Marianne Williamson

Updated 2,005 Days AgoPublic

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Self-help book author, self-described "provocateur" and "Jewish girl talking about Jesus". Ran an unsuccessful 2014 congressional campaign as an Independent, finishing 4th out of 16 candidates, and going on to endorse Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary. She's very Californian, very Hollywood, very American Spiritualist; just take this exchange discussing her electoral loss:

Oprah Winfrey: How important was the win for you?
Marianne Williamson: You know, Ghandi said, the end is inherent in the means. I felt that if I did the right thing, I would have a win no matter what that means. But it's difficult with that, because you—a lot of people are invested in you, a lot of people sent money, so you're spending other peoples' money, so for that reason you want them to get the return on their investment. You owe it to the people who are supporting you, who are volunteering, who are sending in donations, who are working for the campaign. You owe it to them to try the best to win.
Oprah Winfrey: What did it teach you about yourself though? The whole process?
Marianne Williamson: That . . . yaknow, taught me what I should've already known, to only listen to myself.
Oprah Winfrey: Mmm. [Smiles warmly, shakes her head in seeming agreement]
Marianne Williamson: On my message, I did. On my message I did.
Oprah Winfrey: You know, I've felt this about myself. Umm. When you get to be, uhh, a woman of a certain age, or a person of a certain age, and you make a mistake, because you didn't listen to yourself, that is particularly disturbing because you knew, and you knew you knew, right?
Marianne Williamson: Well, except that with politics, there were some technical things I didn't know, so I didn't know I could just ignore them and do what—what I thought.
Oprah Winfrey: What do you wish you knew, going in, that you didn't know?
Marianne Williamson: I kept waiting for people to tell me what to do, and trying to hire people who'd tell me what to do and I should've just started lecturing, all the time, throughout the district, speaking my heart . . . that's all I needed to do, really, hah
Oprah Winfrey: Yeah, instead of—but isn't there a f—isn't there like—you know, when I started this network everybody said "well you don't understand cable, you don't understand cable", but I was like, but I think I understand people, and connection to people, but you don't understand cable, so, were you being told "you don't understand...", you know, how to run a campaign—
Marianne Williamson: Well, I said, during the campaign, that this is much bigger—this conversation, of a politics of conscience, and a politics of the heart, is much bigger than any one woman winning a congressional seat, and if that woman loses, the conversation goes on. My losing the congressional seat is small; what’s big is the larger conversation, and I, you know, I like to think, you know I'm not in denial about what I didn't succeed at, in this campaign, but I'm not in denial about what we did succeed at. So, you know, you impact the ethers, you know, it's—that energy goes somewhere; and that energy is in me but that energy is in a lot of people.

Williamson has been around for a while. Back in 1997 the magazine Mother Jones wrote a piece wonderfully (oh, for the days when Mother Jones didn't suck!) entitled "Faith: Marianne Williamson Is Full of It", and it lays out a familiar sort of portrait of an amorphously-spiritual figure:

“Because there’s a disconnection inside people, there is no listening,” Williamson says. “The reason that there are no major voices for social justice today is the listening isn’t there. We have to address it because people’s hearts aren’t open enough to hear. Do you understand what I’m saying?” In fact, much of what Williamson says makes perfect sense. She’s affirming the obvious, and even she concedes that most of it has been said before. She’s only paraphrasing for a postmodern world, fluttering around the margins of faith without forcing anyone to examine the core.
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Offering religion without rules, salvation without sacrifice, the former cabaret singer has remade herself into the perfect priestess for a culture steeped in pop. “Love conquers all” is no cliché to Williamson and her readers. Focus on feelings, she reiterates in book after book, and the rest will follow — from a good man to a great salary to a God-fearing nation. Forget the fuss and muss associated with actual effort.
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By preaching peace and love, Williamson herself has become a celebrity of sorts, going from small prayer circles to the stages of auditoriums seating thousands. She was at the altar blessing Elizabeth Taylor’s last failed marriage. She was invited to the White House to share her thoughts with Hillary Clinton. As a result, she is in the awkward position of promoting emotional accessibility while hiring handlers to keep unpleasantness away. Publicists want to know in advance what Williamson will be asked. An agent refuses to provide sales figures for her books and cassettes, arguing that the figures are proprietary.

Just over two decades ago, and the seeds of her later political attempts would seem to have been tentatively planted:

But the truth is that The Healing of America is a daring departure for Williamson, even if she says it is merely an extension of her belief that love and prayer will save individuals and maybe even the world. The hefty manuscript almost — but not quite — dares to state that navel gazing alone is not enough; that it’s time to move from self-absorbed me-ism to a more civic-minded we-ism. This message runs the real risk of turning off an audience that appears to be looking for easy answers to earthly salvation. Williamson says that doesn’t matter. She says she wrote the book her father would have wanted her to write, and that she doesn’t know who will buy it and doesn’t care. It’s time, she insists, to put the yang back into yin-yang by rededicating ourselves to citizenship.
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“I’ve always been the first to say that spiritual seeking without service is self-indulgent,” she says. “I think the question is: Dear God, how can I serve? Not that I’m trying to figure out what someone needs…. I am saying we don’t have the time on this planet to wait until we’re more spiritually evolved to check out what’s going on in this country.” Appendix A to The Healing of America is called “Resources for Activism.” Appendix B consists of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Later that night, as people wander back into the theater after the break, newly purchased books and tapes in hand, a dozen or more say they are open to wherever Williamson wants to lead them. Still, a third of the crowd skips the second half of the lecture, perhaps turned off by the political rhetoric, perhaps impatient with the emphasis on something other than themselves. Williamson and the remaining audience will pray for them anyway.

On the one hand, she tweets stuff like

Humanity needs a new story, like a mythic tale about how people woke up one day and realized magic was all around them.

Then on the other hand, she goes on Chapo and says

. . . I recognize that that kind of an economic system is ultimately tyrannous. It has no plans to really allow for the liberation of people and the genuine actualization of democracy, because that is contrary and inconvenient to its economic purposes.