There is a reason that Utah legislators, so keen to declare we are a republic and not a democracy, buy the notion that the United States government is a federal system, when the term "federal" appears nowhere in the Constitution and is nowhere even implied, notwithstanding the equal representation by states in the Senate.

Clearly, the Founders created a democratic republic because of the patent failure of pure democracy to offer protection for the rights of minorities. In James Madison's words, "In all cases where a majority are united by a common interest or passion, the rights of the minority are in danger."

It is equally clear that the more visionary Founders at the 1787 "federal" convention in Philadelphia understood that a federal system would not work either, based on the luckless 10-year American experiment with one, and on the spectacular catastrophes of some 30-odd other federal governments that came under their scrutiny as possible models for America.

The single, overriding reason for failure in every instance, including our own, was evident: decentralized power, the hallmark of federal systems, and its corollary, the absence of a strong, central government.

So, guided by the brilliant Madison, our federal system was abolished and a new national one was created, under a Constitution that granted national powers "far beyond those exercised by the British Parliament," including the power, without consent of the state legislatures, "to levy money directly upon the people themselves."

None of this sits well with today's descendants of 18th century opponents to ratification of that Constitution. Without exception, they would have voted "NO" with their reactionary predecessors. Think of those who have suggested secession, would nullify U.S. law, argue for their own coinage, loathe every national enterprise and its "socialist, central planning," would in fact see Washington defer to the states.

Then think of Madison's observations in his Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787: "Too much stress was laid on the rank of the States as political societies," he said, warning that for an egalitarian nation to defer to state authority, sanctioned merely by the accidents of geography, would eventuate in inequalities. Today, there is sad and ample proof that he was right, from inequalities in education and health care to taxes and minority rights.

Madison's voice was not the only one arguing for "centralized planning" and reduced states rights. Elbridge Gerry asserted in convention, "We never were independent states, were not such now, & never could be even on the principles of the Confederation. The states & the advocates for them were intoxicated with the idea of their sovereignty."

Alexander Hamilton, by birth a West Indian and therefore likely suspect by today's "patriots," saw through the specious anti-constitutionalists' argument that renouncing state sovereignty is to give up liberty: "It is a contest for power, not for liberty."

And consider James Wilson's eloquent question before the convention, "Can we forget for whom we are forming a government? Is it for men, or for the imaginary beings called States?"

Even under our republic, minority rights are in danger, sometimes even in Utah. And now we have colonial recidivists out to gut the national government and return the country to its woeful pre-Constitution status, complete with all the injustices and shortcomings our framers rejected.

This is not without its irony, since those same opponents to the Constitution with its pre-eminent power, granted and sustained by the people directly without state intercession, endlessly praise it and plead that we "get back to it."

Indeed, do let us get back to it.

Gene Gerstner is a Salt Lake native who wrote business proposals for TRW in Redondo Beach, Calif. Now retired in Washington, Utah, he volunteers at Zion National Park and leads hikes for the Zion Canyon Field Institute.