For three years, the worst of Britain has been in charge. The Britain that says it is elitist to tell the electorate it can’t have the impossible. The Britain that has patted itself on the back for threatening the rule of law and the independence of MPs. The Britain where it is normal for supporters of Jeremy Corbyn to call the BBC’s political editor a bitch and a whore and demand her dismissal for crimes against the party line and for supporters of Nigel Farage to send death threats to MPs. The Britain with no middle, only extremes.

Millions have been airbrushed from the national story: Conservatives who voted to remain; Europeans who have made Britain their home for so long they are British in everything except their paperwork; British citizens living in the EU; and everyone in the UK who wants to live in the EU but whose rights are being taken away in a vast state power grab.

May wins grudging admiration for her stubbornness. Remainers must show the same determination

The representative Briton of the 2010s, who has grown to overshadow the nation, is an angry man from the Don Valley. He must have his way and anyone who warns that his way leads to perdition is inauthentic, less real, a kind of half-citizen who “just doesn’t get it”. The scientist, the small businessman or woman trying to export, the student wanting to travel and learn, the man worried about his job, the woman worried about the future of public services must shrink before his towering rage.

When you are stuck in crisis, it is easy to believe it will never end. Without wishing to offer anything as rash as optimism, there are reasons to think that the Britain of 2016 will die if all who have the country’s best interests at heart find the courage to ignore the insults and insist it has taken a wrong turn. Theresa May wins grudging admiration for her stubbornness. Remainers must show the same determination in the coming weeks.

The Leave campaign’s dishonesty guaranteed the Britain of 2016 could never survive. It promised we could tear up 40 years of relationships – not just with the EU but with dozens of other countries – and prosper. The fantasy should have been exposed at the time. But for three years the Labour and Conservative leaderships and much of the media have failed to confront the public with the true choice between a Brexit that hurts like hell or a Brexit that keeps us so tightly in the EU’s orbit we’d do better to stay.

Politicians and journalists have worked on the truly elitist assumption that 17.4 million Leave voters were children, who must be fed on a diet of mush and fairy stories.

There is a type of ideologue who sinks so much emotional capital into their politics that they can never admit a mistake

Soon, many won’t swallow it. May’s attempt to appease the right of her party has been a monumental failure, as great a failure, I feel obliged to add, as Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement, since in our giddy state it appears we would rather argue about Churchill than confront the crisis in front of us. All that is left is the overweening vanity that May’s persona of a sensible vicar’s daughter hid for so long. Rather than compromise and be dismissed by history as an obscure prime minister whose deal failed, she prefers to endanger her country in the vain hope of getting her way.

Many are still so lost in the ideology of the Daily Telegraph and the European Research Group they dismiss as scaremongering reports of the NHS stockpiling body bags and of national security being compromised.

There is a type of ideologue who sinks so much emotional capital into their politics that they can never admit a mistake. I don’t mean to underestimate them. They control the Corbyn left and the Brexit right. They have built a wall around themselves, and decades from now, they will be shouting that Brexit was betrayed by the establishment or that a neo-liberal conspiracy stopped the far left building socialism in one country. There’s nothing to do with such people except fight them every inch of the way.

But they are not the whole of Britain, although the curse of our time is that they seem to be. Moderate people who voted to leave the EU and moderate Remainers who accepted the result and wanted to move on are now finding that Britain is going nowhere. I don’t just mean that politics will be dominated by Brexit for years to come. I mean that the consequences of our attempts to delay hard choices have finally arrived. We haven’t left yet but already investment has stopped, growth is at its lowest for a decade and the Financial Times reports that Whitehall is telling executives that the government is powerless to cushion the impact of a no-deal Brexit and then “instructs them to keep quiet”. For the first time since 2016, employers are talking in large numbers about imminent threats to their businesses and the jobs of all who depend on them.

No deal that May can offer can keep the Tory party together, and somewhere even in her stubborn mind she must know it

Britain’s daydream is over. Its game is done. No deal that May can offer can keep the Tory party together and somewhere even in her stubborn mind she must know it. Labour’s offer of fake solutions as an alternative to honouring its promise to campaign for a second referendum hasn’t unravelled yet. But it’s only a matter of weeks before it does.

As the actors prance off the stage, the audience has a choice of exits. The first opens at the top of the cliff. We could take it. Cutting ourselves off from our largest trading partner and the laws that bind us to our friends and allies has always been an option. But the right and the pro-Brexit left never told the public about the cost. They received no mandate to lead us over. The other door leads to a waiting room where we could do what the citizens of mature democracies ought to do: take a breath, then take a vote on whether we should think again.

• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist