WASHINGTON — “American politics has become amoral,” Marianne Williamson tells me as we take a seat in the front row of Howard University’s Cramton Auditorium. She’s just finished guest preaching at the school’s Sunday chapel service, delivering a sermon equal parts fire, brimstone, and stump speech, and she’s not pleased with the Democratic Party.
Politics should be an inherently moral activity, Williamson says. And the Democratic Party, in its eagerness to be “people-pleasing,” has lost much ground to the Right in recent decades precisely because the party is so squeamish about legislating what’s often derided as “traditional” morality.
“I grew up in a time when the Left talked about morality as much as the Right did. We just talked about public morality,” Williamson says. “It was around the ’80s and ’90s that some people in the Democratic Party started acting like they were too cool to use the word. That was very detrimental to the soul of the Democratic Party and to the electoral prospects of the Democratic Party.”
She leans forward, eyes laser-focused on an audience of one.
“People are hardwired,” she says. “The conscience is inborn in us: morality and patriotism. If you don’t give people the real thing, they’ll go with the ersatz version.”
And for her, current Democratic leadership is the ersatz version. President Trump is definitely the ersatz version. In fact, everything broken and messed up about American life is, according to this political philosophy, the product of a lazy, uncaring political class unwilling or unable to differentiate between phony probity and the real thing.
Welcome to Marianne Williamson’s “Spirit of America” tour, a national gut-check in search of our lost spark of, not divinity exactly, but something close to it.
Williamson’s got a laundry list of problems to solve: slavery, oppression of women, white nationalism, segregation, mass incarceration, poverty, homelessness, and economic inequality, to name a few. Ideally, Williamson says, she will return not only the Democratic Party, but the entire nation from its “aberrational chapter” to a society that provides a “higher moral vision” for itself.
Williamson’s candidacy is a mass communing with the spirit of America.
The chances of success seem to be shrinking by the day. Williamson is not polling well nationally. She hasn’t made the debate stage since July. She doesn’t have tons of cash on hand. None of that seems to worry her: Williamson has no plans to drop out of the race.
And even if she finally does decide to leave the race, she always has other ways to revive the spirit of America. This campaign isn’t even Williamson’s first shot at reforming the nation through the White House. In late 1994, while riding her fame as a bestselling author of New Age books, Williamson befriended then-first lady Hillary Clinton. The two met over lunch and hit it off, and Williamson soon became one of the Clintons’ many guests to spend a night in the Lincoln bedroom.
Hillary asked Williamson that year to organize a retreat for her and Bill at Camp David to discuss their turbulent first two years in office. The sessions proved fruitful. In 1995, Hillary enlisted the spiritualist Jean Houston, whom she met at the retreat, to help her converse at the White House with her inner Eleanor Roosevelt and Mahatma Gandhi. Houston also encouraged Hillary to speak with Jesus, but Hillary declined. It would be too personal, she said.
Hillary was wary of appearing too close with Williamson. After Esquire published a piece in December 1994 claiming that the two had “become tight,” the first lady fired off a furious letter to the editor.
“I suppose that no matter what I do — or do not do — I will be criticized and exploited,” Hillary wrote, adding that she had “no gurus, spiritual advisers, or any other New Age alternative” in her service.
But even if Hillary thought she was too cool for the likes of Williamson, her words betrayed her. In her 1998 commencement address at Howard, Clinton exhorted the graduating students to remember these words: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are all powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.”
Clinton attributed the quote to Nelson Mandela, but she should have given the credit to Williamson. The passage comes from the author’s 1992 New York Times bestseller A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles.
When introducing Williamson at Howard, Rev. Bernard Richardson, the dean of the chapel, recalled this same passage as “an anthem for a contemporary generation of seekers.” A Return to Love is the foundation of Williamson’s fame. Although she’s written other bestsellers and addressed many crowds over the past three decades, this spiritual self-help book is still the source of her speaking authority.
And her authority on all things spiritual allows her to deliver her sermon at Howard. The speech is part of a larger college tour, which includes stops at Yale, Cornell, and George Washington University. It’s a throwback to the turn of the last century, when liberal reformers ran the college circuit to preach on topics of women’s suffrage, wage reform, and temperance.
These days, Williamson is surpassing her reputation as a crystal lady, has accepted that mantle, invoking the “path of social justice” that through American history has guided the abolitionists, suffragettes, and the civil rights movement. Her message plays well at Howard, especially when Williamson makes her case for reparations.
In her mind, “race-based” policies such as affirmative action and job creation programs are good but essentially “paternalistic.” These are the “mechanistic” solutions of a Democratic Party trapped in the liberalism of the mid-20th century. Reparations, Williamson says, will take these solutions to a “much more uplifted place.”
“Reparations carry moral force,” she says. “They carry psychological power and emotional and spiritual power because there is an inherent mea culpa. There is an inherent acknowledgment of a debt that is owed, of a wrong that was done and a willingness on the part of the people to pay that debt.”
This commitment to placing morality at the fore of political considerations is what launched Williamson into the national consciousness in July. At that month’s Democratic primary debate, she reamed Sen. Elizabeth Warren for believing that “wonkiness is going to deal with this dark psychic force of collectivized hatred that this president is bringing up in the country.” More recently, she laid into her old friend Hillary for suggesting fellow 2020 candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard a “Russian asset.”
“The Democratic establishment has got to stop smearing women it finds inconvenient!” she tweeted in October. “The character assassination of women who don’t toe the party line will backfire.”
It’s fitting that Williamson would level her criticism at these two women. Hillary represents the party’s past dreams of an amoral technocracy: the Defense of Marriage Act, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill. Warren represents its hopes for “big structural change”: the Green New Deal, universal healthcare, and a sweeping wealth tax.
But both of these paths, Williamson believes, will be disastrous for her party.
“No more moral relativism. No, no, no,” she scolds in her sermon.
Williamson believes she is the only one in the still-massive Democratic field who offers an alternative to these bloodless technocratic paths laid out by Clinton and Warren. Never mind South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s attempts to take up the mantle of Jimmy Carter’s left-wing Christianity. Forget Beto O’Rourke’s recent proposal to legislate morality by revoking tax exemptions for religious institutions that oppose same-sex marriage. Religious and moral posturing, more often than not, Williamson tells me, are cynical ploys to capture votes.
“We have to do more than figure out that the words did well in a focus group,” she says. “We need to do more than just use the words. We have to actually talk about transformative changes in public policy that represent a higher moral vision.”
But just what that “higher moral vision” looks like is a sticking point for Williamson. After her breakout moment in July, she attracted the support not just of lifelong Democrats, but of social conservatives as well. Here, at last, was someone who recognized that politics is the collective pursuit of a common good. No moral vacuums here.
Even now, as we conclude our conversation, Williamson seems to be endorsing that notion.
“We have to call out public policy that hides behind the idea of morality which is so obviously counter to everything that God’s love stands for,” she says.
It sounds like Augustine; it sounds like the church fathers. Yet there is something lacking in Williamson’s politics, and it’s what makes her distinctly American.
For even with all her talk about morality, Williamson is careful not to infringe upon the most precious American value: privacy. Her laundry list of social ills mostly concerns “public morality.” And although slavery, poverty, and homelessness affect people on a very personal level, they are distinctly public problems.
It’s the problems of “private morality” where Williamson stops short. The really thorny issues like abortion and the coming headache over transgender rights aren’t up for discussion. Here is where Williamson is comfortable drawing a Cartesian line through the soul of the nation, allowing some issues to be “moral” — and the rest to be forgotten.
“Abortion is a moral issue, but I do not believe the government of the United States has the right to legislate our private morals,” she writes in her platform on reproductive rights.
This is a throwback to the “safe, legal, and rare” Democratic line of the Clinton era. And that approach to politics seems to be, as Williamson has said, well, amoral.
Nic Rowan is a media analyst at the Washington Free Beacon.
