There was a flippancy about a lot of the debate that was utterly inappropriate to the stakes involved, of course some of this was deliberate misdirection. In some ways it had more in common with voting on the X-Factor than one of the biggest decisions in the UK's history. A harsh lesson in the misuse and abuse of plebiscites.
Alongside trying to stem the bleeding, and rather than waiting 100 years for scholars to analyse our stupidity, we should be having a serious discussion in the here and now about the nature of the vote and what it says about our ailing democracy and civic engagement.