No one can now doubt that the British right is a radical right that would choose destruction rather than entertain the possibility of compromise, even for a moment. Its conscious embrace of chaos is the true meaning of last week’s cabinet resignations.

As the right well knows, Britain must leave the EU on 29 March. If Theresa May’s proposed agreement is voted down, and the Commons does not allow a second referendum, we will collapse into a no-deal Britain for which business and the public sector are wholly unprepared.

Tory leadership contests and general elections are trivial in comparison. The only deal the EU will offer is finally available for all to see. The right’s own government has detailed what will happen if we crash out. We might note that voters were not asked to consent to the shortages and burdens of businesses and consumers in the 2016 referendum campaign. We might take this rare moment of clarity to talk about the false promises we were given, and ask whether the change in Britain’s circumstances gives the British the right to think again. Instead, political correspondents, who couldn’t find a big picture in a multiplex, buzz around Westminster hyperventilating about the number of letters sent to the 1922 Committee, and the replacement of minister X with junior minister Y, as if it mattered in the slightest.

Cummings, like so many of his colleagues, believes he has nothing to apologise for

Cynics should admire the right’s mastery of misdirection. Rather than a grim debate about the peace in Ireland, the union with Scotland, and the living standards and futures of 66 million British citizens, Brexit is once again presented as a tale of Tory palace politics, as it has been ever since history’s fool David Cameron promised a referendum to heal Conservative divisions.

Politics and journalism have denied the public the space to lift their heads and see the road ahead. If they could, they would learn that the right believes suffering is a price worth paying for its utopia.

Dominic Cummings, the most important contemporary figure 99% of the population have never heard of, accepts that the Brexit he secured as the campaign director for Vote Leave in 2016 has “driven the country into the ditch”. A man with a functioning sense of shame would have paused at this point and asked for forgiveness. Cummings, like so many of his colleagues, believes he has nothing to apologise for.

On the contrary, he revels in Britain’s breakdown, because it exposes the rottenness of the Conservative party and its “dire cabinet”, and of Westminster and Whitehall for “the whole country – the whole world” to see.

And once the chaos subsides, Cummings babbles, the whole world will see a new post-Brexit Britain, which “should be considering the intersection of ARPA/PARC-style science research and systems management”. No one knows what he means, least of all, I suspect, Cummings. But the thrust of the argument is clear: the country may be in a ditch, but its suffering is justified if it allows us to reach his techno-Utopia, or the free-trading “global Britain” of Boris Johnson’s dreams, or has the effect of stopping British workers being “the worst idlers in the world”, as Liz Truss, Dominic Raab and other leading Brexiters once labelled them.

If you didn’t know it already, Brexit should have taught you that nationalists always doubt their own people, always worry that they are too soft for the macho roles they wish to thrust on them. They see a no-deal Brexit as character building, whatever its cost. This is why the anti-EU commentator Iain Martin wrote last week: “The disruption would hurt like hell for a lot of people, but the British have been through much worse. This is a resilient country. If it’s this or caving into the EU’s unreasonable demands, I know which I would choose.”

This is why Jacob Rees-Mogg could say in apparent seriousness that we would not know the economic consequences of Brexit for half a century.

For all their utopian speculations, the passion that drives them is not a plan for the future but hatred of the present

If you think the uncertainty is a good reason for stopping Brexit, or that sensible countries avoid unnecessary pain, you misunderstand the right. In their hearts, even its greatest propagandists cannot wholly believe in the utopias they promise to the public. If they want a “global Britain” to trade with the world, they would not pull the UK out of its biggest market and maintain, contrary to all evidence, that protectionist America and China would grant the UK favours. If they believe Brexit will “hurt like hell for a lot of people” in 2019, they must know that in all likelihood it will carry on hurting like hell for years to come.

For all their utopian speculations, the passion that drives them is not a plan for the future but a hatred of the present. Any compromise with reality would mean conceding that their pro-European enemies inside the Tory party and the “remoaner” liberals outside had a case. They might even have to admit that we would have more “control” inside the EU than out. They prefer to bury Britain in a ditch than endure the pain of political capitulation.

As in Trump’s America, you hear the echoes of the precursors of fascism, who became ever more enamoured with the cleansing power of destruction as the 20th century began. In the Futurist Manifesto of 1909, Mussolini’s contemporary Filippo Marinetti declared his desire to “glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman”.

Steve Bannon, the 21st-century right’s dark muse, updated the same thought when he stated: ‘“I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Ask him, or David Davis, or Johnson, or Cummings, or Rees-Mogg, or Raab, or Truss, what comes next, and whatever they say about “global Britain” or “ARPA/PARC-style science research”, their only honest answer is: “We don’t care”.

• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist