In Fahrenheit 451, a number of people decide that a particular social good will not survive unless they themselves undertake to preserve it. [In this case, literature.] The society's institutions were corrupt and books would not endure otherwise. [So people take to memorizing great books in a society that burns them.]
Maybe there are two principles in that episode: Something may look like a democracy and quack like a democracy but that doesn't mean it's much of a democracy. [After all, democracies don't quack.] And if the institutions aren't working, the people have to get to work. And maybe a third: Murphy's law suggests that the people had better count on getting to work. There should be a chapter in the high school civics book that explains that democracies are always being stolen away, brick by brick, and for them to endure citizens must always be about the business of defending them.
Fans of Jay Rosen's work on Edward Snowden will have no trouble connecting these brief thoughts to his post about "Fourth Estate situations"--where it is not the social structure or the job title that qualifies a person to act as the best journalists act, bringing truth into the light. It's the will to speak to the nation, as he argues there.