Positioning herself as an alternative to Trump’s neo-fascism and Biden’s neoliberalism, the Democratic challenger takes aim at “the corporate takeover of this country.”
BY MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ MAY 18, 2023 (therealnews.com)
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. Photo by Mike Jordan/Getty Images for SXSW
The 2024 election season has begun, and while a second Trump vs. Biden showdown is expected by many, a number of challengers have emerged within the Democratic Party. One of them is Marianne Williamson—author of several self-help books, and former 2020 presidential candidate. Williamson joins TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez to explain what she’s about, why she’s running, and how she hopes to transform US politics through her candidacy.
Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Adam Coley
TRANSCRIPT
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marianne Williamson:
I’m Marianne Williamson. I’m running for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.
The other night, Donald Trump was on a CNN town hall, the Mussolini show, if I’ve ever seen one. I think that anyone who thinks that traditional transactional politics is going to beat that back is delusional, in real denial. This is not politics as usual, and I’m not a politician as usual. I’m running for president because I’ve had a 40-year career working with people whose lives are falling apart, and what’s happening in this country is that people’s lives are falling apart. I have seen it when people were ill. I have seen it when people were getting divorced. I have seen it when people were addicted. I’ve seen it when people found out that their children were addicted. I’ve seen it when people lost someone that they love. But this is now an ubiquitous wave of despair, and it is a consequence. It is not a cause.
It is a consequence of not only personal factors, but societal factors, economic factors, public policy that make it too hard for the average American in the richest country in the world to even survive. I see a political system that not only doesn’t speak to that, a political system that maintains that and effectuates the policies that created. So I’m running for president because we need a president who is willing to look at that, to realize it, to recognize it, to name it, and to harness the same principles, the same dynamics that I know from a 40-year career to be those things that not only enable people to endure such crises, but also to transform them.
That’s why I’m running for president, because I believe that the idea of a president who represents the status quo means either a president who represents, as someone like Donald Trump was, what is basically a neo-fascist, neo-authoritarian threat to democracy, or a neoliberal, such as President Biden, who represents something that is eroding democracy from the inside. It’s like neo-fascism is the disease, but neoliberalism has weakened our immune system, because every individual life is a cell in the immune system. People are like this. People don’t even have the bandwidth to deal with something like a fascist threat. They’re just trying to stay alive.
So until we start having a more real, deeper, more authentic conversation about what the real problem is, the real source points of what’s happening in this country, then we won’t heal. We won’t repair. We will continue to be, as we are already, vulnerable to seriously neo-fascist, neo-authoritarian forces. I think I’m a person who understands all this and can speak to it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, Ms. Williamson, Marianne, thank you so much for sitting down and chatting with me here on The Real News Network. I really appreciate it, and I have so many thoughts about just that opening salvo alone, and I promise viewers and listeners we’re going to dig into all of that over the course of our conversation here for The Real News Network. As you said, you are running for the Democratic nominee for president in the 2024 presidential election that is on the horizon. In many ways, the campaign has very much kicked off, and we are fully in the windstorm of another election cylce.
Marianne Williamson:
Yes, we are cycle. It has begun.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yes, I want to dig into all of that. But before we get there, I want to start by addressing Real News audiences where they’re at, right? Our audience, I think, is rightly skeptical of electoral politics. This isn’t some ultra-left ideological purity thing, right? I think the fact is that Real News viewers and listeners are a pretty heterogeneous bunch who come to us largely for our coverage of social movements, so the labor movement, the prison abolition and police accountability movements, the climate justice movement, et cetera, because, frankly, they have lost a lot of faith in our system of electoral politics.
They’re also largely working people with busy lives, who understandably want to devote their limited time, energy, and money to areas of struggle where they feel like they can make a difference. The past two election cycles coupled with the standard political rot and inaction and corruption from DC politics have given people little hope that the changes they desperately want to see in the world are going to come through elected politicians.
So before we talk about the race itself and expand on your vision for the country, I think we need to start by talking about these very real concerns that people have. What do you say to people out there who have been explicitly taught by our corrupt political establishment not to have faith in the electoral system, or a lot of folks out there supported Bernie and had their hopes crushed by the DNC two elections in a row. What do we say to people who may support your message about how this time could be different, and what have progressive candidates like yourself learned from the failed or squashed Bernie campaigns that could ensure a different or at least a fairer result this time around?
Marianne Williamson:
Well, I think all of the questions and concerns that you enumerated are very legitimate, but this is not the first time in American history that times have been tough. We all need to toughen up, buttercup a little bit. It wouldn’t have been easy to be an abolitionist. It wouldn’t have been easy to be a woman suffragist. It wouldn’t have been easy to be part of the original labor movement. It wouldn’t have been easy to be working in the civil rights movement. Those were desperate times, too, and there was every reason, given just as there is today the tremendous institutional resistance to the changes that people were standing for. There was no more reason to think they could succeed then than there is “reason to think we can succeed now.”
So working for justice, working for love, working for real truth in our hearts as we see it has never been easy for any generation. But in all of those movements, abolition, women’s suffrage, labor movement, civil rights movement, they ultimately prevailed, and it took more than a couple of election cycles. For that matter, to say that Bernie didn’t succeed, well, he didn’t become president. That’s true, and none of us are naive about the system that locked him out. But he came within striking distance.
A candidacy like mine wouldn’t exist, I don’t think, if it hadn’t been for Bernie. I don’t think Bernie would’ve existed had it not been for Occupy. Everything pushes the needle forward a little, whether it’s The Real News Network or somebody’s podcast or independent media or the labor movement or an actual campaign. No one person or one action is going to fix any of this.
But I think it’s important that we remember that those of us who stand for many of the values that you and I talk about and the policies that I’m sure we’ll be talking about here are aligned with the views of the majority of people in the United States. Poll after poll shows that, and something that Cenk Uygur said on The Young Turks not too long ago, I heard him say this, and it was like a brick to my forehead. “Someone is going to break through.”
So maybe it won’t be me, but to minimize the importance of the presidency is silly. The president doesn’t have a magic wand. No president does, and no president should. But the president’s not just what the president can do to move things forward in the direction of justice. It’s what the president can do and continues to have done over the last 50 years, particularly to keep the needle from moving forward. So I’m not saying that this is the most important thing. I’m not saying I’m the only one who can do it. I’m just saying we have to work on all fronts. On this particular front, I am the one who is saying the things and standing for the issues and standing for the policies that those of us who see the world a certain way agree with.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to pick up on that point about the expectations that we project onto the presidency and how that plays into perhaps the expectations that we have of ourselves and the rest of the political system and the way the two relate to one another. We have a very bizarre way of talking about political qualifications in this country, as I’m sure you know. Of course, the media is going to continue to assert that you are unqualified for the position of president. On the other hand, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton were both presented to us as the absolute most qualified people.
Marianne Williamson:
Oh, look how qualified Dick Cheney was.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Right, or Dick Cheney.
Marianne Williamson:
Thank you.
Maximillian Alvarez:
When most people hear that, all they hear is that they are creatures of the same DC political machine that they despise.
Marianne Williamson:
That took us here. Bingo.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah.
Marianne Williamson:
Of course that crowd says that anybody who is not one of them is unqualified, because that person is not there to effectuate and perpetuate what they’re already doing.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Exactly. So what do you think makes someone qualified for the position of US President, and what makes Marianne Williamson specifically qualified? Yeah, let’s talk a bit about what expectations people should reasonably have for any president.
Marianne Williamson:
First of all, I want to point to something I think is very interesting about the US Constitution. It says that in order to be president, you have to have lived here for 14 years, you have to have been born here, and you had to be 35 years or older. Now, if the founders had wanted to say, “Had to have been a congressman, lawyer, governor, senator,” they would have, and they didn’t. I think they didn’t for a reason. They were leaving it to every generation to determine for itself what that generation thinks is the skillset necessary to deal with the challenges of that time.
I believe for all the reasons that you just said someone whose career has been entrenched in the car that drove us into the ditch, I reject their assertion that only someone like that should be counted on to drive us out of the ditch. Washington, DC is filled with political car mechanics, some of them really good political car mechanics. The problem is we’re on the wrong road.
The qualification that I have is not to effectuate and maintain and perpetuate a corrupt system that has driven us six inches from the cliff, six inches from the cliff in terms of the state of our economy, the state of our democracy, the state of our environment, the state of people’s lives. My qualification is not that I know how to perpetuate that system. My qualification is that I know how to disrupt that system. I think that if you ask how, I’m doing it already. Who else is running for president, saying the things that I’m saying? Although Bobby Kennedy is, we do agree on the issue of the corporate takeover of this country, which is that core issue.
So of course, those whose power and money relies upon the continuation of that system, of course they project it onto anyone who is not one of them. “Oh, that person’s fringe. That person’s wacky. That person’s crazy. That person’s dangerous.” Yeah, dangerous to them. “That person’s not one of us” is what they’re saying, and there is a political media industrial complex. You know that, being part of independent media, and their control is huge. But once again, so was the control of the slave owners. So were the robber barons. So were those who held firm the institutional suppression of women that kept women’s suffrage at bay. So were the segregationist.
So my qualification is that I know a life that is in trouble when I see it. I know a life that is in trouble, and I know that a group of people is no different than an individual, because all that a group is is a group of individuals. The same principles that heal and transform one life will heal and transform this country.
Number one, look in the mirror. This country will not heal until we look in the mirror. Give an example. Let’s talk about the southern border and the crisis there right now. So what do the status quo politicians say? Well, they say some things that are accurate. Certainly we need to have many more resources down at the border. We need to have more legal ways of entry, et cetera. But what does it mean to say America’s going to have to look in the mirror here? We need a president who, as I would do, says in order to deal with this, we are going to have to look honestly at American foreign policy in Latin America over the last 50 years. Hello. We are going to have to recognize what sanctions due to people’s lives. We are going to have to recognize all the ways that we have destabilized countries and governments in ways that have actually contributed to the abject despair.
What is a person going to think of what people are running from? Think how dangerous and desperate your life has to be that you would be willing to walk through a desert with little children in the most dangerous terrain in order to get someplace where you really don’t know how they’re going to treat you so that maybe you could get a job as a busboy. Could we have a real conversation here about what’s going on at the border?
This is what I mean. We need a president who’s going to cut through the seventh grade … although I think at this point, that’s an insult to seventh graders. When it comes to individual relationships, I think Americans get down as real and authentic as any other country. But when it comes to our public dialogue, we’ve been trained to think in the most immature, sloganeering, inauthentic ways. This is not a time in America to be immature thinkers.
So what are my qualifications? My qualifications is I’m going to look and say, “Okay, that’s it. This is the situation, and I know that that situation is that way. You want this old cowboy image of a politician who’s going to come in and treat that symptom.” They’re only going to treat that symptom in a way that they think will help them win the next election, by the way. To hell with thinking about what it’s going to be for the next generation or generation after that.
I want to come in there and say, “What’s underneath that? What’s underneath that? What caused that?” I believe my experience is that when you talk for real with people, they hear you. Politicians talk to Americans like we’re stupid. I don’t think Americans are stupid, and I don’t think Americans are unwilling to have a conversation about what’s really going on. Then you build your public policy positions, as I have built mine. No candidate has more elaborate set of plans than I do, as on my website, Marianne 2024. But we need a president who speaks to the level of symptom and not just cause. That’s my qualification.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Going to the question of expectations, reasonable or otherwise, that we have of a president, as someone who can institute that change, how do you disrupt that system when it’s held together by such a tremendous suffocating blob of corporate money, media manufactured consent, military-industrial complex, backroom deals even within the party that you’re running in?
Marianne Williamson:
The president doesn’t have a magic wand. No president does. No president should. Obviously, the president hopes to have members of the House and the Senate who at least partially agree with her. No guarantee that this would be so. There’s been no president, even our favorites, who didn’t have senators and congressmen and in many cases Supreme Court justices who block their way. But none of that takes away the power of the executive branch, which lies in the hands of the president alone. The president still has the power of executive orders. The president still has the power of the bully pulpit.
So when I think of the things that I want, whether it has to do with universal healthcare, free college tuition, free childcare, guaranteed family leave, guaranteed sick pay, guaranteed livable wage, an economic Bill of Rights, Department of Peace, Department of Children and Youth, when I think of all those things that to me represent the kind of economic, political, and social U-turn that this country needs, I’m not naive enough to think, “Oh, I’m going to go in there, and all those things are going to happen right away.” Of course I’m not, but I can tell you this.
I would go in there. I would not be thinking about getting reelected. I would be thinking about just making this happen and then when I leave say to the Republicans and the corporate Democrats, “You try taking that away from people. See how that will do for you.” I will begin the season of repair. My presidency will not be looked at as one in which everything she talked about was achieved. But it will be looked at as, “Wow, she started. The U-turn began to happen. It’s grounded.” It’s like I see myself as wanting to just open the door and say to a lot of people like yourself, “Come on in. We’ve got the Oval Office for four years.” Millions of people will rush in. But I feel like, “Help me open that door.” It’s like the tip of a spear. It’s not the spear.
I would definitely reinstate those fireside chats. Then I would talk to the American people. This is my second run for the presidency, and I’m seeing already what I saw last time, which is there are two worlds. One is the political media industrial complex, and it is more corrupt than I would’ve feared. Then there are the people. We’re a decent people. We’re a decent people, and we’ve got to get beyond our silos and beyond this Left versus Right. The main dichotomy in this country is not between Left and Right. It’s between huge masses of suffering humanity versus those who don’t have a clue, and those who don’t have a clue hold the money and hold the power.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, no, I think that’s well said and very much consistent with what we see and hear and report on every week.
Marianne Williamson:
You know what? They need someone like me to talk to them.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and like I said, we talk to folks around the country every week for The Real News. We hear and get a lot of feedback from our audience. We know where they’re coming from, and I have to imagine that you’re speaking to a lot of areas of concern for them. But the fact remains that, like I said, Real News viewers and listeners tend to really base their politics in social movements and in the primary areas of concern, like climate, economic justice, housing justice, prison abolition, and police reform, so on and so forth. For those folks who watch me specifically, they’re very invested in the plight of working people, the labor movement, so on and so forth. They build a lot of their political preferences around that. Many people have told me they will not vote for Joe Biden because of what he did to the railroad workers.
Marianne Williamson:
I agree with them.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I think we’ve done a good job of at least presenting to Real News viewers and listeners who will ultimately have the decision for themselves about what to do with this conversation. But I think we have presented a good faith case for why they should take it seriously. But I know that folks will want us to ask about … In the same way they look at Biden and the railroads, they may have seen the political article with the allegations about mistreatment of staff, toxic workplace in your past campaign. That’s where they’re coming from. I think that folks will understand the peculiar timing of when that article came out. They’ll understand that there are a lot of folks who have worked for you who have had positive experiences.
Marianne Williamson:
Thank you.
Maximillian Alvarez:
But what do you say to them, those people who are concerned when they read that?
Marianne Williamson:
Well, I think that article said I threw a phone at someone. I never threw a phone at someone. That article says that I hit my hand on a door. It was a door, Max. It was a door. So after that article came out, I walked around for weeks with what I’m supposed to be … It was like something out of The Scarlet Letter or something, walking around in shame. “Maybe I’m this terrible person.” Have I raised my voice at the office? Yeah, I’ve raised my voice. I think probably everybody else who’s running has raised their voice at the office as well.
If anybody’s ever felt disrespected because I raised my voice, of course, I’m sorry about that absolutely. Not everybody likes me. I’ve got enough texts from enough people who have worked for me. “Love you, Marianne.” I don’t know what else to say. If there have been moments … Yeah. Have I raised my voice at the office? I have. I’ve seen a lot of articles about women and their behavior at the office. I don’t know. I’m sorry if I’ve ever offended anyone. But at this point, I’m hearing stories about people who have said things about me, and I know that I talked to that person two or three times and it was nothing but a lovely conversation. So I don’t know what to say. I’m not going to just wear that as this mantle of shame, because I don’t deserve it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, we just published an interview that I got to do with two incredible worker organizers, Taylor Marie Doggett and Courtney Rose Laudick from the Congressional Workers Union. They’re trying to and have successfully unionized offices in the House of Representatives. They’re focusing on the Senate right now. AOC’s campaign workers unionized with the Campaign Workers Guild. Bernie’s campaign staff unionized with the UFCW. If your campaign staff expressed an interest in unionizing, would you voluntarily recognize it?
Marianne Williamson:
Absolutely we would, and we’ve already discussed it. Yes, in today’s world, absolutely. There’s no other correct position.
Maximillian Alvarez:
To your point about not being selective at how we apply this standard, do you think there is a larger conversation to be had about the conditions of campaign staffers and DC office staffers across the board?
Marianne Williamson:
Well, I think every situation is different, but on a political campaign, it is a 24/7 type of thing. Social media is 24/7. So I think that there are things that people enter into a political campaign understand is the nature of the job. I worked at a church for a long time, and people would expect to take vacations at Christmas, like, “No, no, no. You don’t understand. Christmas is our biggest day.” Do you know what I’m saying? But I think for all of us who understand that this country has become completely lopsided and that there is this power concentrated, the power not only of money, but of control and so forth, in the hands of a very few at the expense of the very many, anyone with any consciousness at all about these things recognizes how important labor is as the front and center bulwark against such overreach.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Let’s talk about that.
Marianne Williamson:
Okay.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Let’s talk about where we as a country are right now and what Donald Trump and the Republicans and Joe Biden and the Democrats are offering in response to that. Like you said, we just watched that travesty of a town hall with Donald Trump hosted by CNN earlier this week, and we know what we’re getting from Trump and the Right. Yet it feels like Democrats and the media have learned nothing from 2016, and for the rest of us, this all just feels like a nightmarish bout of deja vu.
But amidst all of this, whether we’re talking about climate catastrophe, as you mentioned, the assault on voting rights and just basic democratic governance or the general erosion of the social fabric, which people feel. I hear about it all the time, as I know you do, too. There is a palpable sense in the country that 2024 is a point of no return, and we as a society are running out of time to address these threats before they come to permanently define our reality. 2024 for many of us does feel like our last chance to collectively decide whether or not we’re going to tackle them head-on or just accept them and deal with the chaotic fallout. What do you think is needed to meet this moment? Do you see that need being met anywhere in government or beyond? What are Donald Trump and the Republicans and Joe Biden and the Democrats offering instead?
Marianne Williamson:
Well, I’m running, remember. I wouldn’t be running if I thought that what Joe Biden was offering was enough to counter the neo-fascism that is represented by that element of the other party, namely Donald Trump. Obviously, I don’t, or I wouldn’t be running. Joe Biden and that kind of corporatist Democratic politics represents an effort to help people survive an unjust economic system. My point is in the richest country in the world, why should your economic system be so hard to survive? We should be ending the injustice. We should not have an unjust, rigged economic system. That is the agenda. That alone, I believe, will be enough to counter Trump in 2024. What Biden’s agenda represents is incremental change. Now, if Build Back Better had gotten passed, that’s really quite wonderful if it had. I understand about Manchin, and I understand about Sinema. But you can’t just say, “Well, if that had happened”-
Maximillian Alvarez:
“Imagine how great it would be.”
Marianne Williamson:
Yeah, and what are they going to say? They’re saying things like, “Well, we cut child poverty in half.” Well, first of all, if you cut child poverty in half, you could have ended it. That’s number one. Number two, yes, but once that child tax credit expired at the end of six months, you didn’t permanentize it. They said, “Oh, we brought a $35 cap on insulin for seniors.” Well, first of all, to be honest, Trump did that. Second of all, insulin should be free, and there should be Medicare for all.
That which is going to counter Trump and I believe the only agenda that is going to counter Trump will be one in which we say to the American people, “We’re going to make a complete economic U-turn, a complete economic U-turn. We are going to recognize that there is a corporate aristocracy in this country, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, big food, big agriculture, big chemical companies, gun manufacturers, big oil, and defense contractors, and they are no different than the landed gentry in 1776. We repudiated that in 1776. It’s back. That’s why it’s called a corporatocracy, and we need to repudiate it again.”
This is why Franklin Roosevelt said, “We wouldn’t have to worry,” he said, about a fascist or communist takeover as long as democracy delivered on its promises. Democracy, it’s not delivering on its promises. How can we expect a younger generation to go to war, political war in 2024 for Joe Biden when he approved the Willow Project, when he has given more oil drilling permits than even Trump did? When Franklin Roosevelt said, “It has become clear to me,” he said, “that we must become radical, fairly radical for a generation,” we must become fairly radical, radically American. Radically American means that this is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. We have become a government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations.
When the Republicans are hitting you with big lies, the only way we’re going to defeat that is with big truths. Now, what the corporatist Democrats tell is truth, but not the whole truth, not nothing but the truth. We have to name what’s really going on in this country, what’s been going on for 50 years, the massive transfer of wealth into the hands of a small group of people.
During the 1970s, we had a thriving middle class in this country. We had a thriving middle class in which the average worker had decent benefits. The average worker could afford a home. The average worker could afford a house. The average worker could afford a car. The average worker could afford a yearly vacation and to send their kids to college. It’s not an accident that that’s not the way things are now. So what you’re going to say to that average worker … What? You’re not even going to raise the minimum wage? Even when they talk about raising the minimum wage, it’s still not talking about raising it to a level that’s actually a livable wage in many states in this country.
We have got to face this. Then the elite establishment Democrats say to people like myself we’re trying to hijack the Democratic Party? No, they hijacked the Democratic Party. We’re Franklin and Eleanor. They’re the Whitneys and the Morgans and the DuPonts and all those. We need to go back to the Rooseveltian principles and pillars of unequivocal advocacy for the working people of the United States.
Now, look, not every rich person is a greedy bastard. Not every poor person is humble and pure and kind. This is not about individuals. This is about systems. No conscious, righteous person of wealth wants to feel that they create wealth at the expense of other people even having a chance to. So they go on and on about capitalism. How can you be a capitalist if you don’t have any capital? Many of the people who are locked out of any kind of righteous profit creation … We’re just talking about people just wanting to live. We’re talking about people having a hard time just paying for food, paying for rent, having a place to live, people who are college graduates, people who are having to work more than one job just to make it to hold on.
Look how many people who are homeless in this country. We’re making it until one eviction notice. We have over 3 million evictions in this country today, which is larger than at the height of the housing crisis. This is baked into the cake. This injustice is baked into the cake. So number one, people know it. If you put up someone like a Joe Biden, who’s going to say what, that the economy’s doing well?
I told a story last night. I was talking to a man, and he’s a good guy. I don’t want to even say his name, because he’s a nice man. But he’s a pundit who’s out there a lot, right? I was having a conversation with him on his podcast. First of all, he said, “Well, by all indicators, the economy is doing well.” I said, “For who? For 20% of Americans.” 20% of Americans are living on this island, and this island is surrounded by a vast sea of economic despair. So that’s number one. For who? You just keep saying it. It’s like you said, manufactured narratives of the economy is doing well, the economy is doing well. For who? That’s number one.
Number two, and then he said something. I said, “One in four Americans live with medical debt. 18 million Americans can’t fulfill the prescriptions their doctors give them. People are rationing their insulin. 68,000 people dying every year from lack of healthcare, 85 million uninsured or underinsured.” He said, “Well, we have universal healthcare, don’t we?” This is a man who’s a pundit out there quite a lot.
That’s when I really realized. I live in Washington, DC, and I was always told, I think you and I might have even had this conversation, that it was a bubble here. It’s not just a bubble. It’s a walled city, and once again, it’s not nice people versus not nice people. But there are people in this country making policy on a daily basis who are just walled off from the ravages of human suffering that is so prevalent in this society today.
Someone needs to speak to this with power. Many people speak to it. In my career, I read an article about myself many years ago saying, “Marianne Williamson doesn’t say anything everybody else isn’t saying, but she says it when the lights are on and the camera’s on and the microphone is on.” I feel the same way here, Max. I’m not saying anything that everybody I know isn’t saying. I’m not saying anything that you’re not saying. I’m not saying everybody I know isn’t saying, but could somebody run for president and say this, please? Could someone be president and say this?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and be president and follow through. So as you said, you have a well-stocked policy page on your website. So what does meeting this moment look like on a policy level?
Marianne Williamson:
Okay, first day, first day in office, cancel the Willow Project. Next thing, after you cancel the Willow Project, you cancel every US government contract with a union-busting company. Next thing you do is you audit the Pentagon, every dime they spend. Next thing you do, you deschedule marijuana. Next thing you do, you bring together a group of people who are experts on everything related to childhood from the time a child is born, everything, neurophysiology, neuropsychology, health, education. You really get to work on a transfer of resources into the hands of our children ten years and younger. If you want your economy to thrive in ten years, you take better care of your ten-year-olds today.
So these are the kinds of things that you can do, that the president can do on the way. Obviously, we need a just transition from a war economy to a peace economy. We need a just transition from a dirty economy to a clean economy. This is not the time to be ramping up fossil fuel extraction. This is the time to be ramping down fossil fuel extraction. Yes, that is within the purview of the presidency. The president can say, “Stop that.”
Now, is the president held back by the people like Joe Manchin? Yes, but still, there are plenty of things the president has done, such as the approval of the Willow Project, that Joe Manchin did not force him to do. Sometimes I feel like the Republicans clearly overuse power. They abuse power. But sometimes the Democrats are so namby-pamby with it. “Well, we didn’t have a mandate.” I remember that’s what they always said about Clinton and Obama. “We didn’t have a mandate. We’ll do it in the second term,” and then they never do. The Republicans say, “The mandate is that we won the election.” I’d go in there and do it. I would not be thinking about a second term, I assure you.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to pick up on that. This is also something that you and I talked about on your show when you last had me on to talk about the East Palestine disaster. Hopefully we’ll have time to circle back to that. But I said something to the effect of elections are important. I think we should all be honest about that, right? Even if we despise the whole circus of campaigns and the corruption of elected officials, yada, yada, yada, the fact remains that policy decisions shape the ground upon which we live, work, and organize, right?
Marianne Williamson:
Yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So we’re going to have to contend with it regardless of how we feel about the electoral system.
Marianne Williamson:
That’s right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So for that reason alone, elections are important, but they are not the end all, be all of politics. They are not on their own enough to change the world in the ways that we want to see, which is why I think we need as many people making change in as many areas of their worlds as possible, in their workplaces, their apartment complexes, their neighborhoods, their unions, their school boards. We all know how Barack Obama’s campaign effectively tapped into this root work of change-making movements and organizations to help him get elected in 2008, and then he more or less disbanded or abandoned all that organizing infrastructure as soon as he and his technocrats took office. How would you do things differently?
Marianne Williamson:
Okay, so first of all-
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and just let me … because I want to get the question on the record. How would you harness, empower, and work alongside other change-making movements, from the labor movement, the climate justice movement, the housing justice movement, those who are standing up against corporate greed and endless war, those who are standing up against attacks on teachers and queer people and trans people, those who are standing up against book bans and censorship, and how would you hold yourself accountable to those people and those movements?
Marianne Williamson:
A campaign is a long job interview, and it’s where people get to know the candidate and where a candidate get to know people. Long before, by the way … Not only am I deeply involved in that now, I was in East Palestine all this week. I was there all day on Tuesday. Not only am I learning from people, I’ve been learning from people. My 40-year career has been learning from people whose lives are at the effect of every problem you just mentioned. So I go into the White House not only saying, “Come on in, guys,” but already having heard so much. For instance, I want a 21st century economic Bill of Rights.
When you look at someone like Barack Obama, I remember I was one of those people in 2008, oh, just completely enthralled. I thought we had the next Abraham Lincoln. The day he got there, it was so clear it was that that was the campaign. The tragedy there to me is that he was given a mandate. We all said, “Here’s the House. Here’s the Senate. Here’s the White House. Go do all that.” He got there, and he chose not to. He turned out to be a creature of that system.
I’m a 70-year-old woman, and I’m not even from that system. The joy for me, the high for me is doing it. There is nothing in it for me to not do it. There’s no prize. There’s no cookies that I’m going to get for playing along. I’m going to get there despite those people, and they’re going to be hard. They’re going to be tough on me while I’m there. But that’s why my hope and my certitude is that the people who send me there from exactly the movements you’re talking about will be able to see every single day, “She’s trying.”
Democrats have this codependent relationship with these Democratic presidents where if a Republican would do something, we would yell bloody murder. If a Democrat does it, we go, “Oh, poor baby. He wanted to,” but when there’s absolutely no evidence he was even trying, right? You would see that I was out there every single day, and if it wasn’t happening, I would get in that fireside chat or I would get on television and say, “You the American people need to know what your president is trying to do, how it’s being blocked, and who it’s being blocked by. I’m not going to be able to fix it any more than I just tried. The only way this is going to be fixed is you need to get really involved in your primaries, because there’s going to be an election in two years.”
There’s a line, “Virtue is its own reward.” The reward would be for me, “I laid it down today, and I tried.” Would we win every little thing? Of course we wouldn’t. But it would be impacted on the political ethers that you have a president there who’s trying, who’s actually advocating for the people instead of what the establishment Democrats do, which is, “We want to help the people. We’ll do what we can around the periphery, but we don’t want to challenge the underlying corporate forces that make the return of all that misery inevitable because we don’t want to turn them off,” because it’s like with someone like Obama saying he wanted universal healthcare. Well, Obamacare, clearly what happened, he got into office, and the insurance companies said, “We’ll let you go this far,” and now Biden, who won’t even mention the public option.
I don’t understand it. I don’t understand the psychology of the Left right now, because on one hand, you have a president who has given more oil drilling permits than even Trump did, who has approved the Willow Project, who has given the go ahead for the exploitation of liquified natural gas. Now they would point and say, “Yeah, but in the Inflation Reduction Act, there’s all this investment in green energy,” which is good. But all of that investment, the benefits of all that investment is basically nullified between the Willow Project and this gargantuan military budget. The US military is the single largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases that there is. It’s all gaslighting.
So then there are all these environmental leaders who talk about how they’re going to support Biden. When you ask them, “Well, why are you going to support Biden?,” they say, “Well, who else do we have?” I feel so invisible. What they’re really saying is, “Who do we have that we know would take our call?” That’s the main difference at this point. There are too many people representing progressive policies in this town, in Washington who get their phone calls returned and don’t realize how they’re being played. They get a Christmas card. They might even get invited to a reception at Christmas at the White House. They’re just pulled in enough. It’s not the way to harness power. If people know that have you, what’s their motivation to change? They know you’re going to vote for them again.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, yeah. I have been encouraged to see at least some folks in my neck of the woods, the labor movement, some unions like the UAW and other union locals saying, “We’re not just going to automatically endorse [inaudible 00:45:36].”
Marianne Williamson:
Oh, well, that’s happening in New Hampshire for sure. Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. So like, “Good. Use your collective power. Don’t just give that away without getting anything in return.”
Marianne Williamson:
Yes, I hear you.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Speaking of phone calls, so I want us to finish off by talking about that economic U-turn.
Marianne Williamson:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
But before we get there, I want to just take people back to 2020 for a second.
Marianne Williamson:
Okay, okay.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to talk about where things are now. Biden and the DNC say there are not going to be any debates.
Marianne Williamson:
Yep.
Maximillian Alvarez:
They’re trying to act like you’re not there. When they do pay attention to you, they’re trying to smear you and belittle you and so on and so forth. So that’s where we are right now, on top of changing the primary schedule in the most transparently obvious way to help Biden, yada, yada yada. But let’s go back to 2020 for a second. This time three years ago, because I think it’s easy for a lot of us to forget where we were in the Democratic primary, Bernie took New Hampshire. Nevada had a head of steam. Iowa, there was a bit of bullshit, pardon my language, going on. Pete Buttigieg declared victory before the results were in. But anyway, the point is that Biden was getting his ass kicked, right? He wasn’t even in the top two or three in those races. Then South Carolina happened. We don’t have to go into Clyburn and the political machine there, but between South Carolina and Super Tuesday, phone calls were made.
Marianne Williamson:
I think one particular person made those phone calls.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, yeah.
Marianne Williamson:
We all know who it was.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So our old friend, as Bernie would say, my good friend Barack Obama starts putting in calls to Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar. They drop out the wagon circle around Biden, and the tides shift very quickly, very dramatically. This was happening on March 3rd. To everyone watching, remember what happened in the next two weeks in March of 2020. COVID hit, right? Trump was vastly popular before that. So it took a COVID emergency and a lot of DNC rigging to essentially scare a lot of people who may have been receptive to Bernie into thinking, “Oh, God, Trump is messing this up. We need to just go with the safest option, and it looks like that’s going to be Biden.” Biden was more or less forced down our throats.
But the point is that a lot of people did not want what Biden was selling until COVID hit and Trump bungled the response. A vast majority of Democrats didn’t even want Biden to run again in 2024. So we don’t have to pretend, like you said, that Biden has some mandate or that we have to pretend that we like what he’s put on offer in his first term. So I guess what is your message to people about how we’re already talking about Biden as a fait accompli and there’s no point to even have a primary?
Marianne Williamson:
Well, obviously, I’m running.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah.
Marianne Williamson:
So the very fact that I’m running says, “Really? You going to go with that? Really?” We’re almost just trained to think, to limit. This has been going on for so long that people have been trained to limit their political imaginations. I’m older. I come from a time when so much of what’s going on now, you go, “Are you kidding me? What are you talking about here?” So you tell me. Why would people not be taking the campaigns of people who are not Biden more seriously? Many people are, by the way, or I wouldn’t still be in the race. Many people are. If you look at Kennedy and myself and you look at our numbers, you have over 50% of Democratic voters saying, “We want to see someone else.”
Hopefully they are seeing this media blackout. They are seeing how this works. Everything you mentioned, the rigging of the primary system, it’s no different, like you said, than 2020. They’re doing it, I suppose, this time for the same reason they did it last time. They think they know. It’s like men sitting around a table, smoking cigars 100 years ago. “We know the best candidate.”
So why is the party that claims to be the champion of democracy, which we should be, so wary of democracy in our own house? The Democratic voter, anyone planning to vote on the Democratic primary, should see every single agenda, every array, all the array of options politically laid before them, because this is a very serious question, as you’ve made clear here. Who could beat this person in 2024?
I think it is delusional. I think you’re in complete denial to think that status quo Joe Biden politics … That doesn’t mean you’re taking away anything from the good that he’s done. This is not about going negative on Joe Biden, but it’s about really? You watched that Mussolini show the other night on CNN, and you think that this president and this president’s agenda is going to defeat that? Come on. Can we at least have a debate and talk about what the options are here?
So to those people, someone like myself is very outside the box. That’s the point. You know who else is outside the box? Donald Trump. He’s an establishment politician right now because he’s changed the establishment, but he’s outside the box in terms of what we grew up to think politics was, which is why you need someone like myself. You need someone whose energy could take on that person.
Maximillian Alvarez:
It’s funny. As you know, I was raised deeply conservative and made an ideological journey over the course of my life. I look at someone like Trump and the new populist Right, and I see through the bullshit. Again, pardon my language, but it’s like for all that is new and different and out of the box about Trump, what was his signature policy achievement? A massive transfer of wealth-
Marianne Williamson:
That’s right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
… from working people to the top 1%-
Marianne Williamson:
That’s right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
… through the Tax Cuts and Jobs Acts, which exploded the deficit by over a trillion.
Marianne Williamson:
40%.
Maximillian Alvarez:
He is just like every other politician in that regard, or every other Republican politician in that regard.
Marianne Williamson:
But all these people think we just need to attack Trump. When he said, “I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and my supporters would still support me,” I begun to think that’s true. So we are not going to win by attacking Donald Trump. We are going to win by presenting to the American people a genuine, fundamental economic alternative, universal healthcare, universal free college and tech school, universal childcare, universal paid family leave, universal guaranteed housing, guaranteed sick pay, guaranteed livable wage. That’s what the American people deserve. That’s what would beat Trump. Even more importantly, that’s what would begin to repair this country.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Just a quick aside question is it’s been interesting to see that amidst that media blackout and the rigging of the primaries ahead of schedule, you’ve still managed to explode in popularity on social media, particularly with Gen Z on TikTok. Why do you think that is?
Marianne Williamson:
Because young people, this is their lives. They see through the BS that you were talking about. They don’t have an institutional memory of when status quo politics worked for them at all. I can’t even imagine being in your twenties and carrying tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of college loan debt. Debt is crippling. One in four Americans live with medical debt. It used to be that the American Dream was to have a house with the picket fence. Now people just dream of getting out of debt before they die.
So young people, they don’t see the Democratic Party any any more than the Republican Party as having served their need for healthcare, a desire to get an education to make their lives better. Many of these young people who even got the education, now the loan debt is so great they’re working in jobs that aren’t even a result of the education they just got, because if they took that job, they can’t see how they’d ever pay back the bill. So they’re in jobs they hate in order to pay back the bill, or they’re in jobs they hate, as millions of Americans are, because it’s the only way they can get healthcare.
Everywhere I go, I ask people everywhere I go, and I got the same response every time, state after state after state. “How many people in this room either are a young person who has said or knows a young person who has said … If this is true, please raise your hand, and keep your hand up, because I want the whole room to see. Under normal circumstances, I would think of having children, but given the state of the planet, I don’t think it would be a responsible thing to do.” We’re at a point now where probably a third of the room raises their hand. I have to point out this is not normal, and you’re going to elect status quo politicians that are keeping the situation where is it?
Let me tell you something else. You talk about those migrants at the southern border now. That’s nothing compared to what we’re going to see in the form of climate refugees in the next 10 or 20 years if we don’t get ahold of these carbon emissions and this climate crisis. We are on a trajectory. We are headed for the iceberg. Now, the Republicans are headed right towards it. The establishment Democrats would hit it at an angle. It’s like the Republicans represent a nose dive. The establishment corporatist Democrats represent a managed decline. But there is an alternative.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. Well, and I want to end, because I know I only have you for a couple more minutes, but end on that question of managed decline, right?
Marianne Williamson:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I remember recently seeing a potato on my countertop. It got hidden behind some stuff. So at this point, the potato was the shriveled little thing with all those gross sprouts coming out of it. I just stared at it, and I was like, “That’s this country,” right? That is this sort of desiccation of US society while all that’s good and all the value that working people produce is sucked out by vampires in the military-industrial complex, sucked out in the form of massive tax cuts for the wealthy, sucked out in stagnant wages, so on and so forth. This is something that I hear both implicitly and explicitly as I talk to working people day in, day out for my work here at The Real News.
What I hear talking to working people is that there is this general sense that everything is slowly going to shit in America. People are working longer and harder while their wages stagnate and the cost of living continues to squeeze us, while executives and Wall Street shareholders suck all the massive profits that we are producing with our labor. But it’s not just that. It’s like the quality of consumer experience on the whole is going down the tubes, and people feel by and large more alienated from each other.
There is a depressing vibe that America is a dying empire and we’re all just watching it decay as we toil and as we continue to be screwed over and taken advantage of by a ruling class full of power-hungry, profit-seeking, war-obsessed maniacs. What will it take to turn this thing around, right? How can we actually get ourselves as a society to admit that things like trickle-down economics and unfettered corporate deregulation and corporate consolidation, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the war on unions, turning higher ed into this massive student debt trap, not guaranteeing things like healthcare and housing, how can we admit to ourselves that all of these policy decisions have been colossal societal failures that can and should be reversed? What would that look like, to take, as you said earlier, an economic U-turn in this country?
Marianne Williamson:
If you have a presidential candidate who agrees with every single thing you just said and who has said so and whose policy positions align with that, support her, not because her being president is going to fix all of it in a day, but a president who even sees the country that way. We’re not going to begin a season of repair until first we’re willing to acknowledge how sick we are. Everything that you just said I agree with 100%. I’ve said it. I’ve written books about it. It’s on my website, everything. If you see a president, someone actually running for president saying exactly those things, send in a dollar. Put it on your social media. Come on, everybody.
As long as I’m running, it’s not like you can say you don’t have an option. As long as I’m running, you can’t say you don’t have a president who says just those things that you just said. Even to have that person in the conversation, if you’re willing to say the things that you just said and then ignore that person, then I would say it’s on you, because no matter what happens in my campaign, whether it takes me to the White House or not, at the end of this process, I’m going to be able to look in the mirror and say, “I ran for president saying those things.” There was an option of a president.
Even when you were talking before about the labor movement, yeah, but it took Franklin Roosevelt. He established the NLRB. It’s both and. I’m not Trump. I’m not like, “Oh, I’m the only one who can do it,” anything like that. But what’s it going to take? I asked myself that. What it’s going to take is a candidate who says those things. Then I looked in the mirror, and I said, “They’re going to be awful to you. They’re going to smear. They’re going to say terrible things about you. They’re going to be ugly. They’re going to be mean.” I thought to myself, “What a hypocrite I’ll be if I don’t.”
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, Marianne, thank you so much for sitting down and chatting with us today at The Real News Network.
Marianne Williamson:
Thank you.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Before we go, where can people go to learn more about you and your campaign?
Marianne Williamson:
Thank you. They can go to marianne2024.com and all the social media platforms and all of those things. I really, really appreciate you, Max, not only for the work that you do, the books you write, the things you say on Real News. It’s been wonderful getting to know you, and it’s an honor that you have me on. Thank you so much.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Thank you, Marianne.
