not a democracy

Some Utah County parents are calling on the Alpine School District to stop spreading "false educational ideas." First and foremost, the parents say, the district needs to clamp down on its use of the D-word: "democracy."

This week, a spokeswoman for Utah's Republic, a group that advocates for a strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, asked the Alpine Board of Education to scrap its democracy-centered mission statement. The issue has sparked a dust-up over the past month, garnering petition signatures from hundreds of Alpine parents and a rebuke of the school board by the Provo Daily Herald's editorial board.

Alpine's mission statement is "Educating all students to ensure the future of our democracy."

But this nation is a republic, not a democracy, said Oak Norton, a Highland father of five and the founder of Utah's Republic. The Constitution guarantees every state a "republican form of government." "Karl Marx said, 'Democracy is the road to socialism,' " Norton said. A true democracy, he said, relies solely on majority rule and inevitably devolves into anarchy, which then sprouts socialist dictators.

The term "democracy" is commonly used to refer to American society and the power of the people to participate in government, including through votes on ballot measures and representatives, said Kirk Jowers, director of the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics..

"Technically the United States is a constitutional republic," he said. "However, leaders from both [political] parties have often referred to us as a democracy."

Jowers said he received some of the same criticism about the D-word as chairman of the Governor's Commission on Strengthening Utah's Democracy.

"There seems to be a segment of the population who is worried not just about being technically precise on these words ... but somehow interprets a move to democracy as some type of a progressive movement that needs to be stopped," Jowers said. "For the most part, when people talk about strengthening democracy, they're talking about getting more people in the United States involved in our politics and government and more nations in the world being subject to elections instead of dictators."

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For the most part I enjoyed the editorial, "The price of freedom is an active citizenry," (Star-Advertiser, July 4), but with one exception. The author called out our "democracy" when in fact our country was founded as and continues constitutionally bound as a "republic." While often considered as one and the same (in both scenarios government is elected by the people), there is a clear distinction. In a democracy the majority rules (potentially, "mob rule"). However, in a republic, government rules according to the law of the land, which in turn is framed by our Constitution.

Von Kenric Kaneshiro
Honolulu