Marianne Williamson: The Politics of Love
I always remember that. He was saying the fact that I just said what I believe without worrying about the people-pleasing that has become so endemic in our society. I think it is a corruption and I believe that enough people – and therefore I started an exploratory campaign – to see if people believe there is a contribution to be made here. All I know is that I am convicted about something in my heart. That is my firm belief that we are going in such a wrong direction in the organization of American society.
We are moving so far away from the democratic values and the deeply human values that make both our country and our existence on this planet good and true and beautiful as to pose an existential threat to our democracy and possibly to our planet. Now, if other people agree with, that, they’ll vote for me.
Some so many people agree with me that the mindset that ruled the 20th century, particularly the socio-economic and political mindset which has dominated the late 20th century, is not only inadequate to what we need to address the challenges of the 21st century. It is a mindset that is perilous because it’s not based on a bottom line of love or humanitarian values. It is based on a bottom line of profit maximization or huge multi-national corporations which is the fast for future generations. It is fast from the disadvantaged in our country and our world. It is a passive, and sometimes active, assault on democratic principles. It is certainly not the way to create peace on the planet 25 or 50 years from now, and it’s not the way to in any way protect the environment. It is the assault on the environment.
VICTOR FUHRMAN: Marianne, let me ask you this. You’ve recently pointed out that the Constitution doesn’t specify that a President needs to be a former Governor, or Senator, or a Politician of any kind. What are the qualifications you think are the most important?
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: James Madison wrote the Constitution. He went to Princeton. He studied Hebrew and Philosophy. He was not a Lawyer, and I think it is important for us to remember that. Regarding the qualifications for the Presidency, in the Constitution it says that the President has to be 35 years old, has to have lived here for 14 years and has to have been born here. Very significant because it was what they did not say. If they had wanted to, they would have said the President has to have been a Lawyer, had to be a Governor, had to be a Senator, and had to be a Congressperson. They didn’t because they were leaving it to every generation to decide for itself. The qualifications that generation feels is most needed to address the challenges of their time adequately.
So there’s another kind of qualification that I think is just as important. What people call the qualified Politician is someone who might know how Washington works, and I respect that, but what we need in a President now is someone who understands how we work.
We are no longer functioning as democracy here; we are functioning as an Oligarchy Corporatocracy. We’re no longer functioning, in Lincoln’s words, as a Government of the People, by the People, for the People. We’re functioning as a Government where a few of the corporations buy a few of the corporations for a few of the corporations.
Now one major political party is bought and sold by this corporate matrix. The other one raises its hands and says we understand your pain and does what it can to address the pain that’s on the periphery, but that party no longer addresses the fundamentals, except in some cases such as the Bernie Sanders, etc. The current Democratic Party is not addressing those fundamental issues that make all that suffering inevitable. That’s the Democratic Party that I grew up with when you were talking about the times we grew up. Bobby Kennedy. Martin Luther King. Those figures who did represent within the political sphere the larger philosophical dimensions.
Even looking at the Declaration of Independence and the idea that all men are created equal, that’s the basis of all of this. That’s not a political principle or a legal principle, that’s a philosophical, moral principle that all men are created by God, that God gave all men the unalienable rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that Governments are instituted among men to secure those rights.
Tell me where those millions of American children who go to school every day, at schools that do not even have functioning toilets. Millions of American, who are full citizens in this country, go to school every day in classrooms where there are not the minimum school supplies necessary to adequately teach these children. In schools where if they then do not know how to read by the age of eight, the chances that they’re graduating from High School will radically diminish, and chances of incarceration are radically increased. I’ll tell you why. The reason that the political establishment has not addressed the needs of these equal citizens is that number one they don’t vote, and number two because children do not work, they don’t have financial leverage, and if you don’t have financial leverage in Washington today, you are at the bottom of the pile.
I feel that the US Government is exercising passive child abuse. Certainly, active child neglect. So, this idea that we are supposed to be so impressed by this group of experts – while there are some profound political experts in this country, don’t get me wrong – the idea that we’re just supposed to go along. I’ll tell you something else, Victor, and for anybody who’s listening who does not wish to see President Trump re-elected, no traditional Politician is going to defeat the President, and I’ll tell you why because what Trump represents is neither traditional nor political.
The traditional, political mindset thinks it’s so sophisticated. It’s not sophisticated; it’s naïve. It doesn’t get what’s going on here at the deepest level, and if they had known what was going on beneath the surface and these psychological and emotional dimensions that emerged from the chronic, economic despair that so many Americans have been living. Millions of Americans have been living with this for years. We need to claim the realization that the chronic trauma of millions of American children is a humanitarian crisis. We need to claim the realization that spending 718 billion dollars each year on our military while reducing our funding for genuine peace-building measures, is an imperilment, a threat to the notion of peace on this planet in 50 years.
We need more than just some peripheral changes. We have to put out our angel voices. We have to begin a conversation of a genuine, political renaissance in this country that can only emerge from people falling in love again with what Democracy means, with the radicalism of this, with our connection every one of us.
Some people are even using a very spurious notion of spirituality as a justification for political disengagement. Those days have got to end. We need something that is much bigger than electing one-person President. We need a renaissance of political sensibility, a realization that Democracy is not something you can take for granted, any more than you can take your marriage for granted or take your body for granted. You must tend to it. So, we need an awakening that will reconnect all of this with our sense, not only that Democracy gives us rights, but that it gives us responsibilities.
We are, after all, citizens. We are ‘we the people.’ They work for us; we don’t work for them. So, I believe that I can contribute something here to the initiation to that kind of political renaissance in the United States.
VICTOR FUHRMAN: With the recent passing of our 43rd President we heard a lot, whether we agreed with his politics or not, about his selflessness and deep caring for people. Do you have a Presidential role model?
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: I think Franklin Roosevelt was an amazing President. Abraham Lincoln, what do you even say about such a one as he? You look at the Founders, and you certainly have a genius cluster there, although no-one is ignoring slavery. You look at someone like Thomas Jefferson, who on the one hand gave us the enlightened principles on which we purport to stand, and on the other hand, himself owned slaves. That is the cultural DNA of the United States. We were born on one hand on these profound principles, the most enlightened principles that had ever infused the founding documents of any country, and at the same time, 41 signers of the Declaration of Independence were themselves slave owners. So that dichotomy has always been with us. In the Presidents, such as they, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, that dichotomy was present.
Continue to Page 4 of the Interview with Marianne Williamson
