Accumulating Insecurity: Violence and Dispossession in the Making of Everyday Life

2 Poverty as an Everyday State of Exception

49 CHAPTER TWO Poverty as an Everyday State of Exception Julie A. Nice THE WAR ON WELFARE Among developed nations, the United States boasts one of the highest rates of per capita income, while maintaining the highest child poverty rate and one of the highest overall poverty rates (whether measured in relative or absolute terms). Income inequality is widening, as our national policies over the last three decades have doubled the share of after-tax income going to the top one percent of households and have tripled the income gap between rich and poor. Economic insecurity is widespread, with two-thirds of all Americans turning to welfare at some point between the ages of twenty and sixty-five, and 90 percent of those seeking out welfare more than once (Rank 2004, 104–05). Yet, lawmakers have surrendered their brief war on poverty and instead declared war on welfare, demonizing impoverished mothers who fail to secure sufficient income for their children through either work or marriage (Handler and Hasenfeld 2007). In short, the metaphor of war has reversed its aim, no longer focused on ending poverty, but now targeting welfare dependence as the greater danger. By its own terms, the war on welfare has been an astounding success, with the average number of recipients reduced by approximately 70 percent over the last fifteen years. This dramatic elimination of over ten million recipients from the welfare rolls has challenged the canonical thesis advanced by Piven and Cloward (1971) that the state keeps poor people within its ranks to regulate their behavior. While the less than four million recipients who remain on the welfare rolls continue to be subjected to comprehensive regulation and surveillance of their work and family lives, the reality is that most impoverished families have 50 • Julie A. Nice been abandoned by the state (Gilliom 2001). They are left to the disciplining vagaries of the low-wage labor market, where one quarter of American workers receive low wages (which is double the average percentage of low-wage workers in other developed nations). Yet, the American commitment to neoliberalism appears to have survived the recent stress test provided by the longest and deepest recession since the Great Depression. Perhaps more surprisingly, only a few constitutional law scholars identify anything extraordinary or invidious about the American treatment of poor people (e.g., Forbath 1999; Hershkoff 1999; Loffredo 1993, 2007). Rather, the mainstream consensus perpetuates the belief that poor people have been included within the constitutional regime in standard fashion. This chapter is grounded on two observations departing from this mainstream consensus: first, the interests of poor people are largely absent from discourse within the realms of law, policy, and politics in the United States; and second, meaningful concern about the plight of poor people specifically, and about economic justice generally, is virtually unintelligible within American law. I have characterized this elsewhere as a “dialogic default” on the issue of economic justice (Nice 2008). More specifically, poor people lack meaningful constitutional protection, legal entitlement, policy consideration, or political mobilization, leaving them to eke out a meager subsistence that brings into stark relief the “bare life” in the state of abandonment so provocatively imagined by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. This chapter explores how American law has accomplished the abandonment of poor people in ways Agamben theorized, particularly through excluding by including (“inclusive exclusion”) and by treating poverty as an everyday “state of exception” that both constitutes and legitimates abandonment. Agamben’s analysis thus brings into focus what otherwise remains blurred in the background, namely, how the inclusive exclusion of poor people traps them in a perpetual relation of abandonment. Agamben’s analysis seems to predict no relief for the dire straits of poor people precisely because the ambiguity of the relation of abandonment makes it so very difficult, if not impossible, to break. The first part of this chapter briefly summarizes some of Agamben’s pertinent insights, and the second part uses his conceptualization to consider the specific juridical mechanisms that accomplish the abandonment of poor people. These methods include: first, the doctrinal deconstitutionalization that has created dual rules of law based on economic status; second, the legislative disentitlement effectuated by welfare reform; third, the political economy of welfare policy experimentation that has culminated in “reverse capture” of researchers by government policymakers; and, finally, the general political Poverty as Everyday State of Exception • 51 demobilization of those most impoverished. The chapter’s...