Today, Explained - Marianne Williamson on healing America’s soul

Episode Date: January 25, 2021

Marianne Williamson was applauded as well as ridiculed on the presidential debate stage when she warned of the “dark psychic forces of collectivized hatred.” Now, just a few weeks after a lethal i...nsurrection, a historic second impeachment, and the inauguration of President Joe Biden, she talks about the possibility of unity. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:01:17 This is part of the dark underbelly of American society. The racism, the bigotry and the entire conversation that we're having here tonight. If you think any of this wonkiness 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. We need to say it like it is. Marianne Williamson was ridiculed and applauded for alluding to dark psychic forces on the debate stage. But 18 months and an insurrection later, her comments seemed sort of prescient. And it's not just that moment.
Starting point is 00:01:52 In 1997, Marianne Williamson wrote an entire book titled Healing the Soul of America. Sound familiar? I sought this office to restore the soul of America. We are in the battle for the soul of this nation. We're in a battle for America's soul, man. That's right, I agree with that. We're in a battle for the soul of America. And folks, we are.
Starting point is 00:02:15 This healing might be President Biden's ambition, but it's been Williamson's message for decades. So with a country divided and a new president inaugurated, we thought we'd ask her how to reunite these states on the show today. We started, we started, we started with an important caveat. The dark psychic forces are nothing new. The dark psychic force of collectivized hatred was obvious for all to see. Racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, bigotry of all kinds. No intelligent observer would have thought that those things did not exist in this country. They always existed in this country. But we had reached a point where
Starting point is 00:03:02 there seemed to be a national consensus that those kinds of voices would no longer be given major political megaphones, either on the left or the right, by either Democrats or Republicans. With the election of Donald Trump and also with the advent of social media, those levies fell. With social media, anybody could have a platform. And with that president, there was a willingness, as high as the White House, to exploit and to harness those forces for political purposes. Now, anybody with any recognition of the patterns of history would have seen that this was dangerous. All you had to do was read Hannah Arendt. All you had to do was read Timothy Snyder. All you had to do was have even base-level knowledge
Starting point is 00:03:49 of how Hitler emerged and the petri dish of human despair out of which he emerged, the most basic understanding of what happened in Rwanda. This was not arcane knowledge. This was simply a willingness to see not only what was already happening, but also the factors in American politics and economics that had been building up over the last 40 years to increase the danger that someone like Trump would emerge. And yet the reaction in that moment when you
Starting point is 00:04:25 said that, something about hearing someone seriously talk about dark psychic forces on a presidential debate stage, the action seems split between a lot of people who were like, preach, thank you for finally saying that. And then people who are just like, wait, what did she just say? There was a view on the part of the political media industrial complex that this woman needed to get off the stage as fast as possible. And when we look back to January 6th of this year, an insurrection on the Capitol, people showing up with ties, people hanging a noose, people assaulting police officers to their death. Did you feel vindicated on January 6th? There was no room in that experience for any positive feeling.
Starting point is 00:05:14 What is going on here is so much bigger than any one person's drama, including my own. I've been saying for years, not just as a presidential candidate, but long before that, that large groups of desperate people should be seen as a national security risk. Obviously, it's been pointed out by many that some of the people who were storming the Capitol, you know, one woman who was quite, you know, visible, she flew in on her own private jet. Or at least a rented one, which doesn't matter really whether it's owned or leased, right? Yeah, jet's a jet. So I'm not saying that everybody who stormed the Capitol was someone who had felt the economic, political, or social displacement,
Starting point is 00:05:53 but that's where it started. Some of the insurrectionists were calling for war. We had one guy on the show late last year who considers himself a liberal, but still picked up a gun in case there's a civil war. And you've said yourself before that the in case there's a civil war. And you've said yourself before that the country's in a cold civil war. Well, I think that Biden put it quite well in his inaugural address when he called it an uncivil war. We must end this uncivil war. The pits red against blue. Rural versus urban. Conservative versus liberal. We can do this if we open our
Starting point is 00:06:31 souls instead of hardening our hearts. We have every reason to be grateful and relieved that with the election of Joe Biden, we cut the cord to a neo-fascist, would-be authoritarian dictator who was in the White House. To me, it means we didn't go over the cliff, but we're still only inches away from it. And while I think that Biden has struck a very, very good tone in his inauguration and certainly in the first couple of days of executive orders, et cetera, none of us should be naive about the proven sophistication of the larger network of white supremacist, neo-Nazi hate groups in the United States. And this problem existed for quite a while. I remember years ago when the FBI first talked about the threat of extreme right-wing terrorists
Starting point is 00:07:33 as the largest domestic threat. And I remember how it was Republicans who had such a problem with that and started to squelch the conversation. So this already existed. The fact that the president threw gasoline on it and saw this as an opportunity to basically create his own personal Gestapo, while it is to be greatly appreciated that he is no longer president, that does not mean that the problem is gone. And Joe Biden talked in his inauguration speech about dealing with that economic reality for all Americans. He also talked about white supremacy. Joe Biden purports to want to unite the country while also calling out and pursuing and bringing violent forces who have committed crimes on our federal government to justice.
Starting point is 00:08:34 As has been said by many others, there will be no healing without accountability. There will be no healing without radical truth-telling. The only way our government can show mercy to the American people is to show no mercy right now to those who have taken this kind of collective violence to what is already extreme, extreme behavioral patterns. The fact that the president mentioned white supremacy in his inaugural address is historic. A cry for survival comes from the planet itself. A cry that can't be any more desperate or any more clear. And now, a rise of political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.
Starting point is 00:09:23 What remains to be seen is whether he is willing to confront, on a level that is necessary in order to really deal with the problem, the institutional resistance to the fundamental social, political, and economic changes that need to occur if we are to really root out the larger problem. You can see, for instance, that his policies that he's talked about already in the first two days, he clearly intends to rescue as many people as possible from economically drowning. But that is different than saying he is willing to alter the fundamental patterns that ensure the continuation of a permanent underclass in the United States. And I don't think anything less than the latter will provide enough
Starting point is 00:10:12 of an infusion of economic hope and opportunity into the life of the average American to make the kind of difference that needs to be made. I'm very heartened by the fact that the painting over the mantle in the fireplace in the Oval Office that he now looks at when he sits at his desk is a picture of FDR, because I believe anything less than full-on FDR, and we will simply be kicking the problem down the road, eradicating and suppressing some symptoms, but not rooting out a true cause. After you dropped out of the presidential race, you endorsed Bernie Sanders, but it sounds like you have faith in Joe Biden. I have faith in people. And I also feel, first of all, in his inaugural address, when he said, my soul is all in it, I believed him. People think that Joe Biden is so qualified for the job because
Starting point is 00:11:08 of his experience in the Senate for so many years and his experience as vice president. I believe he's qualified for the job, but less because of that and more because of the profound tragedies he's experienced in his own life. This man's soul has been taken down. You can see it. You can feel it. And you know what? That makes him, if he will stay with that, if he will stay with the profundity that he displayed on the day of the inauguration, then absolutely I have faith. But like I said, my concern is whether it will go far enough. Traditionally what has happened over the last few decades is that while the Republican Party has bought hook, line, and sinker into this corporatist mentality whereby government doesn't even pretend
Starting point is 00:12:04 to serve the health and safety and well-being of the American people, except insofar as it aligns with advocacy for short-term corporate profits, the Democratic Party has tried to do what it can to ameliorate the suffering that arises on the periphery from this corporatist trend. But the Democratic Party has been unwilling to challenge the underlying corporate forces that make all that suffering inevitable. I don't think anything less than socialized medicine is going to do it. I don't think anything less than Medicare for all is going to do it. If he's going to continue the Democratic pattern of playing footsies under the table with the health insurance companies and so forth, then no, it will not be a fundamental pattern disruption. And the status quo will not disrupt itself.
Starting point is 00:12:56 And Joe Biden, there's no doubt about it. He has been part of the status quo. I am very distressed by the appointment of Lloyd Austin that was just okayed by a Democratic Congress. The fact that they wavered their own rule about having been someone who was a general, and this man was a board member at Raytheon. It's unabashed. These people don't even pretend. So yes, I have some serious concerns. But at the same time, the game that's being played here among the neoliberals is to point at someone like myself and say, oh, she's just being contrarian. It's not being contrarian. You know, if the house is
Starting point is 00:13:38 burning, there's nothing negative about yelling fire. And you yell fire if it's just a little fire. So the fact that he's put out a whole lot of the fire in the first few days, I'm really happy. And I think that's great. And we have to keep going here. We have to keep going here. We keep going with Marianne after a break. way to keep up with family and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an
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Starting point is 00:15:38 Please do. So, I usually live in Washington, D.C., but I came home to California for the holidays, and I'm in a suburb of Los Angeles. And driving across the country to get here, I saw a lot of Trump flags. And this was after the election, a month after the election. And I was pretty used to it by the time I got to, you know, my mom's suburb in Los Angeles to find not only a lot of Trump flags, but lots of people in her neighborhood integrating their Trump flags into their Christmas decorations, into their Christmas lights, hanging lights across the street from one house to another and planting a Trump flag right in the middle of it. And it really did feel like so many things in the past four years, like this really unprecedented political moment where your politics weren't just, you know, this thing that you thought about every four years when you had to go vote for a president or,
Starting point is 00:16:40 or even every two years when you voted in a midterm election or some municipal election. But it was just your political identity had become your life in this irreversible way. And I wonder, talking about people and healing and light and unity right now in America, it feels like a tall order. First of all, the story that you told, I heard from many people. I heard of people who had Trump signs that were covering two lawns, that were surrounded by lights, that were, as you said, combined with their nativity scene. I heard about Confederate flags in Maine. It was like, who's going to tell them, right?
Starting point is 00:17:28 So clearly what had happened, I know, it's like, clearly what had happened here was that this man was going full-on cult figure. He wanted to make of himself a demigod. One of the most chilling moments to me was when they sang Ave Maria at the end of the Republican convention. Once you bring in this religious symbolism, you're in trouble here.
Starting point is 00:17:53 We're just not on the same page anymore. We're not on the same page about how we celebrate Christmas. And, you know, we're just not on the same page about how we celebrate America. I mean, you know, liberals are bashful about putting up a flag and conservatives aren't even flying the flag anymore. They're flying some black flag with a blue stripe on it or a red stripe on it. Like we don't even have we don't even have one flag. The Trump flag, the Confederate flag. Exactly. Like every element of our identity feels to be factionalized now.
Starting point is 00:18:25 And a thing I wonder is how do you bring people back together? The first principle that is theoretically such a pillar of the American ideal, although part of our problem is that our kids aren't even taught this in school anymore, is out of many, one. That we are many attitudes, many ideas, many viewpoints, many ethnicities, many religions, many cultures. That's the greatness of America. On the other hand, it's out of many, one. It is supposed to be fealty to these first principles. You have nine, I can't remember if it's nine or 11 states in the United States that don't even require of our kids in school half a year of American history, American civics, or American government. That same page has to do with the
Starting point is 00:19:12 principles of our Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal, that God gave all men inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that governments are instituted to secure those rights. When the government is not doing its job, it is the right of the people to alter it or to abolish it. These basic principles of American ideal, not only are they not discussed, not only are they not always upheld, they're not even always taught to American children anymore. And the Democratic Party, when you were talking about the American flag, the Democratic Party abdicated patriotism and they abdicated morality. Too cool to discuss the M word. Traditionally, this was not the case.
Starting point is 00:19:54 Traditionally, the right side of the political spectrum focused on issues of personal morality. But the left side of the political spectrum traditionally focused on issues of public morality. War and peace is a moral issue. Economic injustice is a moral issue. Mass incarceration and racial disparity in sentencing is a moral issue. So when the left became so over-secularized over the last few decades and gave up, wouldn't talk about the moral reasoning behind progressive politics, then they lost all moral authority because they weren't even claiming any moral authority. And that's where you lose the heart of people. You lose your soul connection with people. And if you don't fill the house with light, darkness is coming in.
Starting point is 00:20:42 I'm not humoring myself into thinking that we're going to unfactionalize this country. I know we're pretty much set to be many at this point, and maybe out of many, one is the aspiration. But I'm wondering how we get back there when we can't even agree on what's true anymore, on what's known anymore, right? We don't have the same facts anymore. We don't have the same information, in addition to not having the same beliefs and the same morals and the same culture. So, two issues. Number one, leadership. Leadership matters. If anything is obvious, it's that Donald Trump's words mattered.
Starting point is 00:21:28 And that's why I have hope that, and I think he's got a good beginning. I think that my experience, not just my belief, but my experience is that when you call people to their nobility, their nobility is more likely to come forth. When you call people to their intelligence, intelligence is more likely to come forth. And I do believe we are dignified, decent people. And I am very happy to see Joe Biden calling that out from people. And I think there is a great readiness among a great critical mass of Americans to go there. The second issue is we should not let the media off the hook here. They have not presented the kinds of facts that need to be presented. all broadcast licensees, as you apparently know, had to at least make some effort at fairness and equity in the real coverage of news. But let's not forget the damage done by the Telecommunications Act in 1996. The Telecommunications Act that under Bill Clinton in 1996 is what paved the way for the
Starting point is 00:22:41 corporate conglomeratization of our media companies. Today, you have a few companies, they own the mainstream media, and their bottom line is profit. But just to bring this back to people a little bit, I mean, people are getting their information from Facebook, people are getting their information from WhatsApp, and force is much darker than those two, including Parler and this alt-right media ecosystem. And I'm just wondering how to bring people together. I mean, it just feels like President Biden really has his work cut out for him. I mean, he's been singing this unity song for a while now. And just a few weeks ago, things were seemingly the worst they've ever been. You think he can make any progress to that end? Yes, I do.
Starting point is 00:23:32 When even a fair portion of this country doesn't even believe he's the rightfully elected president. It's unbelievable, the shift in the energy in this country. It is like America's back. It's like we have at least a fighting chance. Having spent the time in the belly of the beast that I spent, I know about the corruption of the system. At the same time, and the brutality of that system, by the way, especially towards anyone who is inconvenient to its pre-prescribed conversation whatsoever. But I also had the exhilarating experience of being in the presence in state after state after state, black audiences, white audiences, brown audiences, rich audiences, poor audiences.
Starting point is 00:24:12 People are smart. And I think that the founders had a very radical, brilliant idea there that in the final analysis, it is only, only the wisdom of people that should be looked to as the force powerful enough to govern a great nation. And that's what we need. We need a real reemergence and rebirth of democracy in this country. In order to have that rebirth, on one hand, you have the passage of H.R. 1 in the House. Now the Senate might take that up. I hear they're going to, the version of that. That's the kind of direction we need to move in, to override gerrymandering and ultimately whatever efforts we're allowed to override money in politics, because right now it's unreasonable to think we're going to overturn Citizens United, but there are other ways that we can start to get around the problem of that underlying cancer,
Starting point is 00:25:09 which is money in politics. And that, I believe, is the only survivable and sustainable future for American democracy. Marianne Williamson, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. It was great talking to you. All my best. the Marianne Williamson Podcast. I'm Sean Ramos for M. This one's Today Explained.

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