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Utah To Teach USA is a Republic, Not a Democracy
0ryan0 writes "Utah lawmakers passed a bill today to force public school teachers to teach that the USA is a republic, not a democracy, because a 'Democracy' would have 'Democrat' in it." The good news must be that all issues of unemployment, finance and social service must be resolved in Utah for their legislature to spend time on this. It must be a utopia!
Indeed, if you want to look at the history of actual full-fledged democracies, you can find the kind of brutalities that would make even the average despot blush.
No, we are not a representative democracy. In a representative democracy majority rules all at all times. We do not have that by virtue of our constitution, making us a constitutional republic.
You left out the bigoted addition from Cmdr Taco. Man what is next From the harder than getting money out of Jew department?
Really Cmdr Taco that is really just not cool.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Plato, in Athens, Greece [Where] in about 340 b.c. was the one who came up with the idea. And had some original thoughts on the issue. One may argue that "Democracy" means something different now [becaue words do change] but you should realize that the distinction is very old.
Well, Plato did write what we commonly call in English The Republic, but that is considered an inaccurate translation of the original title Politeia. The republic/democracy distinction being established by Plato is also silly, because his distinction is democracy (by people)/monarchy (by one)/oligarchy (by the elite)/timocracy (by property owners).
And even Plato doesn't lump constrict democracy into "direct referendum on practically everything". It's a looser term in his work as well. No part of ancient athens even fits that definition, except possibly their secondary political body, which only included men over 20 anyway (this amounted to about 1/8th the population). The primary bodies of government were the public officials who were chosen by lottery.