Marianne Williamson’s ‘Department of Peace’ is a bonkers idea that’s totally necessary

Between full-throated support for slavery reparations, fighting against “dark energy,” and a questionable record of skepticism toward modern medicine, author-turned-Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson is like America’s crazy aunt. But many of the candidate’s ideas, while bonkers in practice, hit on a kernel of truth — and her latest proposal for a federal Department of Peace is no exception.

Williamson unveiled her formal proposal on her campaign site Monday, outlining in broad terms what the Department of Peace would look like. The candidate wrote that “Through support of my candidacy for president of the United States, you can help alter the course of our nation and model peace for our world. This campaign to establish a U.S. Department of Peace is the first step in dismantling our systemically entrenched perpetuation of violence.”

Williamson’s language is, per usual, overly flowery and eerily reminiscent of a California yoga instructor high on mushrooms. Her plan emphasizes a “focus on restorative and healing oriented approaches.” The details of her plan are all over the place, with parts of the proposal making little sense. But her underlying point, that the U.S. needs to radically rethink its love affair with endless war, rings completely true.

As Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, has routinely lambasted, “We’re at war with at least eight different groups and in 20 different countries.” Prolonged conflicts in Middle Eastern countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq have claimed hundreds of thousands of civilian lives and trillions of dollars, with the war in Afghanistan now approaching 18 years and counting. The U.S. has troops stationed in almost 150 countries worldwide, and thanks to the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, the president doesn’t even need proper constitutional permission from Congress before engaging in acts of war.

According to Brown University’s Cost of War project, a conservative estimate indicates that nearly half a million people have died in our post Sept. 11 conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. This includes almost 7,000 of our brave military members and service people, buried by grieving families and largely forgotten in the never-ending news cycle. All this death comes only in the course of endless regime change wars that lack a clearly defined purpose or obvious advancement of American interests. Meanwhile, the people pushing these wars largely do so from think tanks on Capitol Hill, far removed from the costs of war.

Williamson is not crazy to suggest that we need more voices and institutions working to advance peace in our federal government. No, we probably don’t need another bloated federal bureaucracy full of people pushing around pencils and collecting taxpayer funded pensions. At the same time, we have decided to make over $700 billion available for defense spending, the most in the world and more than the next seven countries combined. If we’re going to spend all that money anyway, it’s hard to see why a couple dozen billion couldn’t be re-appropriated and used to promote peace in our government rather than endless war and death.

Still, the idea of a “Department of Peace” is, admittedly, far-fetched. But Williamson deserves credit for at least trying to address the culture of endless war, or “systemically entrenched perpetuation of violence,” that’s plaguing our government. Even an unrealistic effort is more than establishment swamp dwellers from either party have ever done to promote peace.