The deeper issue is that Brexit is merely part of the rush to populism that’s infesting the whole world. From Bolsonaro in Brazil to Babic in the Czech Republic, from Trump in the USA to Orban in Hungary, we see the same thing: simple-minded people rushing to embrace demagogues because those demagogues offer simple sound-bites that those who are ignorant and foolish can grasp. The real world, complex, inter-connected, requiring a knowledge of many different topics, is forever beyond the grasp of most of the population.

Representative democracy accidentally stumbled into existence because of factors that pertained several hundred years ago. It was always an inadequate thing, but its systemic weaknesses were less obvious until quite recently. Even today the vast majority of people continue to fetishize “democracy” even as they differ wildly with regards to what they actually mean by the word. As Plato pointed out over 2,500 years ago, democracies always end as tyrannies because the glib-tongued demagogue will always be able to exploit a significant percentage of the population (the low-IQ, under-informed) and all you need is a “vocal minority” to ensure the majority of the rest of the population will passively accept whatever you do to “honor the will of the people.”

People make the mistake of thinking that Brexit, Trump, Edrogan, Orban, Salvini, Bolsonaro, the AfD, Le Pen, et al are somehow separate local abberations. In fact they are all symptoms of the same underlying problem — a problem that won’t be resolved until we create structures of governance far more adequate for today’s complex world than the 18th century incoherence of representative democracy.