"Darkened heart, enlightened mind. Whole worlds apart remain entwined."

Marianne Williamson has tapped into something, but she's far from alone.

This week’s soundtrack: Pallbearer - “Worlds Apart”

I live in D.C., I’m a straight white cis man and I’m a journalist, so Marianne Williamson has mostly evaded my interest; her popularity is about as far away from the proverbial swamp as anything can be. But, I do have some friends who love her in the way that I’ve read about and I think Williamson’s popularity is worth noting. So, I want to write a little about Williamson’s impact after I read a very good piece by Ryan Grim about Williamson

Marianne Williamson, Fusing Bernie Sanders and (Early) Jordan Peterson, is Taking Over TikTok

It’s worth reading, so click away above, but I want to highlight the notion that Williamson’s popularity with young people – in TikTok, but also otherwise – is because of the way she speaks in the language of spirituality and love.

What makes Williamson unique in politics is her explicit linkage of spiritual inspiration and personal uplift with left-wing sensibilities around community and a collective struggle against corruption and greed. Williamson largely champions the agenda established by fellow 2020 presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, but Sanders never spoke directly to the spiritual rot wrought by neoliberalism the way Williamson does. New Age is not quite his thing.

Grim goes on to compare Williamson to young men’s embrace of Jordan B. Peterson’s books and his general philosophy of getting one’s live in order (not sure where his bizarre diet comes in, but Grim also outlines that Peterson went into orbit a few years ago, so even his early followers think he’s a crank now), writing that Peterson “amassed an audience in the tens of millions or more spoke to a collective — or, as he saw it, individual — yearning he met.”

I am a big devotee of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and the notion that human beings are, at our heart, herd animals who need one another. American modernity – and especially the technological changes of my lifetime – has made alienation the name of the game. The vastness of this slog toward prosperity that came with this revolution is hard to even gauge; we are simply the fish swimming in a sea of alienation and unfulfilled promise of “the future.” To a certain extent, that leaves many of us searching for ways to connect with one another or to make sense of it.

In my own life, I see this a lot regarding non-traditional spirituality systems, especially if you spread that meaning to include bullshit personality framing methods (astrology is the big one, but enneagrams, Myers-Briggs, birth order, etc. all fit within these molds, to some degree). My feelings about these things are largely neutral – they’re dumb, but they’re harmless dumb. And also, everything is dumb – but they absolutely fit within our search for meaning. I saw it on the first date I had with an enneagram evangelist, I see it in the rise of Myers-Briggs in the professional world, I see it in millennials’ embrace of haute astrology and I see it in a coworker saying  “of course, that guy would say that. It’s such a Scorpio thing to say” about another coworker.

(I should again expand on the idea that I don’t find this particularly good or bad. The things to which I hold dear – Maimonides, Heschel, Putnam, etc. – almost certainly read like pablum to most people. Anyone’s search for meaning in an exceptionally cruel world can take forms that defy sense – and universality. The great world religions come the closest to being universal, but it goes without saying that much – probably the majority – cruelty, violence and inhumanity  in history has been done in name of these religions. That said, these religions do bring forth quite a bit of Peterson-esque order and Williamson-eque love, and address the “why” of it in ways that they do not. While the personality framing stuff doesn’t really do that, non-traditional American religion can – I’m thinking specifically of white Americans who talk a lot about chakras– and a whole fucking lot of politics can, too. Most socialists you meet are like this – don’t talk to anyone who just recently read Marx – and, while annoying, I get it.)

And here’s where I veer away from Grim: Nearly successful political movement over the last few decades has seized on the alienation of modernity. It is the driving force over the last half of the 20th century; so much of postmodernism rejects the notion that modernity has brought forth the gains that it promised. Grim’s point that Williamson speaks the language of new age is not without value – again, I cannot reject how popular pseudo psychology is with people I meet, from quants and their love of Meyers-Briggs to the enneagram people to the tarot people – but it is a strain of alienation that nearly everyone has felt for decades. Some of my favorite pieces of art address – including two of my choices for greatest album ever, a generation apart – this directly, but the broader notion that modernity  and late capitalism has left people behind… it didn’t start with my generation.

The words change, but the idea that a more-connected past can help solve our politics is not new. The framing of it within new age wording, of course, is Williamson’s One Big Trick, but she’s simply found her time in the same way that Bill Clinton did with “I feel your pain” and Ronald Reagan did with “morning in America”; the language of the culture was used by the political sphere to stir feelings within the electorate. Donald Trump spoke in the language of recent conservative outrage to rally his fandom; Bernie Sanders did the same, albeit with the Occupy Wall Street movement in lieu of conservative outrage (and with some policy behind it). 

Williamson’s platform last cycle was relatively thin, though she has beefed it up. But, as Grim noted, for her to successfully unseat Joe Biden is about as long a shot as there has ever been. More than anything, successful politicians meet their constituents – and the public – where they are. To use one of the more visible examples of recent vintage: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is often lauded and she’s certainly a rising star because of her ability to do this in a well-rounded way. She embraces technology, she speaks in the language of young voters on their platforms and she performs in her TV moments. But, she’s also in the conventional lanes, as well. Mostly, though, she speaks to the alienation that so many feel from late-stage capitalism, from her DSA membership to her personal story. 

Williamson has her charms, for sure, but she is not anywhere near the lanes of power. As Grim points out, she’s more a popular culture figure than anything else, but politics becoming pop culture has become our politics themselves.

GovExec Daily

People really responded to today’s show with Rep. Abigail Spanberger. Not only does it feature a sitting member of Congress, but it deals directly with a pocketbook issue for public servants.

Last week also featured an interesting conversation with our reporter Erich Wagner on the workforce issues at Social Security. It’s one of those agencies that is slowly being starved of workers and it’s finally showing up on the customer service side of things.

Finally, Lindy Kyzer is among my favorite people to have on the show and she even let us do it on video. You can watch us chop it up over at LinkedIn.

Lulu Update

I’m still waiting on some stuff to get Lulu’s knee fixed, so I’m trying to get my girl to stay off of her bum knee as much as possible. It is an impossible task, of course, as she is completely nuts.

Big yawn.

A Recommendation: Karol G’s Mañana Será Bonito

I’m a generally opinionated cat, so it will come as no surprise that I have opinions as to which are the best-sounding languages and which are ugly as hell. English is the only language I speak fluently (and I’m not even sure I do that), but I’m OK in Spanish, the most beautiful language in the world.

French is gorgeous, for sure, but there are some regional versions that sound honking or inelegant. The lilting nature of Italian is wonderful, but Spanish is really good no matter where it comes from or who is speaking it. I came to this realization somewhat recently and it comes through most on Karol G’s latest record, Mañana Será Bonito.

The record’s best songs’ lyrics are kinda filthy, but they sound absolutely romantic. I can take or leave reggaeton, but the records’ rhythms are infectious, the hooks are terrific and Karol G’s voice showcases just how wonderful Spanish can be. She was on SNL over the weekend doing two of the record’s songs. Check out “TUS GAFITAS” below. Not even SNL’s famously bad sound mixers can make it sound bad.