The Brexiteers aren’t alone in wanting to turn back time and behave as if certain significant events never happened. A look at the more unequivocal end of the pro-European Union spectrum of British political life — the die-hard Remainers — finds similar retrospection. The referendum result, they claim, was not a statement but a mistake: the consequence not so much of mass dissatisfaction and a decades-long tabloid project of anti-European propaganda but of a plot to subvert our democracy. Their solution? To hold another referendum, magically erasing both the bitter divisions of the intervening years and the social and political conditions that nurtured anti-European Union rage in the first place.

In an age of hidebound regression, moving forward becomes inseparable from looking backward and inward. Frustrated by what they see as the outdated and ineffective deadlock of the two-party political orthodoxy, a shiny new breakaway faction has emerged in Parliament called The Independent Group. Pressed for clarity on such tiresome details as policy, one of its more significant members, the ex-Tory Anna Soubry, defensively claimed that even to ask such a thing was the “old way” of politics, and that this group is based on “shared values.” The slightest scratch at the surface of those values, however, reveals nothing new whatsoever, with the No. 1 shared value, as listed on their website, turning out to be the drably predictable assertion that “Ours is a great country of which people are rightly proud.” It’s the same old pillar of jingoism and self-regard to which, it increasingly seems, everyone must genuflect before, or even in place of, saying anything else at all.

Here, ultimately, lies the Gordian knot at the heart of Britain’s predicament: To shape from our current inertia a meaningful future, we need to address the brutal reality of the present. We are not quietly leading any revolutions right now, unless one counts as a revolution our project of self-dismantlement.

We’re the world’s fifth-largest economy and likely to sink to seventh this year. Industry and finance are falling over themselves to flee. Nor am I convinced that anyone should be “rightly proud” of a country in which, according to the homelessness charity Crisis, the number of people sleeping on the streets has risen 140 percent since 2010; in which over a million emergency food packages were given to those struggling financially in the 2017-18 financial year; in which over 4 million children are living in poverty; and in which local councils in England face an £8 billion financial black hole by 2025, endangering not only their upkeep of communal spaces, but also their ability to provide adequate care for children, the elderly and people with disabilities.

Indeed, when the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights visited Britain last year, his verdict was damning, depicting not a nation “picking itself up when things get tough” and “quietly making history” but a society in which, as he put it, “British compassion for those who are suffering has been replaced by a punitive, meanspirited and often callous approach.” We are even, in point of fact, going off tea.

Our inability to state difficult truths without first offering some reassuring patriotism accounts, in some ways, for the failure of the Remain argument. In making a negative case against leaving the European Union — that it will cause irreparable harm to the economy, that vital flows of food and medicine may be disrupted, that we will consign ourselves to bit-part status on the global stage — Remainers’ concerns have been dismissed as traitorous fantasy, the manipulative catastrophizing of what Brexiteers call “Project Fear.”