11 Jul 2023 2:23 pm
Enough with the dumb jokes about crystals. You should take Marianne Williamson and her politics seriously.
The first thing I notice over tea in Tribeca last week with the author and presidential candidate Marianne Williamson is that there’s nothing silly about her. Williamson speaks bluntly, laser-focused on the dangers that American-style capitalism poses to our planet, our lives, and our well-being.
During our interview, her answers are sometimes so concise and on point they seem to challenge my questions.
As soon as we sit down, I ask her what experiences convinced her that our current spiritual crisis was a collective one, a social disease.
“I never thought it wasn’t,” she says, looking almost annoyed.
Williamson is serious. This must be said, because the Democratic Party’s gatekeepers are doing their best to marginalize and mock her. When asked if the president was annoyed that Williamson had announced her primary run, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre had a mean-girl moment: “I’m not tracking that. I mean, if I had a, what is it called? A little globe here, a crystal ball… if I could feel her aura.”
Liberal media outlets have dismissed Williamson as “quirky” and identified her as “Oprah Winfrey’s spiritual adviser.” Much has been made of the fact that she once lived in a geodesic dome. More inexplicably, centrist and progressive pundits have been dismissing her ideas. Slate denigratedWilliamson’s speeches as “the ramblings of an inspirational speaker . . . devoid of meaning.”
Seeking is not my vibe, and I mistrust gurus. I was prepared to roll my eyes at least a little bit at Williamson. But a few minutes into conversation with this author of thirteen books, seven of them bestsellers, I realized the media portrayal of her was propagandistic nonsense. I had to wonder who the mainstream media has been describing: not the smart, well-spoken, righteously outraged woman sitting across from me.
Williamson, now seventy, was raised on left-wing values. Her father, a World War II veteran and an immigration lawyer, was a United Auto Workers organizer in the 1930s. When he was a child, she says his own father, a railroad worker, took him to hear Eugene Debs speak.
While for decades she has been a writer and speaker on spiritual matters, Williamson has recently begun taking a more political approach to our collective malaise, as she did in the 2019 book A Politics of Love: A Handbook for a New American Revolution and in her 2020 Democratic primary campaign.
Marianne Williamson speaks onstage at Guerrilla Tactics & Asymmetric Political Activism during the 2022 SXSW Conference and Festivals at Hilton Austin on March 14, 2022, in Austin, Texas. (Mike Jordan / Getty Images for SXSW)
It’s a chilly spring day, but we sit outside because the cafe is closing. Williamson isn’t warmly dressed but graciously adapts to our situation, ordering a hot tea and sitting in the fading late afternoon sun.
She explains her shift from spiritual teacher to political candidate by describing the distress she’s witnessed in recent decades.
As someone people turn to when they’re in trouble — a clergyperson for the unchurched — she has seen up close how neoliberalism is “devastating people’s lives,” she says.
https://jacobin.com/2023/04/marianne-wi ... ing-people
The first thing I notice over tea in Tribeca last week with the author and presidential candidate Marianne Williamson is that there’s nothing silly about her. Williamson speaks bluntly, laser-focused on the dangers that American-style capitalism poses to our planet, our lives, and our well-being.
During our interview, her answers are sometimes so concise and on point they seem to challenge my questions.
As soon as we sit down, I ask her what experiences convinced her that our current spiritual crisis was a collective one, a social disease.
“I never thought it wasn’t,” she says, looking almost annoyed.
Williamson is serious. This must be said, because the Democratic Party’s gatekeepers are doing their best to marginalize and mock her. When asked if the president was annoyed that Williamson had announced her primary run, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre had a mean-girl moment: “I’m not tracking that. I mean, if I had a, what is it called? A little globe here, a crystal ball… if I could feel her aura.”
Liberal media outlets have dismissed Williamson as “quirky” and identified her as “Oprah Winfrey’s spiritual adviser.” Much has been made of the fact that she once lived in a geodesic dome. More inexplicably, centrist and progressive pundits have been dismissing her ideas. Slate denigratedWilliamson’s speeches as “the ramblings of an inspirational speaker . . . devoid of meaning.”
Seeking is not my vibe, and I mistrust gurus. I was prepared to roll my eyes at least a little bit at Williamson. But a few minutes into conversation with this author of thirteen books, seven of them bestsellers, I realized the media portrayal of her was propagandistic nonsense. I had to wonder who the mainstream media has been describing: not the smart, well-spoken, righteously outraged woman sitting across from me.
Williamson, now seventy, was raised on left-wing values. Her father, a World War II veteran and an immigration lawyer, was a United Auto Workers organizer in the 1930s. When he was a child, she says his own father, a railroad worker, took him to hear Eugene Debs speak.
While for decades she has been a writer and speaker on spiritual matters, Williamson has recently begun taking a more political approach to our collective malaise, as she did in the 2019 book A Politics of Love: A Handbook for a New American Revolution and in her 2020 Democratic primary campaign.
Marianne Williamson speaks onstage at Guerrilla Tactics & Asymmetric Political Activism during the 2022 SXSW Conference and Festivals at Hilton Austin on March 14, 2022, in Austin, Texas. (Mike Jordan / Getty Images for SXSW)It’s a chilly spring day, but we sit outside because the cafe is closing. Williamson isn’t warmly dressed but graciously adapts to our situation, ordering a hot tea and sitting in the fading late afternoon sun.
She explains her shift from spiritual teacher to political candidate by describing the distress she’s witnessed in recent decades.
As someone people turn to when they’re in trouble — a clergyperson for the unchurched — she has seen up close how neoliberalism is “devastating people’s lives,” she says.
https://jacobin.com/2023/04/marianne-wi ... ing-people