A question of writ - Asiya Bibi and Sabarimala

The Sabarimala and Asia Bibi cases put the spotlight on how institutions adhere to constitutional principles writes Sanjay Hegde in The Hindu


On the streets of India and Pakistan, a frightening message is being sent out: that courts must not rush in where politicians fear to tread. In matters of faith, courts must simply sit on their hands and pray for divine intervention to resolve the petition before them. The public and political responses to Supreme Court judgments in two instances — Sabarimala in India and the Asia Bibi case in Pakistan — bear striking similarities. What is different, however, is the ability of the two states to enforce their writ.

Sabarimala is considered to be one of the holiest temples in Hinduism, with one of the largest annual pilgrimages in the world. The faithful believe that the deity’s powers derive from his asceticism, and in particular from his being celibate. Women between the ages of 10 and 50 are barred from participating in the rituals.

The exclusion was given legal sanction by Rule 3(b) of the Kerala Hindu Places of Public Worship (Authorisation of Entry) Rules, 1965. The validity of the rule and other provisions restricting the entry of women was decided by the Supreme Court last month. The Court, by a majority of 4:1, held that the exclusion of women between these ages was violative of the Constitution.

The Sabarimala judgment

Then Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra and Justice A.M. Khanwilkar held that the practice of excluding women did not constitute an “essential religious practice”. Crucially, the judges also relied on Section 3 of the Act mentioned above which stipulates that places of public worship must be open to all sections and classes of Hindus, notwithstanding any custom or usage to the contrary. It was held that Rule 3(b) prohibiting the entry of women was directly contrary to this. A concurring judge, Justice R.F. Nariman, further held that the right of women (in the age bracket in question) to enter Sabarimala was guaranteed under Article 25(1). This provision states that all persons are “equally entitled” to practise religion. According to him, Rule 3 prohibiting the entry of women, was violative of Article 15(1) of the Constitution.

Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, also concurring, emphasised the transformative nature of the Constitution which was designed to bring about a quantum change in the structure of governance. More crucially, it was a founding document, designed to “transform Indian society by remedying centuries of discrimination against Dalits, women and the marginalised”. ‘Morality’ used in Articles 25 and 26, the judge held, referred to constitutional morality which includes the values of justice, liberty, equality and fraternity. 

Holy communion: It’s just the forests, the mountains and the Sabarimala temple on most days of the year. The place of worship comes alive only during the five-day monthly puja and the 41-day annual pilgrimage season beginning mid-November. 

He also held that barring menstruating women from entering the shrine is violative of Article 17 (the constitutional provision prohibiting untouchability). The judge held that the concept of untouchability is grounded in the ideas of ‘purity and pollution’. These same notions form the basis for excluding the entry of menstruating women into religious shrines.

The sole woman judge, Justice Indu Malhotra, who dissented, reasoned, “Issues of deep religious sentiments should not be ordinarily be interfered by the court. The Sabarimala shrine and the deity is protected by Article 25 of the Constitution of India and the religious practices cannot be solely tested on the basis of Article 14... Notions of rationality cannot be invoked in matters of religion... What constitutes essential religious practice is for the religious community to decide, not for the court. India is a diverse country. Constitutional morality would allow all to practise their beliefs. The court should not interfere unless if there is any aggrieved person from that section or religion.”

While the Bharatiya Janata Party has seen the judgment as an attack on the Hindu religion, the Congress too has not lagged behind. Even an “instinctive liberal” such as Shashi Tharoor has said, “abstract notions of constitutional principle also have to pass the test of societal acceptance — all the more so when they are applied to matters of faith... In religious matters, beliefs must prevail; in a pluralistic democracy, legal principles and cultural autonomy must both be respected…”

Asia Bibi case

In 1929, the funeral of a killer, Ilmuddin, took place in Lahore, executed for the murder of Rampal, a publisher, who had published an allegedly unsavoury reference to the life of Prophet Muhammad. Ilmuddin had been buried without funeral prayers as the authorities anticipated further trouble. But some eminent personalities, who included M.D. Taseer, assured the British authorities that there would be no trouble if there was a proper burial with a procession and Islamic prayers. The British relented and at the public mourning, the funeral prayer had to be read thrice before the surging crowds. The upshot of these events was that Section 295A was introduced into the Indian Penal Code to punish a deliberate insult to religious feelings. 

Years later, in Zia-ul-Haq’s Pakistan, Sections 295B and 295C were added to the Pakistan Penal Code which criminalised blasphemy against Islam and even made it punishable with death. In 2009, Asia Bibi, a Christian woman, was accused of blasphemy by her neighbours and jailed pending trial. She was sentenced to death in 2010 by a trial court.

Her case became a cause célèbre and Salman Taseer, the Governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province, visited her in prison to express support. This act by Taseer, who was the son of M.D. Taseer who had negotiated Ilmuddin’s burial, did not go down well. So enraged was his bodyguard Mumtaz Qadri, that he assassinated Taseer in 2011. When Qadri was produced in court for trial, he was showered with rose petals by lawyers. He was tried and hanged in 2016, and his funeral attracted a crowd that rivalled the one at Ilmuddin’s.

Last month, the Supreme Court of Pakistan allowed Asia Bibi’s appeal and declared her innocent of the charges. She has now been released and expected to be granted asylum in Europe. Her lawyer has fled Pakistan and the judges now fear for their lives. Pakistan faced the threat of mob violence led by the radical Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan party. Despite Prime Minister Imran Khan’s initial bluster, an agreement has been signed with mob leaders to end the violence.

The Chief Justice of Pakistan, Saqib Nisar, has reportedly defended himself by saying, “No one should have the doubt that the Supreme Court judges are not lovers of Prophet Muhammad... How can we punish someone in the absence of evidence?”

The thread

It is easy to dismiss the Sabarimala and Asia Bibi cases as being unconnected and belonging to different jurisdictions and contexts. But both belong to the same region and trajectory of history. India was built on a secular foundation while Pakistan was built on a majoritarian Muslim agenda. However, both countries profess at least lip service to the rule of law. Years of majoritarianism have brought Pakistan to the point where its institutions have had to defend themselves before doing justice to minorities. India is at a stage, where its majority is seeking to bring its institutions to acquiesce in majoritarian instincts. A majority whose forebears had committed themselves to a magnificent constitutional compact now has elements who seek to regress from those values.

The question is whether the people and the institutions succumb to pressure or adhere to principle. Each individual, regardless of birth ascribed identity, is a minority of one entitled to an individual guarantee of rights protected by the Constitution. It is in the adherence to individual rights that the greater public good rests. Those who sacrifice a little man or woman’s liberty for the security of the many will find neither liberty, nor security.
Let us keep this in mind, as the Supreme Court agrees to hear in open court a review petition against its Sabarima judgment.

It took a UN envoy to hear how austerity is destroying British lives

Philip Alston’s inquiry into poverty in the UK has heard a shocking truth that British politicians refuse to acknowledge writes Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

 

Philip Alston with pupils from Avenue End primary school in Glasgow. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian


The room is packed, people spilling out of the doors. The atmosphere crackles. So it should, for this is what it feels like when an entire society is held to account. Over 12 days, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights is touring not Bangladesh nor Sudan but the UK. And what Philip Alston has discovered in the fifth-richest country on Earth should shame us all. From Newcastle to Jaywick, he has uncovered stories of families facing homelessness, of people too scared to eat, of those on benefits contemplating suicide.

'A political choice': UN envoy says UK can help all who hit hard times


This UN inquiry could prove one of the most significant events in British civil society this decade, for one simple reason: for once, poor people get to speak their own truth to power. They don’t get talked over or spoken down to, lied about or treated like dirt, as happens on any other day of the week. Instead, at these hearings, they speak to Alston and his aides about their own experience. The white-haired Australian academic lawyer doesn’t cross-examine; no vulgar TV debate ensues with some hired contrarian. In its unadorned humility, the process matters almost as much as the press statement on Friday or the report to be published in a few months. Here is someone above party politics, outside the parameters of national debate, determined to treat all sides – poor people, the politicians, the academics and NGOs – as equal.

Bearing their crutches and their prams, the crowd gathered in this east London hall on this Monday afternoon knows visitors like Alston come along but once. “We’re really glad you’re here,” one person tells him, to general approval. That enthusiasm is widespread: the UN team has been deluged by a record-breaking number of submissions (nearly 300 for the UK, against 50 when it toured the US last year); city councils have passed motions requesting his presence. After eight years of historic spending cuts, a decade of stagnant wages and generations of economic vandalism, these people and places want to bear witness.

Without media training, some speak off mic, others run over time. While talking, they clutch friends’ hands or break down. When the subjects are too raw, they look away. But the stories they tell are raw. In tears, Paula Peters remembers a close friend who jumped to her death after her disability benefits were stopped. With nine days to Christmas, “she left behind two small kids”. Trinity says she and her children eat from food banks and “everything I’m wearing, apart from my hair, is from jumble [sales]”.

The welfare secretary, Esther McVey, has never conducted such a listening project. Instead she makes up her own fantasies about the effect of this government’s austerity. This summer she fabricated stories about the National Audit Office’s report into universal credit, for which she was later forced to apologise. A couple of months later, she told the Tory faithful that claims of cuts to disability benefits were “fake news”, just days after House of Commons research showed that the government planned almost £5bn of cuts to disability benefits.

The effect of those malicious government lies resounds through this afternoon. We hear how ministers talking of “shirkers” creates an environment in which people in wheelchairs are spat at. Still in his school uniform, 15-year-old Adam talks about boys being knifed in his suburb and links it to cuts in youth services, in policing, in schools. In this Victorian-built hall, where Sylvia Pankhurst once spoke and the GMB trade union was formed, he half-shouts, half-pleads with Alston: “Label this government as criminal, because that is what they are.”

Over the weekend, I asked Alston whether he heard any echoes between British experiences and the testimonies he heard last December while investigating Donald Trump’s US. “In many ways, you in the UK are far ahead of the US,” he said. He thinks “the Republicans would be ecstatic” to have pushed through the kind of austerity that the Tories have inflicted on the British.

Like others at the Guardian, I have been writing on the debacle of austerity Britain for years now. Rather than the goriest details, what strikes me is how normalised our country’s depravities have become over the course of this decade. Ordinary people speak in ordinary voices about horrors that are now quite ordinary. They go to food banks, which barely existed before David Cameron took office. Or they go days without food even in London, the city that has more multi-millionaires than any other. They spend their wages to rent houses that have mice or cockroaches or abusive landlords. Any decent society would see these details are shocking; yet they no longer shock anyone in that hall. What will remain with me of that afternoon is the sheer prosaic weight of the abuse being visited on ordinary people who could be my friends or family.

Alston has heard so many stories about the toxic failings of universal credit and the malice that is the disability benefits assessment scheme that he is in no doubt about the truth. The question for McVey, who is due to meet the UN party this week, will be how she responds to the weight of people’s lived experience. None of those giving evidence this afternoon want victim status. They are, as Trinity says, “survivors”. What they want is to be heard – and after that they want remedies.

Whether it’s Tony Blair and his “big conversation” or Cameron and his false belief that the Brexit vote was in the bag, leading British politicians don’t do listening – for the simple reason that they wouldn’t like what they’d hear. The evidence about austerity, about economic hollowing-out, about a shoulder-shrugging bureaucracy was all readily available before Alston flew over from the UN. But the government, like most of the press, didn’t want the truth to be acknowledged – because then it would be compelled to act. This is what Britain has been reduced to: hoping that a foreigner has the stomach and integrity to hear and record our decade of shame.

Why Sabarimala is surprising even Kerala, and why it is an opportunity

With all the claims of literacy, good healthcare system and the resultant general progressiveness of Kerala, it largely seemed like a reasonable expectation that women would just start going to the Sabarimala temple writes N P Ashley in The Indian Express

I find surprised, and even flabbergasted, Malayalis and non-Malayalis around me on the Sabarimala issue.

Even though a lot of people had reservations about the Supreme Court verdict which lifted the ban on women of menstrual ages from entering the Sabarimala temple, it was largely expected that, like the famous declaration of the Temple Entry Proclamation which allowed the lower caste groups temple entry in Kerala in 1936, women would just start going to the temple by and by. With all the claims of literacy, good healthcare system and the resultant general progressiveness of Kerala, it largely seemed like a reasonable expectation.

But events unfurled in quite a different way: the televised break down of law and order in the area, the rule of fear and insecurity that hovers around the state on this issue and the unending high-voltage discussions on mass and social media gave a sense of a state at siege. Though all parties are oath-bound and duty-bound to endorse the Constitution of India, and even when most parties at the national level have taken the official national position that there should be no ban on women only because of they are of the menstruating age (this includes the RSS and the Congress), their state leadership got so scared of the sentiments of their supporters and decided to resist the implementation of the court order through campaigns or even physically. The attempts have been so successful that not a single woman of the age between 10 and 50 have entered the inner sanctum of the temple to this day.

 

Women devotees at Sabarimala.

The typicality of Sabarimala

Three aspects of Kerala society throw light on the typicality of the developments: one, Kerala is a hyper consumerist, middle class society in which party supporters behave like consumers with a sense of entitlement. Politicians are only capable of giving what these supporters like and want. This should explain how the state committees of national parties have decided to take a position contradicting their national leadership. Two, though Kerala somersaulted into a global economy in 1970s itself, its values are completely feudal: a huge house, marrying off a daughter in all pomp and glory, and strict allegiance to family, community or party are still cherished.

The cocktail of feudal values and capitalist life-conditions provides the third aspect of the Kerala society: misogyny. Sabarimala is only one of the spaces in Kerala where women have no entry. Public spaces are largely inaccessible to unaccompanied women after nightfall, places of worship, festival venues and grounds are male homosocial havens, mass media and entertainment industries revolve around a handful of male icons, in many households women continue to belong to the kitchen and drawing rooms are still men’s, and lastly and most importantly, political and cultural discussions are held by men, of men and for men (even feminism is just another discussion topic for men!). In short, Kerala’s public sphere is saturated with male bodies and their understanding of the world.

This is not to belittle the amazing movements of the women in the last 30 years for the rights to body, property, work, dignity and presence. But the subcultural space of male bonding has defined itself against all such naming them to be feminist. The all too existing possibility that “feminist” in itself can be used as an allegation, like “terrorist” or “Maoist” in today’s Kerala should tell us something about contemporary Kerala. This becomes all the more revealing when compared with the moral ground that North Indian feminists have won against patriarchy on the ground, creating a new common sense, making it impossible even for the majoritarian right to oppose the Supreme Court verdicts on decriminalising homosexuality and lifting the ban on women to enter Sabarimala.

This is nothing new: though women’s rights were a crucial concern for the social justice project on caste reformation and economic restructuring called Kerala Renaissance (beginning in the early 20th century), men limited their participation to the level of ideas without extending it to bodies and spaces. Women continued to be in-charge of households, preparing children for a male chauvinist society and men continued to talk about things political and social. These women and their domestic spaces were addressed only by two entities: the religious organisations and by television serials (both were designed and developed by men again). Other than making fun of them and treating these as innocuous, men never had interrogations about the exclusivity of the spaces they held. Family WhatsApp groups seem to mould these sensibilities into community stories of victimhood and fear mongering. This blackhole of the Kerala public sphere must be acknowledged in the contemporary developments.

 

Kerala Renaissance: Archaic, Aestheticised or Unfinished?

Sabarimala women’s temple entry issue largely has four categories of people involved: Violent Ritualists (mostly male) who oppose women’s temple entry and believe that women who dare should be stopped using violence and terror, Anti-Violence Ritualists who oppose women’s temple entry but believe that use of violence and abuse by vigilante groups is unacceptable, Constitutionalists who believe that the verdict is, to borrow Gandhi’s words on the Temple Entry proclamation for the lower caste groups, one written in golden letters upholding constitutional morality and must be implemented by getting rid of the violent men at any cost, and Institutionalists who believe that though the judgment could have as well not come at all, now that it has, there is a need to respect the judgment and implement it, slowly and strategically.

All these groups seem equally lost about something or the other: Ritualists don’t know till how long they can hold the fort (every party has people who make contradictory statements is a good sign of it), Constitutionalists have not come up with any practical solution to the law and order troubles that might come up with what has now been construed as the “event of that single woman’s temple entry” (One of the questions they should consider answering is how did this “social vacuum” around Constitutional values come about!) and Institutionalists seem to be rather half-hearted about any actual step by any woman to enter the temple.

Among the four, the first, the Violent Ritualists, given how anti-social their acts have been merit no discussions. They need to be removed from the space and booked, along with their political patrons in the media and elsewhere, for their acts. The Anti-Violence Ritualists, Constitutionalists and Institutionalists can, and I believe they need to, hold conversations.

What would be the reference point of such conversations? Many are resorting to idealisation of the Kerala Renaissance which I find problematic in a discussion about women’s bodies for its very exclusive history on that front. Post 1970s Kerala has been such a different space that much of this rhetoric ring no bell with the life-realities of Malayalis now- as future cannot be in some past and nostalgia for it, it is unlikely to take anybody forward. Reviving any kind of golden past in itself is a regressive position.

Secondly, Kerala Renaissance has been made into an empty symbol to such a point that all sides are actually using the same images. The constitutionalists and institutionalists are constantly reminding people of the dark ages before the Kerala Renaissance while the Ritualists have used the photos of the Renaissance leaders on their “rath yathra” vehicle, and thus making them null entities politically.

The only useful and viable option is to see Kerala Renaissance as an unfinished project: one that talked of social justice for the backward castes like ezhavas while abandoning dalits and adivasis, one that spoke of women but never let them speak and one that believed in freedom from feudalism but without ever being able to come out of feudal values. Kerala Renaissance surely has, in it, a moment and a spirit that is ethical, inclusive and brave that can be captured but it cannot be a destination.

For this act of completion, let women sit together and come up with ethical, practical and effective solutions which are capable of redefining the very social values of the Malayali society. For once, men need to listen and just listen for the saturation they have caused is itself a huge part of the problem.

The underbelly of the state has come out right in the open, while the symptoms have always been there. Now this is an opportunity: let there be new thoughts, new imagery, new set of bodies from the receiving end changing the very paradigm towards a more egalitarian and more inclusive tomorrow. Kerala needs more and Malayalis deserve better!

Is there an Indian road to Equality

Ramachandra Guha

Surely it is not the politicians’ fault is it?

A dream fable from a strangely familiar land where people blame their politicians for their own failures writes Tabish Khair in The Hindu

I dreamt that I woke up in a foreign country with many languages, cultures and religions. It was also a country with a working democratic system and a Parliament full of different parties.

The people of this country, despite wide swathes of illiteracy, mostly participated in the political process, and often held strong views. But they tended to complain endlessly about their representatives. Some of them would aggressively — even violently — endorse one party against the other, but they would also castigate politicians in general.

“If only we had good politicians,” one of them lamented to me. “Yes,” added his friend, who actually supported a party in the Opposition. “All these politicians just play us against each other in order to win. They never think of the people and the country first. Sheer opportunists, all of them. With no moral, no character, nothing but a hunger for power.”

In my dream, I listened to them, and it sounded familiar. I had heard similar sentiments while awake too. But I was curious. I asked them to explain.

Two cults

“Well, you see,” one of them said. “We have various religions, but the major one is known as the cult of stone and the second biggest one is known as the cult of air.”

Ah, I said. That sounded familiar too. “And what do these, er, cultists look like?” I inquired.

“Look like?” he answered. “They look human, like me and him, of course!” He pointed to his friend, who — to my foreign eyes — looked almost like his twin. “My friend belongs to the cult of air: we call them Aerialists. I belong to the cult of stone: they call us Lithicists.”

Ok, I rejoined. “I don’t see any problem yet — let alone a problem your politicians can take advantage of.”

“No, you won’t, you don’t know the place,” the Aerialist responded. “But you see, we had this church in which we worshipped our god who cannot be seen, and the People’s Party of Aerialists claimed that it had been built on the spot where one of their visible gods had been born...”

“Not that you lot were actually using that Aerialist church,” the Lithicist rejoined with a laugh.

“Facts, my friend, facts. You are talking belief; we are talking facts. Your lot broke down our church by sheer force. You broke the law in the process,” the Aerialist responded.

The two friends paused at this point of disagreement and then agreed that, in any case, they did not care this way or that, and the matter would be decided in court before the next election.

“I still do not see how politicians can...,” I began to say, but I was interrupted by the two.

“That’s not the only issue the courts will decide before the next election,” the Lithicist interposed. “You see, the Aerialist Church has its own personal laws.”

“So do other churches here,” the Aerialist broke in.

“But my friend,” the Lithicist continued. “You will agree that your personal laws are a bit harsh on your women: the husbands obviously get more rights than the wives. Why, they even get more wives!”

The Aerialist looked a bit uncomfortable and waved away the issue. “I say, let the courts decide,” he replied. “They will, they will,” his friend laughed.

I was still quite confused in my dream. “Look here, gentlemen,” I objected. “It is not that I am unfamiliar with such controversies, but what I still do not understand is why you seem to be blaming all this on your politicians?”

Both of them replied together: “Because our politicians take advantage of such situations!”

“But how can they?” I asked, bewildered. “You have said that the courts will decide, and you have told me that you have a constitutional democracy and functioning courts in your country. If so, surely, the courts will decide against the conservative Lithicist position in the case of the demolished church and against the conservative Aerialist position in the case of the personal laws. I mean, you have already indicated that, in terms of law and justice, it was wrong to demolish the Aerialist church and that it is wrong of Aerialists to discriminate against women in their personal laws. So, problem solved: your courts will take the right decision before the elections and no politician will be able to use these issues again!”

Accepting court orders

Both the friends laughed incredulously at me.

“That is what you think, do you?” they scoffed. “Well, let me tell you, Mr. Foreigner (or maybe they said Mr. Dreamer), many Lithicists won’t accept a court order in favour of the Aerialist position on the matter of the demolished church, and many Aerialists will not accept a court order against their personal laws. So, do you know what will happen before the election if the courts take the correct decisions in both the cases? Mobs of Lithicists and Aerialists will be out in the streets protesting and smashing windows for different reasons, preventing reasonable voters from voting… The election will be totally polarised. Politicians!”

“Surely it is not the politicians’ fault if so many of you refuse to accept the correct...,” I started objecting, but that is when I woke up.

Should the rich pay more for the same services – and higher fines too?

Patrick Collinson in The Guardian

The government is considering a sliding scale of probate fees, an idea that could apply elsewhere


 

In Finland, speeding fines are based on the offender’s income. Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA

There was outrage this week when the government said it was pressing ahead with a new approach to charging for its role in probate (the legal process for settling your financial affairs on death). Instead of the current £155 flat fee for the paperwork, the government is considering a sliding scale of probate fees based on the value of the estate, from zero to £6,000 – even though the cost of the paperwork is virtually the same.

The Law Society – representing the solicitors who do probate work – says it’s unfair. “The cost to the courts for providing a grant of probate does not change whether the size of the estate is £10,000 or £1m.” It argues that this is no longer a fee but a “stealth” increase in inheritance tax.

Much steeper inheritance taxes are perfectly fine, but this back-door attempt to raise IHT will strike even soak-the-rich types as a bit odd. What next? Should a homebuyer pay a higher fee for local authority searches depending on the sale price of the property? Should your TV licence be based on your income? Should you pay a bigger fine for not having a TV licence, if you have an above-average income?

Actually, on the last one, plenty of countries do go down that path. In Finland – to which we must now genuflect on all things progressive – there is a system called “day fines”. If you commit a misdemeanour that may result in a fine issued by a public authority – such as a speeding ticket – then the size of the penalty is based on the person’s income.

In 2015, a millionaire in Finland was hit with a €54,000 (£4,700) fine for speeding, while in 2002 a Nokia executive received a €116,000 fine for speeding on his Harley Davidson motorcycle, and in 2001 a driver was punished with a €35,300 fine for going through a red light.

Behind the idea of bigger fines for the rich is the fear that they can “purchase” the right to commit offences, because the relative cost to them is immaterial. Anybody who speeds, or evades their TV licence, or who goes through a red light, is equally blameworthy, but the richer person is less deterred from repeating the offence because the fine is relatively meaningless.

Of course, this is all about misdemeanours. Surely there’s no read-across to pure government services? But there is: your family might produce the same amount of rubbish as a similar family on the other side of town, but you are already effectively paying a much higher price (through your council tax) for it to be collected if you live in a pricier house.

There may be more merit in a sliding scale for probate fees than first thought – and a very good case for making speeding and other fines payable according to income.

What the Working Class Is Still Trying to Tell Us

David Brooks in The New York Times



Republican supporters waited to enter a rally in Indiana where President Trump was campaigning days before the midterm elections. Credit Leah Klafczynski for The New York Times


I was ready for massive Democratic turnout for the election on Tuesday. But I was surprised how massive the Republican turnout was in response.

The Republicans who flooded to the polls weren’t college-educated suburbanites. Those people voted for Democrats this year.

They weren’t tax-cut fanatics. Half of the Republican members of the House Ways and Means Committee either left Congress, ran for other offices or were defeated.

They weren’t even small-government Republicans. The same red states that elected conservatives to office also — in Nebraska, Idaho and Utah — approved ballot initiatives to expand Medicaid. The same red states that elected conservatives also approved initiatives — in Arkansas and Missouri — to raise the minimum wage.

These were high-school-educated, working-class Republicans.

A lot of us pundits said Donald Trump should run a positive campaign bragging about all the economic growth. But Trump ran another American carnage campaign. That’s because American life still feels like carnage to many.

This is still a country in which nearly 20 percent of prime-age American men are not working full time. This is still a country in which only 37 percent of adults expect children to be better off financially than they are. This is still a country in which millions of new jobs are through “alternative work arrangements” like contracting or consulting — meaning no steady salary, no predictable hours and no security.

Working-class voters tried to send a message in 2016, and they are still trying to send it. The crucial question is whether America’s leaders will listen and respond.

One way to start doing that is to read Oren Cass’s absolutely brilliant new book, “The Once and Future Worker.” The first part of the book is about how we in the educated class have screwed up labor markets in ways that devalued work and made it harder for people in the working class to find a satisfying job.

Part of the problem is misplaced priorities. For the last several decades, American economic policy has been pinioned on one goal: expanding G.D.P. We measure G.D.P. We talk incessantly about economic growth. Between 1975 and 2015, American G.D.P. increased threefold. But what good is that growth if it means that a thick slice of America is discarded for efficiency reasons? 

Similarly, for the last several decades American, welfare policy has focused on consumption — giving money to the poor so they can consume more. Yet we have not successfully helped poor people produce more so that they can take control of their own lives. We now spend more than $20,000 a year in means-tested government spending per person in poverty. And yet the average poverty rate for 2000 to 2015 was higher than it was for 1970 to 1985.

“What if people’s ability to produce matters more than how much they can consume?” Cass asks.

The bulk of his book is a series of ideas for how we can reform labor markets.

For example, Cass supports academic tracking. Right now, we have a one-size-fits-all education system. Everybody should go to college. The problem is that roughly one-fifth of our students fail to graduate high school in four years; roughly one-fifth take no further schooling after high school; roughly one-fifth drop out of college; roughly one-fifth get a job that doesn’t require the degree they just earned; and roughly one-fifth actually navigate the path the system is built around — from school to career.

We build a broken system and then ask people to try to fit into the system instead of tailoring a system around people’s actual needs.

Cass suggests that we instead do what nearly every other affluent nation does: Let students, starting in high school, decide whether they want to be on an apprenticeship track or an academic track. Vocational and technical schools are ubiquitous across the developed world, and yet that model is mostly rejected here.

Cass also supports worker co-ops. Today, we have an old, adversarial labor union model that is inappropriate for the gig economy and uninteresting to most private-sector workers. But co-ops, drawing on more successful models used in several European nations, could represent workers in negotiations, train and retrain workers as they moved from firm to firm and build a safety net for periods of unemployment. Shopping for a worker co-op would be more like buying a gym membership. Each co-op would be a community and service provider to address a range of each worker’s needs.

Cass has many other proposals — wage subsidies, immigration reforms. But he’s really trying to put work, and the dignity of work, at the center of our culture and concern. In the 1970s and 1980s, he points out, the Emmy Award-winning TV shows were about blue-collar families: “All in the Family,” “Taxi,” “Cheers,” “The Wonder Years.” Now the Emmy-winning shows are mostly about white-collar adults working in Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, New York and Washington. 

We in the college-educated sliver have built a culture, an economy and a political system that are all about ourselves. It’s time to pass labor market reforms that will make life decent for everybody.