What Marianne Williamson Got Right

Republicans are nearly coming to blows in the hallways and hearing rooms of Congress. Violent threats against judges, legislators, and election workers keep mounting. Donald Trump’s rhetoric grows more vicious and inflammatory by the day. Meanwhile, the polls show that Trump, despite his increasingly unhinged behavior and four criminal indictments, has a better than even chance of being reelected President in 2024.     

What’s going on here? As the political madness grows, I have been thinking back to what was, to my mind, the most memorable line from the 2020 presidential campaign. It came during one of the early Democratic debates, from a candidate almost no one took seriously: the self-help author and New Age guru Marianne Williamson. 

“If you think any of this wonkiness,” she said, referring to the policy debates going on around her, “is going to deal with this dark psychic force of the collectivized hatred that this President is bringing up in this country, then I’m afraid that the Democrats are going to see some very dark days.”

Williamson’s campaign went nowhere (and she’s running again, not that anyone has noticed). But her diagnosis struck me as apt then, and even more so now. Donald Trump’s continued popularity simply defies all logic, rational explanation, or conventional political analysis. It is something beyond the realm of politics — a spiritual, almost mystical phenomenon. Enter the Dark Psychic Force. 

How else to explain a Bizarro world where all our values, norms, even historical facts, have been turned upside down? Where a man who lies virtually every hour of every day can claim, with a straight face, that he’s the only politician who can be trusted; a pathological narcissist who brags endlessly about his wealth yet has convinced millions that he’s “fighting for you”; an ex-President who spent four years in the White House without learning a single thing about governing, yet who can still run on the promise that “I alone can fix it”?   

It’s a dark force because, as Williamson discerned, it foments and is fueled by all-consuming hatred: hatred of immigrants, hatred of abortion doctors, hatred of Hunter Biden, hatred of all those progressive Democrats who (the pot calling the kettle) “hate America.” In this perverted world view, lifesaving vaccines are an evil government plot; faithful public servants are sinister agents of the “deep state”; and ruthless foreign dictators are strong leaders to be admired and emulated.

And it’s a psychic, not a political, phenomenon because trying to disprove any of it with rational argument or political persuasion is pointless — in the same way that it’s fruitless to try convincing a person in the grip of mental illness that he’s not being followed around by hidden cameras. 

This may strike some as a depressing thought, for it implies a kind of laissez-faire acceptance of the unacceptable. But I find it oddly comforting. For one thing, it relieves us of a lot of day-to-day, poll-to-poll angst. Why do voters persist in blaming Biden for an economy that, by nearly all measures, is doing very well? How can they continue to support a candidate whose stated goal is to end our democracy, and whose primary motivation for running is to stay out of jail?

It makes no sense — but there’s no point in blaming Joe Biden, or Democratic strategists, or the media. Even the most astute political messaging is no match for the Dark Psychic Force. It may simply have to run its course. 

The comforting part is that, inevitably, it will. It is simply too much of an aberration, too contrary to our values, history, and normal human behavior, to last for very long. Even if the unthinkable happens and Trump is reelected, the Dark Psychic Force will eventually sow the seeds of its own destruction. Trump will overreach, a national calamity will strike, a backlash will set in — or simply the Newtonian law of politics (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction) will break the spell, lift the darkness, and restore the national equilibrium.

This assumes, of course, the soundness of our democratic institutions, and the basic decency of the American people, even those who have been led astray by a gifted demagogue. Which I do. Just call me a New Age optimist.