As someone living in smaller country, we now have our voice heard more than before, and other benefits of EU far outweigh the downsides.
> They are institutionally cynical about their own citizens, who they see deep down as basically being stupid sheep
Yeah Trump and Johnson are so much better \s. Every country has politicians like that.
And yes I know lots of people living in the EU think it's great. Lots of people living in the USSR thought it was great too, as can be seen from the opinion polls showing how many Russian think Stalin was their greatest leader. That doesn't change the nature of what these systems are.
And Boris (among many others), more or less engineered the whole brexit so he could gain power, if that fails he is done. He is doing it because he bet his whole career on it, and has nothing to loose.
And as someone who lived (although only for about 12 years of my life) behind iron curtain. I can assure you most people didn't think it was ok, and we are paying attention so we don't end up in the same situation again.
Part of what we usually want from our politicians is to filter what people want a little bit and remove some of the evil and stupid. I know, then we don't get exactly what we want. But if you ask exactly what people want, about 90% of it ends up being "people not like me to suffer more", and if you run everything based on that, all you get is everyone suffering more.