Marianne Williamson announced last week that she will be the first candidate to challenge Joe Biden for the 2024 Democratic nomination. In light of this news, I am issuing a humble request: Can we all just be normal about her this time around?
The last time the self-help author and spiritual influencer ran for president, in 2019, left-of-center tastemakers went gaga for her touchy-feely vibes and self-empowerment shtick. To some, she made for an entertaining meme, a chance to make jokes about crystals and Sailor Moon. Others were sincerely besotted. Progressive celebrities praised her rhetoric on health care (what she calls “sickness care”) and hosted fundraisers for her campaign. A New York Times journalist beseeched voters to take Williamson seriously, calling her “the most radical/rational person” on the debate stage.
There is nothing wrong with enjoying Williamson’s essays about harnessing the power of positive thinking, or her sermons about God as an all-loving being who accepts us exactly as we are. But the eagerness of otherwise intelligent political observers to praise Williamson for adding a needed perspective to the Democratic political discourse—or even to half-jokingly thank her for bringing healing vibes to a real downer of a presidential race—was embarrassing in 2019. After all the country has been through since then, it would be even sillier now.
Some long-shot candidates play a valuable role in democracy by pushing the major candidates to the right or left and forcing them to discuss specific policy points. (Andrew Yang and his single-issue campaign for universal basic income is a good example.) Williamson is not that candidate. She has said, over and over again, that politics and policy are not the answer to America’s problems, even as she (purportedly in all earnestness) has sought the nomination of a major political party to run the U.S. government. (It’s a lot easier to get on a debate stage in a party primary than as a third-party candidate in the general election, see?)
And when she does deign to talk policy, she phones it in. The pillars of Williamson’s campaign, the Washington Post reports, are universal health care, free college, paid family leave, free child care, and raising the minimum wage—in other words, nothing new, and exactly what progressive Democrats with actual political influence have already been lobbying Biden and other centrist Democrats to support.
It remains unclear how much attention Williamson will suck up in the 2024 race. The Democratic National Committee has made clear that it will support Biden and eschew primary debates if he chooses to run for reelection. Without the guaranteed coverage that attends the debate stage, Williamson may fade into the background as an immaterial outsider.
But not if she can help it. Williamson is a cookie-cutter political grifter, a smooth talker who maintains no illusions of having any real political impact but benefits financially from the attention her candidacy brings. Last time she ran for president, she released a book (A Politics of Love: A Handbook for a New American Revolution) in the middle of her campaign. She charges people $34.95 a month for access to her library of livestreamed lectures and $149 or more for “workshops” (audio and video recordings) on subjects like weight loss and “aging miraculously.” She also has a Substack, for which subscribers can pay between $50 and $150 a year.
Her presidential campaign amounted to free publicity for these products, which were previously only known to those who had seen her on an Oprah program, read her Christian Science-y “New Thought” writings from the 1990s, or learned of her polarizing response to the AIDS crisis, which has made her both a hero and a villain in LGBTQ circles.
While Williamson was not the only candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary to get in the game for purely self-promotional reasons—and she is certainly not the first bloviating political candidate to make abstract, emotionally charged speeches in an effort to sell books—she did the most to make a mockery of the exercise, even as she wrung her hands over threats to American democracy. At one campaign appearance, she told attendees, who were attending a sober 7:30 a.m. rave, that “there’s something about dancing where it literally shifts the molecules.” The first thing she would do as president if elected, she said in a debate, would be to call up the prime minister of New Zealand, who had said she wanted to make her country the best place in the world for children, and say, “Girlfriend, ‘You are so on.’ ” In an answer to another debate question, she said one of her first phone calls—besides, apparently, the one to New Zealand—would be to “the European leaders” (?) to say, “We’re baaack!”
These were not new and refreshing ideas that deserved a place in America’s one wild and precious 2020 Democratic primary. They were the ramblings of an inspirational speaker with a tenuous grasp of U.S. politics who knew there was untapped fundraising potential among the sage-smudging, left-leaning, vaccine-skeptical set.
Oh, right, did you forget that part? The thing about the vaccines? On the trail in New Hampshire in 2019, Williamson called mandatory vaccination “draconian” and the conversation around it “no different than the abortion debate,” because “the U.S. government doesn’t tell any citizen, in my book, what they have to do with their body or their child.” This comparison has aged like an unrefrigerated mRNA vaccine in light of both the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s important to remember that it was equally inane and insulting in 2019. Williamson later apologized for it, just as she did after she was criticized for calling clinical depression a “scam” and suggesting that antidepressants enrich Big Pharma while possibly causing suicides. Backtracking after every controversial statement: a true sign of someone who is more committed to a deeply held set of ideological or spiritual values than to public acclaim and monetary gain!
Putting any substantive political criticism aside, it must also be said that Williamson’s catchphrase-y exhortations, the things that people applaud for their supposed radical insight, are the sorts of things that want to seem profound but are just plain dumb. Calling them cliché would be too much of a compliment—clichés typically stick around because they are useful shorthand for common sentiments or occurrences, while Williamson’s notable quotables are devoid of meaning.
For example: “Washington is filled with good political car mechanics,” she wrote in her Facebook announcement on Saturday, “but the problem is that we are on the wrong road.” Or take this advice she included in a recent Facebook repost of something she wrote in 2014: “To soar high, dig deep. To have an effect, don’t try to. To get anything, give everything.” O … K? Care to elaborate?
In her 2019 campaign, Williamson promised to “harness love for political purposes” to combat the hate and fear of the Trump campaign, promising Trump, “sir, love will win.” Her phrasing was chillingly redolent of the Hillary Clinton campaign slogan “Love Trumps Hate.” This was not the appropriate vibe for 2019. If we learned a single lesson from the 2016 election, actually, it was this: Love does not trump hate! “Love wins” is an even less relevant outlook now than it was four years ago. To paraphrase Tina Turner, what’s love got to do with, say, the attempted Jan. 6 insurrection?
This is not to say that Williamson is incapable of uttering a political banger. Her best-known quote, which can be purchased as wall art in a wide array of fonts on Etsy, is this, from a 1992 book: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. … As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” The quote has become extensively used, including in a tattoo inked on the chest of Formula One racer Lewis Hamilton. And it has been so widely misattributed to one of the greatest political leaders of modern history that the Nelson Mandela Foundation was forced to deliver an official clarification that the words were written by Williamson, not the former South African president.
So it’s easy to see why Williamson thinks she belongs in politics, and why her presence in a typically religious-but-not-spiritual space has been welcomed by people who are enchanted by the sorts of things that wind up on motivational cubicle posters. Self-help rhetoric and good political messaging can have a similar effect on people. I’m no scientist, but I suspect that hearing, for instance, “our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure” lights up the same sectors of the human brain as “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
But presidential races do not need comic relief, and faux-profound wordplay is only good for getting a job in politics, not doing it. Feel-good empowerment lectures in service of a spiritual wellness empire—especially those that pooh-pooh policy as a powerful mechanism of change—do not deserve a place in a critical political race, hoovering up attention and money that could be better spent elsewhere. It would be worthwhile, perhaps, for the country to maintain some cultural and aesthetic segregation between the tarot girlies and the policy nerds.
With that said, I do know plenty of tarot girlies who are also deeply engaged in politics. In 2020, regarding Williamson as a benign but ultimately unserious presence in the race, they supported Sanders or Warren instead.
