Williamson is not the only one speaking in emotional terms in this campaign
by digby
I know that many people were moved by Marianne Williamson in the debate last night and that many more are followers of her spiritual instruction through her books and teaching of “A Course in Miracles.” I’m not going to debate that point. I’m not an expert and I am more interested in the political dimension of what she’s talking about in these debates.
I think it’s important to point out that she is not alone in trying to speak to this “emotional turbulence” we are going through but that others are also trying to find material ways to combat it, through policy and politics. Religion, spirituality and self-help are vital aspects of human experience but they aren’t specifically the business of politics. Politics requires both “wonkery” and emotion.
In any case, I invite you to read a few commentsabout some of the other people who are running for president.
Corey Booker:
He would have done pretty much the same routine no matter what, because that’s what he does: method performances of emotions lived out fresh onstage each time, moments from his life stamped into parables of the new agey Gospel of Cory, each one introduced with “I want to tell you a story …” In the Senate and in the presidential field taking shape, he’s more a bundle of feelings than an agenda.
No one walked out with any clue where Booker stands on almost any issue, aside from a riff that talked about the Democratic commitment to Medicaid, Medicare, voting rights, civil rights, LGBTQ rights, “the party of people who believe that someone who is nice to you but is not nice to the waiter is not a nice person.” (Booker greeted janitors backstage before the speech, and walked around the room again afterward, shaking hands that were dumping the leftover food into the trash.)
But they did walk out saying things like “I so needed that today.” The skepticism wasn’t about his controversial vote on a resolution about importing prescription drugs to lower prices or the work he’s doing pushing sweeping reforms to the criminal-justice system. It was about whether there’d be a big enough market, outside Democrats willing to buy tickets to a dinner to hear him speak, for a message of inclusivity for a black senator from the East Coast. “He was coming in as the savior, but this was the choir,” one said.
A quote:
My heroes have been not afraid to talk about love. Martin Luther King Jr. talked about the “beloved community.” He talked about the Greeks, who separated love into three categories: eros, philia, and agape love. I think patriotism, by its very definition, is love of country. But we seem to have become a country where the highest thing we’re reaching for is tolerance. When you say “bipartisan,” you’re really saying, “Hey we’re going to tolerate each other.” Go home and tell somebody that you live with, or your neighbor, “I tolerate you.” That’s not a high aspiration.
He’s been pilloried for his “love” approach by the savvy presidential press corps. If he’d have said the things Williamson said in the debate last night they would have been savage.
How about this guy?
Charlottesville, Va., is home to the author of one of the great documents in human history. We know it by heart: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
We’ve heard it so often, it’s almost a cliché. But it’s who we are. We haven’t always lived up to these ideals; Jefferson himself didn’t. But we have never before walked away from them.
Charlottesville is also home to a defining moment for this nation in the last few years. It was there on August of 2017 we saw Klansmen and white supremacists and neo-Nazis come out in the open, their crazed faces illuminated by torches, veins bulging, and bearing the fangs of racism. Chanting the same anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the ‘30s. And they were met by a courageous group of Americans, and a violent clash ensued and a brave young woman lost her life.
And that’s when we heard the words from the president of the United States that stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation. He said there were “some very fine people on both sides.” Very fine people on both sides?
With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.
I wrote at the time that we’re in the battle for the soul of this nation. Well, that’s even more true today. We are in the battle for the soul of this nation.
I believe history will look back on four years of this president and all he embraces as an aberrant moment in time. But if we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation — who we are — and I cannot stand by and watch that happen.
The core values of this nation, our standing in the world, our very democracy, everything that has made America, America, is at stake.
That’s why today I’m announcing my candidacy for President of the United States.
Folks, America’s an idea, an idea that’s stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator or tyrant. It gives hope to the most desperate people on earth, it guarantees that everyone is treated with dignity and gives hate no safe harbor. It instills in every person in this country the belief that no matter where you start in life, there’s nothing you can’t achieve if you work at. We can’t forget what happened in Charlottesville. Even more important, we have to remember who we are.
This is America.
That was Joe Biden’s announcement speech.
Here’s Elizabeth Warren:
In the tale that is captivating crowds on the campaign trail, Warren is not a professor or a political star but a hardscrabble Oklahoma “late-in-life baby” or, as her mother called her, “the surprise.” Her elder brothers had joined the military; she was the last one at home, just a middle-schooler when her father had the massive heart attack that would cost him his job. “I remember the day we lost the station wagon,” she tells crowds, lowering her voice. “I learned the words ‘mortgage’ and ‘foreclosure’ ” listening to her parents talk when they thought she was asleep, she recalls. One day she walked in on her mother in her bedroom, crying and saying over and over, “ ’We are not going to lose this house.’ She was 50 years old,” Warren adds, “had never worked outside the home, and she was terrified.”
This part of the story has been a Warren staple for years: Her mother put on her best dress and her high heels and walked down to a Sears, where she got a minimum-wage job. Warren got a private lesson from her mother’s sacrifice—“You do what you have to to take care of those you love”—and a political one, too. “That minimum-wage job saved our house, and it saved our family.” In the 1960s, she says, “a minimum-wage job could support a family of three. Now the minimum wage can’t keep a momma and a baby out of poverty.”
Or this fella:
They all do it differently, but to say they aren’t trying to speak to the “heartlessness” of American society, as Williamson contends they fail to do, is just wrong.
I’m sure there are other examples from Democrats who appeal, to one degree or another, to the heart and soul of the voters. It’s as big a part of politics as the policy wonkery that dominates these generally painfully frustrating debates.
Williamson is being held up today as if she’s doing something truly unique and I think the only unique thing about it is the fact that she is not required to talk about policy in-depth and can simply offer her observations that America is in a dark place and we should replace it with love without specifics. That’s fine as far as it goes, and I take her seriously as someone with a huge following and a message that resonates with a lot of people. But it’s unfair to say that other candidates are failing to try to connect on this emotional level. They just also have to back it up with policy.
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