Essential California

Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Wednesday, July 31, and I’m writing from Los Angeles. There was only one presidential candidate on stage during last night’s debates who has ever lived in a geodesic dome, led a room of hand-holding moguls in prayer at David Geffen’s 48th birthday party or officiated a wedding at Neverland Ranch. The bride was Elizabeth Taylor(entering her eighth and final union, with a Teamster she met while both were drying out at Betty Ford), and the candidate in question is, of course, Marianne Williamson. Williamson, who is based in Los Angeles and has spent the better part of her adult life in the state, is a uniquely California creature. She operates at the nexus of celebrity, pop psychology and potential salvation, where shrewd business acumen and astral planes collide. The 67-year-old is a self-help author, motivational lecturer and new age guru who believes that performing miracles is her life’s work, and delivers her love-based philosophy at sold-out seminars. Like most California eccentrics, Williamson hailed from elsewhere (Houston, in this case), wandered lost and then was found. Southern California has long drawn prophets and gurus like moths to sun-drenched light. Our shores are an oddly fertile breeding ground for all manner of cultists, mystics and new religious movements. In his indispensable 1946 volume “Southern California: An Island on the Land,” historian and social critic Carey McWilliams penned the ur-history of the region as world capital of woo woo, and dated the emergence of the phenomenon to roughly the turn of the last century, when Katherine Tingley, “the first major prophetess of the region” established a Theosophical community near San Diego in 1900. It’s not exactly a direct line from Tingley to Aimee Semple McPherson to Williamson, but the path is there. Williamson typically speaks as if she’s delivering the answer to a riddle at a dinner party hosted by Tom Wolfe. She has written seven New York Times bestsellers, including the 1992 debut “A Return to Love” that launched her career into the mainstream with Oprah’s ringing on-air endorsement. She came west in 1970, for a two-year stint at Pomona College that helped shape her very California candidacy. “We read Ram Dass and Alan Watts in the morning,” she recalled to the audience at an L.A. event, according to a recent profile. “And went to Vietnam antiwar protests in the afternoon.” Williamson, who was raised Jewish, first encountered “A Course in Miracles,” the thousand-plus page spiritual tome that has shaped her teachings, on a friend’s Manhattan coffee table in 1977. Los Angeles — a city that specializes in the brand of post-denomination, choose-your-own-adventure spirituality necessary to casually accessorize a red string Kabbalah bracelet with a crucifix necklace — was a natural destination for a Jew to riff on a book that purports to be the words of Jesus, as dictated directly to a New York shrink. (Yes, that is literally the background on “A Course in Miracles.”) Williamson began giving her talks in 1983 at the Philosophical Research Society on Los Feliz Boulevard (the nonprofit, which gets a name-check in McWilliam’s chapter on the abundant flowering of Southern California occultism, is still in operation). She started to gain an L.A. audience in the mid-’80s, particularly with Hollywood’s gay community in relation to her AIDS activism. She launched her political career in 2014 with a glitzy bid for California’s 33rd Congressional District (Henry Waxman’s old seat, now represented by Ted Lieu). The campaign was unsuccessful but drew support from multiple Kardashians and spawned “Mermaids for Marianne” lawn signs. In the crowded race for 2020, Williamson remains a long-shot candidate who has been polling at less than 1%. Her wacky and extremely meme-able performance during the first round of debates last month brought her outsize attention, though much of it was as a punch line. She’s been derided as a “dangerous wacko” and made deeply controversial statements on vaccines, weight loss and mental health, among other things. “In many ways, Williamson is the left’s answer to Trump — an outlier candidate who celebrates her lack of political acumen with the language of popular culture and believes, at some level, that feelings are the same as facts,” my colleague Mary McNamara wrote in a column last month. In an election season with an incumbent president who has never before held elected office, McNamara suggested that Americans ignore Williamson at their own peril. And on Tuesday night, Williamson delivered the most surprising performance of all: that of an eerily near-viable candidate, who spoke powerfully on race and dominated Google search traffic.