On night two of the first Democratic primary debate leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Marianne Williamson gave her closing statement:

I’m sorry we haven’t talked more tonight about how we’re going to beat Donald Trump. I have an idea about Donald Trump. Donald Trump is not going to be beaten just by insider politics talk. He’s not going to be beaten just by somebody who has plans. He’s going to be beaten by somebody who has an idea what this man has done. This man has reached into the psyche of the American people and he has harnessed fear for political purposes. So, Mr. President, if you’re listening, I want you to hear me, please. You have harnessed fear for political purposes and only love can cast that out. So I, sir, I have a feeling you know what you’re doing. I’m going to harness love for political purposes. I will meet you on that field. And, sir, love will win.

No one should take Williamson seriously in the Democratic primaries. And some say there are reasons not to take her very seriously as a public intellectual either. But I think that that specific statement of hers was not a reason not to take her seriously. Williamson opened up a few possibilities there of no little importance. Her statement packed some important assumptions. We should try to evaluate the possibilities that she opened up. But in order to do that, we first have to recast her statement, designed as it was to be a soundbite for easy consumption. We have to present her real contentions in such a way that those contentions are as defensible as possible, which means among other things as empirical and falsifiable as possible.

Let’s begin with love versus fear. According to A Course in Miracles, known to be a big source of Marianne Williamson’s philosophy, Perfect love casts out fear. If fear exists, then there is not perfect love. And The opposite of love is fear. Enough further understanding of ACIM might give me a different understanding of what the author of it (or channeler of it), Helen Schucman, meant by those sentences, but I will assume that what she meant accords with a view of mine: there is a lot of psychological truth in saying “Love is the opposite of fear.” I think that all fears are mechanisms of clinging to our egos and are the causes of all our suffering. (“Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.” If one does not fear and resist pain, then it is only pain. This knowledge goes back at least to the Buddha.) Once we are free from our egos and free from suffering, what will remain is the love that is always under the surface, and as part of the process of getting free, that love that is under the surface impels us to overcome, or cast out, fear.

Love is often dichotomized with hate, but I feel that hate, and all negative emotions other than fear, would not occur if we did not fear for our egos. Whereas love is not contingent on anything in a similar way. It is fundamental – it is always there, and it is there to be experienced once we overcome fear. Real love is entirely altruistic, in contrast to what Abraham Maslow called “deficiency love,” and when real love is directed toward a person, the attitude is “Love says that ‘it is good that you exist,’ and insofar as I am able I will contribute to your happiness, your existence, your flourishing.”*

So I think there is a lot of truth, in the context of the psychological realities of any individual person, in saying that love is the opposite of fear. And whether or not it is possible for a person to be all love and no fear, I’m sure there are big differences between persons in terms of each person’s balance of love and fear. I feel quite sure that there were Democratic candidates on that stage those two nights who were more loving than poor Donald Trump, and that Marianne Williamson was one of them.

But Williamson is talking about an election, a form of social struggle. Can love cast out fear in a social struggle?

The psychological mechanism by which love casts out fear operates within a particular individual, working in the framework of the love and fear within that individual. There is no such mechanism by which the love within one voter can cast out the fear within another voter. So I don’t think she is really claiming that that will happen. She spoke of harnessing love and harnessing fear. She was saying that Trump’s voters will be motivated by fear, and hers by love. So what she seems to be claiming is that a side whose supporters are motivated primarily by love will prevail politically (or in the case of a war she might say prevail militarily) – will prevail in any social struggle – over a side whose supporters are motivated primarily by fear.

She does not quite claim explicitly, by the way, that her own internal love-fear balance is more loving than Trump’s, but my guess is that it is. And my guess is also that she would not disagree.

She did not say exactly that Trump had stoked any fears, only that he had harnessed them. But Trump has sometimes been accused of fearmongering, and probably Williamson would agree that, whatever fears Trump voters may already have harbored, Trump has also created new levels of fear that did not exist before.

But at this point we have to look at Williamson’s website. Her website says:

There is a growing consensus in America that climate change is an existential emergency. . . . Due to the nefarious influence of unlimited corporate money on our politicians, our government has become a system of legalized bribery. . . . The situation has reached emergency proportions. . . . Everything about American life today – including the economic pressure that leaves 40% of Americans living with chronic stress over whether they can make basic costs of health care, rent, transportation, and education – contributes to the higher trend of chronic disease. . . . eradicating or limiting abortion rights would not decrease their number; it would simply mean that rich women have safe abortions, while poor women go back to risking injury, or even death, in the modern equivalent of back-alley abortions.

These are all appeals to fear. So at this point let’s make a distinction. Some of Williamson’s appeals to fear may be to valid fears. And though Trump may have stoked fears of terrorism, for example, way beyond a rational level, Williamson would probably not deny that terrorism is a matter of concern. To a small extent at least, Trump’s appeals also may be to valid fears. Williamson’s objection is not to valid fears, but to false fears.

One more thing can be read between the lines. I mentioned above my own confidence that Marianne Williamson is a person of a more loving nature than poor Trump, and mentioned my guess that she would not disagree. My guess is also that within the framework she subscribes to, whenever there is any struggle in which society is divided into a love side and a fear side, the love side will almost always be led by someone who is personally more loving than the leader of the opposite side.

So I think that if Williamson were to state her contentions more precisely and rigorously than she did in the forty-five seconds she was allowed that night, they would be these (and I might be wrong, of course):

5. Williamson is a more loving person by nature than is Trump.

I think that contentions 1, 3, 4, and 5 must be largely correct. But what about 2?

Contention 2 will be correct only if Williamson has correctly calculated that her supporters will be motivated primarily by love, and that Trump’s supporters will be motivated primarily or importantly by false fears. But let us look at this.

One of her web pages, as I have mentioned, says:

eradicating or limiting abortion rights would not decrease their number; it would simply mean that rich women have safe abortions, while poor women go back to risking injury, or even death, in the modern equivalent of back-alley abortions.

First of all, “would not decrease their number” is not true. And if she is predicting injuries and deaths in big numbers, based on the past – numbers big enough to justify raising an alarm such as this in her platform – then she is peddling the same misinformation that Planned Parenthood’s president recently tripped over, as revealed by no less than the pro-choice Washington Post. So she is harnessing a false fear, whether she understands that or not. False fears are being harnessed on both sides.

And will no voters on Trump’s side be motivated by love? Again let’s think about the abortion issue. There are tens of millions of Americans who perceive the unborn at any stage as full-fledged members of our human family, that is, who perceive them with love and with an instinct of protection. Yet hardly anyone who supports Williamson’s position on abortion knows anything about love for those young beings. Whatever Williamson’s supporters may know about love seems to enter a vacuum when their gaze falls on the most vulnerable and youthful end of the human spectrum.

If Williamson were indeed to face Trump in 2020, there might be only one issue, the abortion issue, on which false fears would motivate voters on Williamson’s side, and love would motivate voters on Trump’s side. But that one issue is a very big issue, huge in terms of human numbers and disproportionately large in terms of human consciousness.

Note that I have not called Williamson’s supporters on the abortion issue unloving persons. Their love bypasses one big human group because of a problem of perception.

Williamson said in her closing statement, “[Donald Trump]’s going to be beaten by somebody who has an idea what this man has done.” Her qualification to be the Democratic nominee, as she sees it, is a keener psychological and spiritual insight than that of her Democratic rivals. Yet those who support her and all her rivals’ absolutist position on abortion will some day be remembered as the side of history that was unable to see.

* Jason Lepojärvi.

© 2019

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