All signs point to the UK taking an increasingly authoritarian attitude to the net post-Brexit.
In 18th and even 19th century, Britain's unwritten constitution and notions of "English liberty" did indeed stand out -- and inspired the American to crystalise the ideas into written constitutions.
But 20th century ideologies, and the modern administrative state have "obsoleted" all that. Needless to say Britain coped with the change better than lots of pre-war countries (Germany!).
But post-war, Europeans have put in place formal human rights protections that a working imperfectly, but better than the British non-constitution. British citizens have their basic rights protected in large part because the UK now shares these formal rules with Europe.
I am unaware of major cases of regulatory capture in the EU governance and most regulation proceeding this has been well intentioned - if the cookie banner is annoying then tell your the site to stop tracking you.
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So you had Farrah’s and others playing the usual “Hey struggling masses, all of your problems are those immigrant’s fault” game. Over time the political success of UKIP and internal strife within the Tories led David “The Chinless Pudding” Cameron to promise that he would hold a referendum on the issue of re-elected. At the time he assumed that he would win by the same narrow margin he had previously and once again would enter into a “power-sharing” deal with the Liberal Democrats. He could then blame the LibDems for blocking the referendum, defuse the Tory civil war, and shut Farage up for another election cycle.
Then he won, decisively, and the LibDems tanked. So Cameron had no excuse to not have the referendum. He assumed that people who had been openly pro-remain such as Boris Johnson would put aside their personal ambitions and support Remain, but of course that didn’t happen. So what you had was a group of highly motivated people such as Boris who used this as a means to get power, people like Farrage being populist demagogues, and the ERG playing ideologue while just looking to get even richer. Cameron quit and literally walked away humming a little tune, and the Tories went to war with themselves. In the end everyone “died” and out of the ashes rose the silent one, Theresa May, who had switched from staunch pro-Remain to equally staunch Brexiteer mode overnight.
The rest is history. In a sense at the highest levels where Brexit isn’t about gaining short-term power and settling grudges, it’s about the long-term goal of being able to capture UK regulatory bodies. “People” like Jacob Rees-Mogg see how the business class can rob the state in the US, and they want a slice of that. The EU would prevent much of it, so they want out of the EU. The details of why individual people (who bothered to vote at all) voted to Leave is a lot less interesting and has less to do with Brexit than the political reality.
The latest extension offered to Brexit is until Oct 31. And another extension is likely to be offered then.
The MPs in office overwhelmingly oppose Brexit. They don't support anything else, but they oppose Brexit as well. But the country is fairly evenly divided. However the Conservative party hung itself out to dry on a promise to deliver Brexit, and the Conservative base very strongly wishes that Brexit had happened already. If it doesn't, it is not impossible that the Conservative party will fall apart.
The Conservative leadership's opinion is that their base consist of "swivel-eyed loons", but without that base, the Conservatives don't win elections. Also the Conservatives are in a coalition right now with the DUP, and the DUP is strongly for Brexit. (As I commented to a friend today, if the Conservative base consists of swivel-eyed loons, the DUP base consists of steel-eyed goons.)
The country as a whole is fairly evenly divided. Polls suggest that a re-do would come up Remain. But polls suggested the same thing before the referendum as well. Demographics suggest that the country as a whole will support Remain in the future. However large parts of the country are strongly Leave and that won't be changing any time soon. And no, they aren't simply stupid racists. They have some valid concerns, such as the long-term effect of EU regulations (such as GDPR and the new Copyright bill) on economic growth.
I don't know how the west will recover from this but if there is one thing I've come to view as a vital component of that recovery it's arts spending. We seriously need to up critical thinking skills in the general populace instead of continuing to pump out trade-schooled apprentices (that includes a bunch of us developers, many of whom are more heavily rote taught than anything else).
Our purpose in the universe is... well probably nothing, but it'd be nice if we equipped everyone to deal with life and their journey through it with as many tools as possible. It is possible to find some educational spending wasteful and desire to make it more efficient, but the people who say "we're wasting money educating all these people" those are the most dangerous of all.
But it was the best 'educated' voters who took the dire economic warnings of the cost of voting leave most seriously, which have since been proven false (e.g. no 800,000 lost jobs due to uncertainty post-vote).
So there's an easy argument to make that huge numbers of remain voters were just, as you put it, "unquestioning individuals that are happy to go along with whatever they are told" i.e. they were to vote remain or else economic disaster, didn't question it despite the obvious holes in this story, and did as they were told. Leave voters thought for themselves, concluded the risks were exaggerated and didn't do as they were told.