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The Anti-BDS Bill

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Clarissa

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Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) supports the outlandishly bad bill that would make supporting BDS a felony. This is so sad. McCaskill is local (from across the river in Missouri), and I used to like her. What, what could possibly possess a good, normally intelligent senator from Missouri to support this disaster of a bill? This is the measure that gets bipartisan support, really?

I’m sure most people with a functioning brain realize that this bill is about a whole lot more than the BDS. To paraphrase Bauman, the only freedom that you don’t have in neoliberal societies is the freedom not to shop. The space of politics is now almost entirely colonized by monetary transactions. The anti-BDS bill strives to make a refusal to shop into a crime. Because there is nothing that neoliberalism detests more than defective consumers who, for whatever reason, abstain from buying. 

2 responses to “The Anti-BDS Bill”

  1. Vic Crain Avatar
    Vic Crain

    I hadn’t paid attention to this, and couldn’t make sense of your comment, so I looked BDS up. The links I found identify it as an economic movement (pro-Palestinian) to undercut business and political support for Israel. Thus the law isn’t “anti-shopping” but it seems to be “anti-free speech” as boycotts were defined during the civil rights movement as legal expressions of dissent. Unfortunately, few in Congress seem to care about that right these days, and we’ve learned that the Alt Right/Klan/Nazis can use that right to promote abhorrent ideas.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I like to look beyond the rhetoric of free speech on occasion and see what it conceals. It’s definitely an issue here but I’m also seeing a feature of neoliberal mentality where everything is about consumer choices.

      This is now my research interest, so I will go on and on about neoliberalism forever.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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