Ai Mittion/UVU Review

When asked to describe his political philosophy, mayoral candidate, Steve Clark keeps it pretty basic. “I’m a conservative Republican. I stand for strong family values, traditional values. I have a great desire to help Provo.”

A little too basic. Asking a Republican candidate if he stands for traditional family values is like asking Dracula if his thirst for blood is insatiable. You already know the answer.

This kind of uninspiring politics flourish when good candidates do nothing. During our interview, Clark did not seem to want to address any of Provo’s student issues beyond a mere wave of the hand and an assurance that all is well.

Under Provo’s current student housing laws no three unrelated persons may live in the same domicile outside of Provo’s designated student ghetto, just south of BYU campus.

Clarke, commenting on this law, responded, “You can rent a home to anyone you want – that’s been in place for 50 years. We haven’t changed the laws.”
Either we are not talking about the same Provo, Utah, or we are dealing with a discrepancy of information. When asked if limiting the student population to a one-mile-by-one-mile area of town was damaging to competition in the housing market, Clark responded that Provo actually has too many properties going with rent signs in front of them. Which there may be, yet until laws are changed – or in Clark’s case, acknowledged – nothing can be done to fill these properties, a task which could be easily accomplished by a student population free to live where and with whom they see fit.

Meanwhile, Clark’s Web site reads, “There are many problems that come to our long-term resident population as a direct result of accommodating and providing the necessary services for BYU students.” These services would seem to be housing, parking and transportation needs. But Clark doesn’t elaborate exactly providing better housing for the students is going to chap the caboose of the long-term residents. He doesn’t go into how actually fulfilling the parking needs of students who call Provo home, would inconvenience the townies.

The bottom line here is that, like it or not, the students are an integral part of Provo. Without them, Provo is Payson. Any candidate interested in standing at the city’s helm has got to build a working relationship with the tens of thousands of students who live here. Dismissing the issues near and dear to a major sector of the town’s population is not becoming of a man who flaunts his experience in City Council and the House of Representatives so readily.

Having said that, there are areas that have really drawn Clark’s undivided attention. Like razing buildings in downtown Provo and building hotels and convention centers for Provo’s tourists. Of course, Clark’s family owns a mechanical contracting firm, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. I’m sure he would still be lackadaisical about student life in Provo even if his family printed textbooks.

Ai Mittion/UVU Review

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Often in political and philosophical discussions, the reasoning can appear to be something like “Whatever you think that thing is (be it an idea, concept, object or maxim), actually it is the opposite.” 

Up is down, black is white, dogs and cats actually love each other, etc. But when it comes to this particular word at hand, that’s exactly how it is. “Liberal” means almost precisely the opposite of what most of us think it means.

“Liberal” as a political term is really about individuality. The idea is that the individual is the core unit of society, and it is the individual’s rights that are paramount in a political calculus. Rights of the government, be it local or federal, or the rights of the community are always subservient to the individual.

Freedom is freedom of the individual to do what they please so far as it doesn’t harm anyone. The individual retains ownership of property as opposed to a group of people, like a government. Even a corporation composed of many people is legally considered an individual, and accumulates wealth just like an individual. 

To whatever degree you accept these ideas you are a “liberal.” If you accept them unequivocally, you might be called a libertarian; to reject them utterly you might be called a communitarian (not the same as communist) and of course there are many in-between shades. Pretty much every democracy in the world is a liberal democracy, ones that for the most part espouse these ideas of rights, liberty and property.

            But notice – doesn’t this sound an awful lot like ideas that are espoused by the U.S. right-wing? Any one of those ideas could have come right out of the mouth of Newt Gingrich or George Bush and you’d probably not bat an eye. The American right-wing are the true political liberals, not Democrats and leftists. 

            In fact, it seems that being politically left is in part a commitment to honor the rights of communities, especially disenfranchised and marginalized communities. But this just means that by definition the left is actually far les liberal than the right, if we take political terms seriously and not parochially.

The reason that we often identify the word liberal with the left probably has something to do with the sense of the word meaning something more like overflowing, broad, generous; the analogy being that leftists are generous in our political leanings, or something like that. To get where the real political term comes from just consider the word “liberty”, as in freedom. This goes back to the Latin word “liberalis” that referred to a free man, that is, a man with money who was free of having to work. 

So calling a philosophy that seeks to maximally protect individual freedom “liberal” makes perfect sense.  In fact it makes more sense than our current usage. At any rate, next time someone calls you a liberal, you’ll have something to distract them from the inevitable end of the conversation, wherein they call you a dirty hippie.

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Photo courtesy of John Curtis

John Curtis is probably the most typical Provo candidate — a conservative BYU graduate with a business degree who married his high-school sweetheart after serving an LDS mission. In a race against fellow G.O.P. Candidate Steve Clark, some of the more liberal-minded students might question the point of even filling out a ballot. However, Curtis might be the lesser of two Republicans. His focus is more on keeping the already safe streets of Provo at status quo and increasing business opportunities and prosperity – not on legislating morality.

In the wake of past experiences with conservatives who have wanted to read your emails, ban “degenerate art” and tell you who you should sleep with, it’s refreshing to hear Curtis say things such as, “Government cannot create morality or personal responsibility by passing laws,” and actually mean it.

One issue we spoke about at length was housing laws. Currently it is illegal for three unrelated people to live together outside of the designated area south of BYU campus. In a town dominated by a hyper-conservative Mormon ideology, it’s not hard to figure out why – legislation has been heavily influenced by a certain idea of “morality” and has worked to enforce unity under one particular conception of “right and wrong.” Those who align with this ideology don’t want a couple “living in sin” in their neighborhood, nor do they want three young dudes drinking alcohol on their porches for their children to see. Better that they should be banished to BYU housing, where limited competition in housing means a lack of rent control and that and alcohol use, tobacco use, and sex out of wedlock can result in eviction.

As a walk-the-walk conservative, John Curtis sees this as a conflict in ideology. “It’s a clash in our neighborhoods. You’re pitting neighbor against neighbor, and it’s not a healthy thing for our city. We have created a situation with some ordinances that are hard to understand and hard to enforce.”

 “That ties in,” Curtis goes on, “Obviously, to the students, who are a big part of Provo. We have a high number of BYU and UVU students who would like to live in Provo. They would tell you that we’re tough on them. But they’ll survive. They’re resilient and they’re here for a short period of time. What we’re really doing is hurting Provo.” He acknowledges the fact that many students want to get their degree and get out of town as quickly as they can. “We’d like for them to settle here. We would like them to open their businesses. We’d like them to have a good experience, not go out into the world with horror stories about town.” For Curtis, the attitude that students are wild animals to be contained in a veritable pen between campus and Center street, is a hurtful one. “What is Provo without the students?” 

While Curtis is committed to increasing safety and prosperity in town and decreasing personal divisiveness amongst Provo’s residents, he is not foolishly optimistic. “We’re really good at talking in Provo. Not so much execution.” Hopefully, if elected, John Curtis can get the ball rolling to make Provo a better city for everyone living there.

For more information, visit www.johncurtis.org

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This week’s word: Conservative

 Now, I know I’m going to get some angry and/or confused readers from this one, but be aware that next week I’m writing about the word “liberal,” so you can repose in the idea that both words are equally misunderstood. But I only get one of these a week, so …

The thrust of the idea of conservatism is a reluctance to change the status quo. There is always some kind of relationship between the word conservative and the adjective “old-fashioned.” This is not necessarily a bad thing — “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” can be a sage piece of advice.  Societally speaking, if we were ever able to achieve a stable, just, great society, we’d all want to be conservative in keeping it the way it was.

In the United States we tend to use the word to mean a lot more than the above, and this leads to some conceptual problems. In common language when we use the term it means something more like “right-wing” combined with some ideas of being “traditional” and maybe even a little touch of “libertarian.”

This usage is not always commensurable with the proper use of “conservative.” For instance, right-wing political views take a more bare-bones approach to government, the idea being that less is more and government often gets in the way of liberty.

What then are we to make of properly conservative laws like restrictions on the availability of what some consider vice, like alcohol and sex? Or the regulation of marriage? These are clear invasions by the government into our personal decisions as citizens. Not so right-wing though, since these kinds of laws curtail what seem to be behaviors which any robust concept of liberty would allow. What they are is conservative because they beckon to more traditional, entrenched societal values.

Education is another filter through which we can see clearly the difference between conservatism and political “rightness,” as it were. The modern capital-driven education might be termed market-style education, the sole goal being to get people into the workforce as efficiently and profitably as possible; this viewpoint is held by practically every politically right-wing thinker and educator. But this viewpoint is a progressive and not a conservative one — it is a profound rejection of the more traditional education focused on critical thinking and understanding the world and people around us. The true conservatives in this instance are those who think that the older liberal education is the better one, a view often held by university educators and the left-wing intelligencia.

Now you know — be careful how you use the word “conservative.” You might be conveying a lot more with its use than you think are or ought to be.

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There is a near-constant refrain I hear from friends, fellow students and political pundits in the ongoing debate in health care and it goes something like this: “I believe in personal responsibility, and I don’t think that it’s right that some poor person or illegal immigrant should get a handout from the government for doing nothing and/or breaking the law.”

Or some such variation — the point is that they argue (loosely interpreted) that public health care systems amount to giving people something they don’t deserve.

I find it hard to make sense of this, and the best way I can think to express my confusion and dismay is to ask those who make these statements to give taxpayers back their money.

Did you drive to school today? Then you got a handout. After all, public funds paid for the road you drove on, the DMV where you got your license, the police that keep you from speeding and the parking lot where you are currently parked. I don’t know what anyone did to merit the privilege of driving except simply exist.

Did you receive financial aid in the form of a state or federal grant? Handout! Would you be willing to give back your aid on principle, simply because it was a handout? If you are not willing, and you are also opposed to a public health care option, perhaps you should start rethinking one or the other position for the sake of being morally consistent.

Did you drink some soda today? Then you received a handout from the federal coffers that subsidized the corn, which was then processed into the syrup that makes your bubbly beverage ever so sweet. Small, but a handout nonetheless.

Seriously, I could go on for days listing things that we all get from local or national government that we just don’t “deserve” if you take seriously the ill-conceived and vulgar notion so often mislabeled as “personal responsibility;” it really amounts to the notion that poor people are lesser beings than rich people and hence deserve proportionately less.

“But we paid taxes for all those things!” I can already hear in response.  Well, no “we” as students didn’t. By and large, we pay either no or very little taxes, considering we make next to nothing flipping burgers and scrubbing toilets to pay for school and top ramen. Only those far richer than we can even imagine right now “deserve” to drive on the roads, use the busses, the school facilities, the parking lots, the sewers, the street lamps and everything else that makes our lives as students and citizens possible. 

Health care is no different. With a public option, we all pay for it eventually, and those indigent and poverty-stricken families or individuals who can’t pay would deserve their “socialized” medicine just as much as they deserve the soccer stadiums, libraries, universities, historical markers, stop signs and high schools we all get, courtesy o’ Big Brother (and against which no one seems to be making “personal responsibility” arguments), not to mention the OVER-FOUR-HUNDRED-BILLION-DOLLARS worth of tanks, jet fighters, long-range ballistic missiles, nuclear warheads, CIA agents and combat boots that (supposedly) keep us safe and chock-full of liberty.

I’m going out with a zinger, folks: something about “socialized” medicine just seems to make sense when you consider that WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY, PEOPLE!

Ba-zing!

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