‘The Dog returns to his Vomit,” wrote Rudyard Kipling in 1919 as he denounced the delusions of liberals and socialists. “And the Sow returns to her Mire, and the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.”

Only conservatives understood the eternal verities – The Gods of the Copybook Headings, as Kipling titled the most splenetic of Tory poems. Only conservatives knew that progressive talk of “the March of Mankind” hid the truth that fallible humanity always ended with its fingers in the flames.

Conservatives believed in personal responsibility, not in a world where “all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins”. Fashionable thinkers could spout their nonsense but it took a conservative to state the obvious that “All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four”.

You can take or leave Kipling, but ask yourselves, who are his burnt fools now?

Wabble, wabble, wabble go the right’s bandaged fingers. Theresa May failed to get the EU to break its rules because she didn’t SHOUT LOUDLY AT FOREIGNERS. If only we bellow hard enough, the EU will fold, and we can live in the pro-having-your-cake-and-pro-eating-it world of Boris Johnson, a layabout fraud Kipling would have despised for his conviction that he should be paid for existing and others must pay for his sins.

The right has nothing to say about tariffs destroying the car and steel industries and wiping out agricultural exports

And when the EU doesn’t fold, for it never will, then…

Wabble, wabble, wabble. “We will leave the EU on 31 October, deal or no deal,” declares Johnson. It won’t be a problem, adds Nigel Farage. “We voted to leave, we didn’t vote for a deal.” The right has nothing to say about tariffs destroying the car and steel industries and wiping out agricultural exports. Nothing about the service sector, which comprises 80% of our economy, and will find leaving the single market hard enough, let alone a fall into the fire.

The desire to plunge into the flames is sweeping the country. Farage won the European election campaign without facing a coherent challenge from the Conservative party he destroyed. By all accounts, many of its members and rightwing MPs voted for him, a betrayal that makes their ability to choose “our” next prime minister all the more outrageous. It is not just that Britain’s fate is being decided by 100,000 or so Tory members; many are so extreme they did not even vote for the Conservative party whose leader they are choosing.

We are assured that not one of the bewildering array of candidates can become prime minister if they do not threaten to bang the table, and accept a no-deal Brexit when the table refuses to budge. In the right’s certainty that there is no other way lies the death of an intellectual tradition.

Conservatives still claim to be hard-headed. They puff out their chests, and begin their speeches with “Unfashionable though it may be to say so…”, as if expecting applause for their bravery. The self-congratulation survives when the justification has vanished. Today’s right is a movement of cowards; an organised deceit that cannot tell the truth to itself, let alone anyone else. An honest supporter of Brexit would acknowledge that it will hurt, and the harder the Brexit the greater the pain. Brexit is the work of a decade, its proponents would continue, the most bewildering task Britain has contemplated in peacetime.

If we leave the customs union and single market, we will not only have to cut our ties with the EU but with 69 other countries we trade with via the EU. If Britain rejects the Irish backstop, as Farage and the Tory right say it must, we will not only risk the peace in Ireland but threaten a trade deal with the US, whose Congress may not approve the smallest of challenges to the Good Friday agreement. And when all this is accomplished and the brave new world begins, we would find Brexit’s “only accomplishment would be to make the country poorer and weaker than it was before”, in the words of my colleague Ian Dunt.

Supporters of Brexit must believe that the impoverishment of the economy and the weakening of national security (which the right once fretted about) would be worth it because Brexit would bring national independence. Remainers say sovereignty would be at the expense of power. Every time the EU made a regulatory decision, Britain would have no choice but to go along with it or risk further damage to its economy. But whether Remainers believe we’ll be crawling back for a deal is irrelevant. Honest rightists must think that sovereignty or cuts in immigration make the belittlement of Britain worth while. Not one says so. Not one accepts trade-offs or admits they exist. It’s as if they don’t think at all.

The conservative tradition, which once boasted of its ability to face unpleasant facts, cannot now state the obvious

We’ve reached the point where you cannot be honest and be on the right. Tory MPs who know the dangers the country faces keep quiet for fear of their constituency associations. In what the Conservative historian Tim Bale calls the “Tory party in the media”, you cannot find one commentator arguing against Brexit in the Express, Mail, Sun or Telegraph. As soon as you make your opposition clear, you are expelled. Tribalism is all, and to call the modern right anti-intellectual is to understate the case. It is anti-thought.

The conservative tradition, which once boasted of its ability to face unpleasant facts, cannot now state the obvious. Instead of speaking plainly it wabbles towards the fire and says hard questions insult “the public”. Then takes a break, moves a little closer and – wabble – damns all warnings as “lies”.

Kipling finishes with his own warning that reality always bites:

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

No one should mourn when the flames slaughter the wabbling right. It has doused itself in petrol and yearns to be burned. Its readiness to set the rest of the country ablaze should be our sole concern.

• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist