From Peace Pops to Capitol cops, Ben and Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen has long been a pioneer of cause-based marketing. This week, he took his kabuki dance to the Senate where his long-time friend and beneficiary Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was co-chairing what was supposed to be a serious event.
Cohen’s antics on Wednesday at a budget hearing the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP Committee held to probe Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on proposed cuts played to the ice cream man’s “can’t pin me down” brand as he lashed out from the peanut gallery. Because he was being deliberately disruptive — after all he was not an invited panelist, though Sanders surely knew he’d be there — he was escorted out of the room and arrested.
All of this not only delighted his fellow Vermonter, but upstaged President Donald Trump’s Mideast tour, as televisions across that region featured the
“Congress kills poor kids in Gaza by buying bombs, and pays for it by kicking kids off Medicaid in the US,” Ben blurted in a clip that lit up the evening news for delighted Arab audiences, and perhaps some Persian ones too. It was a banner day for the not-particularly-observant Jew. A few years back, he made waves on Levant shores by boycotting Israel — a hot country that could probably appreciate some cool ice cream — because of its West Bank policies.
Just last week, the same Ben Cohen was a guest on Tucker Carlson’s interview program on X. There the supposed hippie from Vermont found common cause with Carlson’s dim view of U.S. overseas entanglements and spoke out against America’s role the Ukraine war as well as what he sees as the national security establishment’s war-gaming against Iran. You have to hand it to Tucker Carlson for breaking the mold when it comes to outspoken guests.
Yet Wednesday’s performance goes beyond the performative skills of one multi-millionaire with opinions, it highlights the current strategy of a once dominant political party that has for the last six months been flailing like a fish pulled from the sea and dropped on the deck of a boat. Having slowly come to realize that the “Deep State” form of resistance on which Democrats relied from 2017-2021 turned out to be a bust, they are now taking their act to the streets.
Witness the theatrics of Newark, NJ Mayor Ras Baraka, who managed to get himself arrested for trespassing last week when he led a people power assault on an ICE facility. This may have even inspired Cohen, who knows. But as the mainstream media clutched their pearls over federal authorities detaining an elected mayor, the intentionality of the stunt got less coverage. It is altogether consistent with the activity of Democrats elsewhere, even in the Maine Legislature, as they spur resistance to immigration enforcement actions.
Aging Boomer Dems have fond if hazy memories of what a blast the 1960s were when they marched against the Vietnam War. Meanwhile an angrier and more dystopian youth wing of the party, epitomized by Democratic National Committee co-chair David Hogg, wants to purge the senior citizens — and not entirely without reason either. But pragmatists like James Carville call Hogg a “contemptible little twerp” bent on a campaign of “jackassery.” Can civil disobedience bridge this demographic divide?
Having secured two of the three legs of national political power in 2020, Democrats were in the awkward position of being unable to “resist” a government they then fully controlled. Instead, they sought to consolidate that control by expanding the administrative state. Now, having lost both of those commanding heights after last November’s wipe-out election, they are free to beat their chests and howl at the moon, bemoaning cuts to an unaffordable government as being fundamentally inhumane.
The pivot from, in recent years, abusing state power to arrest and prosecute their political opponents to, having seen a convicted felon elected president in an apparent rejection of legal weaponization, becoming outlaws themselves would be head-spinning were it not so increasingly common in modern politics.
Will it work? Stay tuned. In the meantime, getting arrested seems like a good enough strategy for the klieg lights anyhow.
