Last Night's Democratic Debate: Marianne Williamson and Elizabeth Warren Gave Two Apocalyptic Visions of America

Each of the candidates in last night’s Democratic Primary Debate expressed a vision of America, framed as the vision that they thought would help win the election and defeat Donald Trump. It was, like the last two Democratic primary debates, a miserable spectacle. But I would like to take a minute to look at two visions of America: that of Marianne Williamson, a long-shot candidate of no obvious credentials, and the high-polling Elizabeth Warren. Although their policies are much different, their tone was ever-so-much like that of Donald Trump: both women talked about a nation in crisis. Fear. Impending disaster. Doom is upon us. 

If they don’t win the White House, they could probably both get jobs as end-times preachers on television.

One of the USA's Founders

Let’s start with Marianne Williamson's opening statement. Like many liberals, she started by hearkening back to the nation's founders: “In 1776 our founders brought forth on this planet an extraordinary new possibility. It was the idea that people, no matter who they were, would simply have the possibility of thriving.” But, alas, she said, the nation has now turned away from those ideals and has fallen into “an amoral economic system” that “has turned short-term profits for huge multi-national corporations into a false god. And this new false god takes precedence over the safety and the health and the well-being of we the American people and the people of the world and the planet on which we live.”

Williamson rejected political norms: “Conventional politics will not solve this problem because conventional politics is part of the problem.” Pretty harsh, is it not? Because, sounding like a radical, she rejected the system that many people think has made the United States into a great nation. Similarly, during his campaign, Donald Trump said much the same thing: “Our country is in serious trouble.”

In case anyone missed the point, Williamson later talked about "this dark psychic force of the collectivized hatred that this president is bringing up in this country." 

Well, no surprise there. Most pundits feel that Williamson is the fruitcake candidate. But let’s look at what high-polling Elizabeth Warren said during her opening statement: after criticizing Trump, who she said “disgraces the office of president every single day,” she said that “our problems didn't start with Donald Trump. Donald Trump is part of a corrupt, rigged system that has helped the wealthy and the well-connected and kicked dirt in the faces of everyone else.” Warren rejected the system more emphatically than Williamson!

After promising to fix America’s political and economic problems, Warren concluded her opening statement like this: “You know, I know what's broken in this country, I know how to fix it, and I will fight to make it happen.”

Echoes of Donald Trump! Do you remember when Donald Trump said, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it?” Like Warren, Trump also talked about a “rigged system.” Warren was positively channeling Trump’s rhetoric. Do you remember Trump’s inaugural address? He promised that, “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” Williamson and Warren were promising much the same thing.

The soul of radical rhetoric is to say that the system is so bad that we can't fix it, but instead we need to overhaul it or get rid of it entirely. Williamson and Warren, like Trump before them, spotlighted a rhetorical vision; they told us about a country that was falling apart at the seams: a country that needs a hero to arise and put it back to rights. But people who have faith in our system and traditions, who cite the Founders, cannot, with any logic, then say that the system is broken, rigged, and doomed to destruction. And I am too old to think that one hero can fix everything. That path leads to disappointment or, worse, tyranny.

In part, the debaters were appealing to primary voters, who tend to be much more ideological than the public at large. In part, however, they are making self-fulfilling prophecies: if you tell people that things are terrible and then work to rip everything apart, you’re pretty much guaranteed to make things terrible, and then you get to say that you were right. Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper proposed more conventional solutions: “What we focused on was making sure that we got people together to get things done, to provide solutions to problems, to make sure that we—that we worked together and created jobs.” But he is near the bottom of the polls. In last night’s debate, the apocalyptic visions carried the day: Warren is edging up in the polls, while Williamson dominated social media.

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