A republic, if you can keep it

The right-wing and libertarians have been pushing for years to control local school boards and town councils. More recently, the right-wing has been systematically moving to control election boards. Enabling this is the apathy of liberals, centrists and real conservatives.

Here an example in a small town in New Hampshire. Libertarians managed to get a 20-14 vote to slash the public school budget in half (that’s 34 votes in a town of about 800).

Fortunately, saner heads prevailed. Under New Hampshire law, citizens could petition for a special meeting where the budget cut could be overturned — if at least half the town’s voters were present and cast ballots. After an aggressive GOTV campaign, They needed at least 283 voters. On the day of the vote, they had a turnout of 379. The vote to overturn the cuts was 377 to 2.

Unsurprisingly, the local libertarian leader referred to this exercise in pure American democracy as “mob rule.” This is an example of why I call libertarianism the political philosophy of middle school boys and arrested development.

As the kids say, read the rest here:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/07/10/nation/one-small-step-democracy-live-free-or-die-town/