The first I came across her was as a market on PredictIt, in which you could wager on whether she'd meet either of the thresholds for inclusion in the first debate. I looked her up and learned she was some kooky self-help lady with a lot of wealthy Oprah types in her corner. I wrote her off.
In the first debate, she dropped a line about how the US is overprescribed medication, which Lester Holt or someone promptly cut off (not that I disagreed with her statement, insofar as I heard it) and solidified her meme status by shouting out Jacinda Ardern in one of the most memorable debate moments I can remember:
It was fun to make fun of her, but something seized me about this moment: I noticed just how incredulous I was that anyone could make the US the best place in the world for a child to grow up. We talk a lot about expanding the Overton Window with regards to taxes and Medicare and other "wonkery," as she put it, but aiming to make the US a nurturing place seemed even beyond any of that. No one really takes it seriously when politicians weepily speak of the importance of the next generation; it's usually in more of a "values" context, which is a permuted and cynical appeal to nostalgia and gauzy sentiment. Creating a place that cared about education and safety and a sense of community seemed, not even bygone, just out of place in this country.
I started wondering why that was, and why Americans had gotten so inured to the spiritual despair we tolerate here. After looking into her a little bit more, I started to wonder why it wasn't proper for a political candidate to speak to our social malaise directly.
I'm generally on board with the idea that our national politics now resides in a post-practical world of pure ideology. That a winning candidate is one who largely sets the moral and cultural agenda in a way that ignites the base, and an effective president is one who can appoints the right bureaucrats to execute their vision. If setting priorities is the main job of a presidential candidate, then... what was wrong with Marianne Williamson? Her political priorities, I had concluded, were generally the first I would adopt if I could wave a magic wand over the country.
I'd also recently realized that I was being a pussy when it came to backing a candidate. From Hillary on, I've been assessing my personal feelings towards candidates in light of my assessment of their electability. It's not a completely crazy idea, because we all want to defeat Trump. But my mom, of all people, actually called me out on it. She challenged me to identify and support the candidate who, essentially, aligned most with my political goals, and not to worry about electability. Once I heard it, I knew she was right. Worrying about the Vegas odds of a candidate didn't help me at all in 2016, when I was completely wrong about Hillary, and worse, allowed me to hide and not own up to my own preferences. I tested out being a Bernie supporter (including by going to his launch rally in Brooklyn), then Beto, then Warren, the Buttigieg, even Yang. (My Yang phase might still be nigh.) But none of them felt super great.
When Williamson spoke, however, I found myself vigorously nodding more than at any other candidate. In the second debate, she made reference to the obvious-to-me notion that any dollar spent helping someone "thrive" is a profit-inducing investment into the economy. (I mean, this is a basic neoliberal argument. "We should have public schools so our workforce can compete." Come on.) Once I found out she was as comfortable invoking the benefits of the free market as talking about love, I was even more intrigued.
To be sure, I hated all the woo-woo talk. I don't respond to language about "the politics of love," I hate guru culture, and I want a hard-headed pragmatist to run things. But given the chance to explain herself, Williamson was pretty prosaic in important ways. Her defense of reparations was rooted in the idea of spiritual penance, which is appropriate, but she also went out on the limb of proposing a dollar amount. (The unlikelihood of this policy is besides the point; she brought it up and gave it a number.) She didn't really want to eradicate private insurance—which even though I like the sound of, I concede would be more chaotic than progressive without decades' worth of build-up.
And even though I didn't like the hippie spiritual crystals talk, I had come to conclude what David Brooks, of all people, put well in his column on Williamson: that she alone spoke to the truth of Trump as cultural phenomenon, and that he must be met with a counteracting force operating on the same level.
This election is not about [policy]. This election is about who we are as a people, our national character. This election is about the moral atmosphere in which we raise our children... Trump is a cultural revolutionary, not a policy revolutionary. He operates and is subtly changing America at a much deeper level...
She is right about this: “We’ve never dealt with a figure like this in American history before. This man, our president, is not just a politician; he’s a phenomenon. And an insider political game will not be able to defeat it. … The only thing that will defeat him is if we have a phenomenon of equal force, and that phenomenon is a moral uprising of the American people.”
I really hate giving Trump any credit (he is not a phenomenon, in my opinion, but rather a one-trick bitter old man whose base personal instincts align with the body politic's primal scream) but he has certainly captured the moral imagination of the United States and aggressively pushed it downward.
Again: why not combat this on the same level? I've already written off the American electorate as basically retarded, so why not give them someone who speaks on Trumpian terms?
Now, I write this on surely the tail end of my Williamson fascination. I just listened to her on Chapo, and while she had her moments, and is genuinely one of the most impressive extemporizers I've seen in politics, she also dipped into the New Age well a little too liberally. Some of her best log lines felt canned, and arguably from a policy angle, she's even to the right of me. (She hesitated to criticize the military and private insurance, two institutions in need of savage and relentless rhetorical kneecapping.) Her electability, which I cannot help from at least consulting, is low.
But she is a great speaker and, honestly, probably the person who has best articulated what I feel about the situation we see ourselves in. I want to preserve the line she had about the humanistic dimension of capitalism, which I thought was fantastically stated. This comes from the 11:15 mark of the interview:
The kind of capitalism that is being practiced today, the kind completely untethered from any kind of moral or ethical consideration, [this is one of her canned lines], requires cheap labor in order to thrive. And that's why I recognize that that kind of an economic system is ultimately tyrannous. [This is the part I really like:] It has no plans to really allow for the liberation of people and the genuine actualization of democracy, because that is contrary and inconvenient to its economic purposes.
I think a lot of the conversation we've been having recently about 'capitalism' and 'socialism' is a little juvenile. I mean, what do you call the police department if not socialist? The fire department? I think capitalism, while it can create great economic opportunity, does not inherently take care of everybody. Socialism, while it is more prone to taking care of everybody, does not necessarily create a lot of economic opportunity.
Simple statements, sure, but these are striking at some pretty core dynamics within the thinking that I am doing at the moment. I want capitalism, I recognize its benefits, but I want it trammeled by "moral and ethical considerations," in her words, or in my words, by a superseding sense of belonging in a larger community.
So anyway, we'll see where this goes. I don't think Marianne Williamson is going to be around long enough in this race to really shake up any more debates, but in the time that she's been here, she's provoked a lot of questions I not only can't wave away, but that I actually want to be present at the core of the debate about what and who we are right now.
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