Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson suspended her White House campaign Wednesday. It isn’t terribly surprising that she dropped her bid after winning only 4% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary and 2% in the South Carolina primary. More surprising is that she barely got any votes despite backing so many policies desired by progressives who might be interested in a challenge to President Joe Biden.
In her support for “Medicare for All,” free college tuition, rapidly shifting to renewable energy and calling for reparations, Williamson said a lot of the right things for those of us who lean far to the left. Still, she failed to win the support of a substantial number of people who generally like the idea of a social democrat running for the White House, despite facing no other competition in that lane this year. Williamson was ignored by the mainstream press, rarely made waves in progressive and left-wing spaces, didn’t garner huge crowds at rallies and was mostly forgotten during the primaries.
Williamson was not a trustworthy or effective messenger of the progressive policies she embraced.
I’m not sad about Williamson suspending her campaign. I do wish Biden had some serious competition from the left, and I think it’s a tragedy that he faces no organized pressure, for example, to adopt Medicare for All. But Williamson was not a trustworthy or effective messenger of the progressive policies she embraced, either this time or in 2020. Her woo-woo calls for a spiritual revolution were a distraction from a proper working-class-focused political movement.
Williamson’s background as a New Age spiritual guru was always in tension with her progressive political views. She has no background in electoral politics; she’s a self-help author who writes books about topics like healing and love and developed a wide audience as a spiritual adviser to Oprah Winfrey. And she has long been an evangelist of the kind of anti-establishment health…
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