Spirituality may be the way forward for the New Left movement we’ve been engaging within since the 2016 Presidential election.
Bernie Sanders, the Progressive Left, and 2020
The Black Electorate and Joe Biden
The pulling force that led to the election of Joe Biden, instead of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Primary came down to Bernie’s inability to connect with the Black electorate. Marianne Williamson, in her 2020 and 2024 bids for President, tried to mitigate this lack within the Progressive left with a call for reparations.
Voting for Bernie Sanders requires that black people believe that white people will do something they’ve never done: willingly and openly share the economic bounty of the United States.
Emily olson, abc news, april 2020
In 2019, Marianne Williamson was an outspoken presidential candidate, calling for reparations for slavery.
In 2023, Williamson seemed to take her campaign into the mainstream political discourse.
In her campaign kickoff speech, Ms. Williamson, 70, made no talk of exorcising the ‘dark psychic force of the collectivized hatred’ in American politics or of calling New Zealand as her first act in office. Instead, she sounded more like a Bernie Sanders-style liberal, focused on economic justice, corporate power and what she called the intentional blindness of powerful federal government officials to poverty in America.
Reid J. Epstein, New York times
Marianne Williamson’s Virtual Learning Center provides a plethora of sermons, seminars, and talks from Williamson with the goal to enrich spiritual journeys. In this amazing array of lectures, it’s clear Marianne has thought deeply about the connection between self development, spirituality and democracy.
In April of 2023, the Democratic National Convention stated that they would not be holding primary debates. The Democratic party is doing itself a disservice by writing off Marianne Williamson. This will cause divides within the party, particularly between younger and older voters. As the moderate Biden wing continue to make fun of Williamson, they will lose positive momentum for Biden’s campaign.
Nina Turner is an American politician, activist, and former Ohio State Senator is a frequent commentator on cable news programs and has written for various publications on issues related to politics, race, and social justice. She took to Twitter in April of 2023 to condemn the Democratic party and their choice to not hold primary debates.
In his article “Marianne Williamson, Fusing Bernie Sanders and (Early) Jordan Peterson, is Taking Over TikTok”, Ryan Grim explains that Williamson’s uniqueness is in her “linkage of spiritual inspiration and personal uplift with left-wing sensibilities” and that “Democrats will have a hard time winning [young voters] back over if they’ve done nothing but mock her.”
“Yet the self-help, up-by-their-bootstraps mentality runs deep in American mythology. Even the term ‘New Age’ undersells how old the phenomenon is, the way a mixture of striving and inchoate spiritual yearning has coursed through American culture back to its colonial days…Williamson inverts that right-wing critique and argues that it is our atomization, particularly in such anxious and precarious times, that drains both our power and our spirit in the service of the powerful. Her pairing of those two strains is neatly captured in the title and subtitle of her 2019 book, ‘A Politics of Love: A Handbook for a New American Revolution,’ which is itself a nod to her mega-bestseller, the 1992 book ‘A Return To Love.’
Ryan Grim