What Croydon, a ‘Live Free or Die’ Town, Learned About Democracy

This is definitely a good example to use, in my opinion, to show that the idea of 'my vote doesn't matter so I won't bother' is bad - as the article explains, the budget cut was allowed to happen because many of the residents didnt bother to show up to the town hall meetings.

It is good in this case that they had a legal recourse to fix this by getting people who initially didn't bother to be involved in the process to express their opinions.

Exactly my thought when I saw this. Things can go south real quick if ordinary people lose interest in politics - which is sort of the trajectory we are on. In this case people could mobilize and take corrective action; that isn't always the case though.

This echoes exactly what's happening all across the US. A small number of extremists have taken over

Un-paywalled version: https://archive.ph/ke1Du

I thought this was about Croydon in South London when I saw the title, which is a sort of Live Free or die place in its own way.

There is a silver lining to extremism : it awakens reasonable people out of indifference.