many things proved by the history of the 20th century is that once such opinions gain momentum – and fuse with claims of national humiliation and betrayal, another cliche much in evidence at the rally – it rarely ends well, to say the least.

Yet here we are. Handed yet another opportunity by a Conservative party whose collective stupidity has long since reached the point of surrealism, Farage’s greatest asset is a discourse full of crude binaries, established by the original referendum and then deepened by the hardcore postures struck by Theresa May in its aftermath (the main reason, incidentally, why she deserves her fate). Via her moronic insistence that “no deal is better than a bad deal”, leave v remain has led inexorably on to the idea that the only meaningful choice is between total capitulation and leaving without a deal, and that unless we do the latter, democracy will be over and public rage will be unstoppable. This lunatic proposition is at the heart of the Tories’ current contortions: whoever takes over from Theresa May will either embrace it, or have a hell of a job fighting it off.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘As he tries to terrify the ruling party into doing his bidding, Farage has discipline, media nous and the clearest of messages.’ Photograph: Kirsty O’Connor/PA

At which point, a reality check. Clearly, however much noise it creates, support for the Brexit party and its agenda remains a minority taste. As I wrote last week, the results of the recent local elections highlighted the fact that large swathes of England are unstoppably moving in the opposite direction. Contrary to some of the overheated stuff one hears from the media, both here and abroad, most of the country is not in a state of wound-up fury, nor baying for the economy to be pushed off the proverbial cliff. Even if we now have a politics that produces remarkable surges every 18 months or so (from the initial rise of Ukip to the summer of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn”) these things sooner or later collide with reality.

But that does not mean Britain is not in the midst of a deeply dangerous moment. Two days after my Frimley experience, I went to Manchester, to report on another rally (or rather “rally”), this one held by the anti-Brexit party Change UK – or, to give them their full name, “Change UK The Independent Group”. It was held in a modestly dimensioned room in the city’s technology centre, attended by no more than 60 people, and addressed by just about all the party’s leading figures, including Chuka Umunna and Anna Soubry. On Brexit, they had arguments that sounded both passionate and convincing. They also had a video presentation that didn’t work, so some of the speakers were given the backdrop of either a PC desktop or the Google homepage.

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Four miles down the road in the bustling neighbourhood of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, just about everyone I met had voted remain, but responded to questions about Brexit with a sighing fatalism. “I’ve stopped following it,” said one woman; “I try not to pay too much attention,” offered another. Mention of Change UK drew a series of blanks, and people said they were voting for the Greens, Liberal Democrats and Labour. But they did so without any sense of urgency or passion: whereas Farage’s messages have flowed, molten hot, out of social media and big events into the national conversation, here there was a sense of the righteous paroxysms of so-called ultra-remainers as something from another world.

The Brexit fight, in other words, is arguably more imbalanced than it has ever been, even as calamity looms. We all know the basic position: Labour still treats the debate about our exit from the EU as something that can only be reluctantly parried; in their very different ways, the Greens and Lib Dems lack both the representation and clout to push things anywhere very different. Any remaining liberal, pro-European Tories, meanwhile, are at the mercy of forces that encompass relentless ideologues within their ranks, and troublemakers without.

One thing, moreover, defines this most fretful early summer. As he tries to terrify the ruling party into doing his bidding, Farage has discipline, media nous and the clearest of messages. By contrast, even as they tremble at the prospect of no deal and cling to a vision of an open, modern country, what have his opponents got? Milkshakes?

• John Harris is a Guardian columnist

• This article was amended on 30 May 2019 to correct diffuse to defuse