WASHINGTON — America has a big problem, Marianne Williamson tells a nearly full reception room in early March in Union Station. It’s our mindset.
“This country is now in the grip of an economic mindset,” she warns. She lists a few descriptors: neoliberalism, free market capitalism, crony capitalism, “hypercapitalism.” There may be some fine distinctions among these mindsets, but for Williamson, they amount to the same thing: entrenched injustice, a sociopathic economic system, a system of legalized bribery — in short, a state of affairs that can only be resolved through massive social upheaval. “That’s our job,” she says.
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“The people who are in power either don’t have the solutions or do not deeply support the solutions. And people who have the solutions do not have the power,” she says. “Let the people get in there. We’ll handle it from here.”
This is the message of Marianne 2024, the grittier reboot of a Democratic presidential campaign that four years ago was dismissed as the hobby of an aging crystal lady. Everyone laughed in June 2019 when Williamson claimed at a primary debate that there were “dark psychic forces” at work in Donald Trump’s America. But less than a year later, the arrival of the pandemic seemed to vindicate her diagnosis. The country ground to a halt. Schools and churches closed. The economy crashed. The months of civic suspension that followed occasioned a summer of racial unrest, a contested presidential election, and a riot in the Capitol building. And when Joe Biden took the reins from Trump, very little seemed to change. The rate of suicide continued apace. Bridges collapsed and trains derailed. Inflation soared. If Biden’s presidency so far has shown Williamson anything, it is that no one man can have custody of the dark psychic forces.
“I’m so glad that President Trump did not win the last election: That means we didn’t go over the cliff,” she says. “But we are still 6 inches away from it.”
Williamson thinks only the most dramatic measures can save the country. She wants universal healthcare, free college and the cancellation of all existing student loan debt, a raft of family policies, a wealth tax, prohibitions on dark money in politics, and a transition to a green economy. These were certainly not Trump’s priorities. And while Biden may give lip service to some of them, Williamson sees him and other Democrats as limited by an “oligarchic system” in which “corporate profits take precedence over the good of the people.” Her vision is different and, she says, untainted by the nihilism and cynicism that has marked Washington politics since World War II.
Williamson would know about cynicism since she is a Washingtonian herself. She moved to the city shortly after dropping out of the 2020 presidential race and became a fixture on the activist circuit. She told reporters that she was just keeping “an ear to the ground” and learning about the mechanics of politics in the Capital, but she was always preparing for another run. In October 2021, she appeared onstage with Andrew Yang, another 2020 long shot, and told a crowd that it was a shame that the United States wasn’t like “any other advanced democracy” where “they have multiple political parties.” The last time I saw her, a few months beforehand, she was fumbling with a glow-up kit on Capitol Hill at about midnight. She had rushed up to the Capitol steps to self-record a media hit, anxious to be included as a dissenting voice along with Reps. Cori Bush (D-MO), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), when Congress decided to end its COVID-era moratorium on rent payments. “Somehow, we have to develop a constituency of conscience,” Williamson sighed as a small crowd gawked at her.
Insofar as Williamson does have a constituency, it has always been made up of people driven by conscience, or at least people with the luxury of parading their consciences in public. Williamson is one of these people herself. She was raised by parents who took public morality very seriously, to the point that her father once flew her to Saigon to demonstrate the grave evil of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. When she was still beginning her career as a spiritual and self-help guru, she raised her profile in Los Angeles by giving speeches around the city to raise awareness about the AIDS crisis. And during the darkest moments of Bill Clinton’s presidency, she served as an adviser to Hillary Clinton, organizing retreats and counseling sessions for the beleaguered first lady.
In the past few years, as Williamson has become more enmeshed in Washington, she has grown beyond her old world. But her spiritually inflected self-help attitude still animates her approach to politics, often in ways that positively distinguish her from her rivals. Unlike most other professional politicians, Williamson’s posture is perfect, her skin luminous, and her suits well-brushed, never wrinkled. She does not sweat. She always stays on message and speaks from memory. (“Never, never a teleprompter,” a staffer told me.) When she wants to move through a crowd, it parts before her as if on command.
But she also still sounds a lot like a self-help guru with her frequent references to mindsets and her moral pronouncements that often spiral upward into abstraction. Williamson is clearly aware that some of her verbal tics discredit her — she admits that in the first campaign, it was easy to write her off as “kooky” — and for the revamped run, she has dropped the “politics of love” shtick in favor of hard-hat economic talking points. Her announcement speech makes no reference to the great social debates of the last half-decade, racism, transgenderism, or cancel culture, and explicitly endorses the founders as heroic men whose moral ideals are those to which all citizens of this country should aspire. She doesn’t use the word socialist to describe herself because she doesn’t need to. Everyone listening is already familiar. In fact, everything Williamson says sounds suspiciously like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in 2016, to the point that a cynic might wonder if Williamson just has been practicing his old lines.
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Because, after all, none of it seems natural. And sometimes, the old crazy eyes still peek out from this newly disciplined face. “The reason we have such a problem today is because it is not one specific institution that plagues us,” Williamson exclaims midway through her announcement speech. “It’s not one institution this time. It’s like an atomizer sprayer of economic injustice.” Dark psychic forces, atomizer sprayer: There’s not much difference between these formulations. In each case, Williamson points to massive, unseen powers beyond anyone’s reach, pushing the country toward a doom from which not even she can rescue it. “I am not naive about the forces that have no intention of allowing anyone into this conversation who does not align with their predetermined agenda,” she admits. Still, she begs her audience to “reject within ourselves the nihilism, reject within ourselves the cynicism, reject within ourselves the personal anger,” and march with her to battle the forces of injustice and, maybe, defeat them.
When Williamson’s rhetoric reaches the upper registers of its moral loftiness, those in the back of the room begin to melt away. “Americans shouldn’t have to limit their political imaginations,” she declares. But why heedlessly unlimit them? There’s a reason why neither Republicans nor Democrats talk or act like Marianne Williamson. Even if she makes a splash in the primaries, idealism alone won’t get her nominated, much less elected. In politics, a moral victory is just another phrase for a loss.
Nic Rowan is the managing editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary journal.
