Leave were perfectly aware of this, which is why Brexit was presented as everything for everyone instead of a specific deal.

Quite literally. Aside from the broad lies - the infamous £350m a week for the NHS, and the "Absolutely no one is suggesting the UK will leave the Single Market", among many others - Cambridge Analytica aimed micro-targeted ads with knowingly misleading promises at micro-demographics.

The whole point of Brexit was to remove local and EU democratic oversight and turn the UK into a neoliberal dictatorship. Those responsible are perfectly happy to trash most of the UK's economy as long as they personally get much, much richer.

The entire project is a shocking exercise in leveraging exceptionalist collective narcissism into a pretext for oligarchy and corruption on a Russian scale.

> The whole point of Brexit was to remove local and EU democratic oversight and turn the UK into a neoliberal dictatorship.

Of course, the expectation that the EU should be saving the UK from its local elites who the UK press and voters continue to protect and elect is a strange one. It's certainly antidemocratic.

It's even stranger if you think about another common anti-Brexit argument: that many of the "EU laws" which caused people to vote for Brexit were actually created by the UK and Brexit supporters were tricked into blaming the EU for them, where the "UK" in question was actually the same tiny group of UK leaders that we're meant to fear Brexit will hand over control to, behind closed doors, with no real functioning democratic oversight.

It did moderate some of the more vicious impulses of local elites. Look at the enthusiasm with which they went at the human rights act.

My favourite analogy for the Brexit vote is as follows:

Imagine if you will, voting on what to have for dinner.

30% are vegetarian 30% eat only pork 30% eat only beef 10% eat any meat

Now, if the only two options are meat or no-meat, then you're going to get 30% voting for no-meat and 70% voting for meat - a clear majority. However when you got to the shops, what do you buy? Pork will only satisfy 40% and beef will only satisfy 40%, so you're going to end up with 60% unhappy with the choice.

I think you describe the fundamental crisis of democracy. No single proposal ever has a majority of support. So you get what is essentially a confidence motion... that the 'winner' themselves would not survive.

That's a weakness of FPTP voting systems, not of democracy