Nov. 15, 2018 - Author Marianne Williamson Announces Presidential Exploratory Committee

• note from website     • video   

Dear Friends,

For the last year I have held within my heart the idea of running for President of the United States.

Today, I formed a committee to explore the possibility of seeking the Democratic nomination in 2020.

At a time when fear has been harnessed for political purposes, our task is to turn wisdom and love into a political force. The lower inclinations of human nature cannot be defeated by politics alone, but they can be overridden.

Our political circumstances are not simply a product of external policies, but even more so of internal dynamics like fear, desperation, hope and yearning. The mindset of the current political establishment neither acknowledges nor understands the deeper emotional and psychological rivers that underlie political forces on the move today.

I do.

In order for us to transform the crises we are facing now, we need a candidate whose understanding of our internal landscape is as expert as their understanding of traditional politics.

As someone who has had a 35-year career addressing the personal crises of millions of individuals, I feel I have a unique qualification to help create the spiritual awakening that will transform the crisis we are facing now. In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “We need a quantitative shift in our circumstances as well as a qualitative shift in our souls.” And I have experience with both.

I am sending you this letter and attached video to see whether the combination of politics and awakening that compels me is something that compels you too. If it does, I hope you will help me communicate to people far and wide that my exploratory campaign exists, and do everything you can to help create the material means to support it.

Together we can do great things. We can show up for our country in a way we have never shown up before. And with God’s help, we can create miracles.
 
With thanks and all best wishes,


Transcript

Hi.  I'm Marianne Williamson.  I'm considering running as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2020, and I want to tell you why.

We had a miracle in this country in 1776, and we need another one.

I want to talk first of all about what that miracle was.  Previous to the founding of this country, the entire civilization of Europe was run according to a monarchical and an aristocratic system.  What that meant—we learned this when we were kids in school—that there was a divine right of kings.  The idea was that God had given power to one person, maybe two, a king and a queen, and their group of rich friends, the aristocracy.  And it was deemed that they were entitled.  This group was entitled to the land, to wealth, to education.  They were entitled to ownership and to the opportunity for the creation of more ownership for all of the material means that would provide for the self-actualization of an individual.  Nobody else had those rights.  Nobody else was entitled.  Everybody else—which was the vast majority of the population—was little more than serfs to that small group.

With the founding of this country we turned that entire mindset, that entire paradigm was repudiated, was turned on its ear, and instead in our Declaration of Independence it says that all men are created equal, and that God gave all men the unalienable rights to life, and to liberty and to the pursuit of happiness and that governments were instituted to secure those rights. 

That's why Abraham Lincoln would later talk about our being a government of the people and by the people and for the people, and he said in the Gettysburg Address that the whole point of this battle was that government of the people, by the people and for the people would not perish from the earth.

It's perishing now, because we're not functioning as a government of the people, by the people and for the people.  We in our generation are functioning as a government of a few of the people, by a few of the people for a few of the people.  In other words, we have subconcioiusly reverted to an aristocratic paradigm.

Now this is not the first time that this has happened.  This struggle has been with us from the beginning.  On the one hand, we are founded on these extraordinary principles; on the other hand we had slavery, we had genocide of native Americans, we had institutionalized white supremacy, segregation, lack of suffrage and oppression of women. 

But, even though we had those problems, we, our country in which our narrative has been that of problem solvers who have risen up in their time.  So that yeah, we had slavery, but we also had abolition.  We had the oppression of women; we also had two major waves of feminism and the women's suffragete movement.  We had institutionalized white supremacy and segregation, and we also had the civil rights movement.

You know what ladies and gentlemen?  It's our turn.  It's our turn to not only identify our problems, but identify with the problem solvers who have done in their time what we now need to do in ours.  Push back, push back against all forces which would repudiate the principles on which we stand, who in their time, when the United States was functioning in a way that was off its moral axis, in ways that were not our democratic values, in ways that were not our deep universal values, generations rose up and said unh-unh, no way, not on our watch, we're going to get this country back on track with our ethical values, and that's what we need to do.  We need to get our country back on track, our government back on track, back to an ethical center that is the true exceptionalism of the American ideal.

We need to do more than just fight what is; we need to create, as Lincoln said, a new birth of freedom.  Martin Luther King, Jr. said we need quantitative changes in our circumstances but also qualitative changes in our souls. 

We have to change.  We have to recognize that we have been chronically disengaged, too often, too much.  We need to all remember that citizenship is a part of what it means to be a concious, mature person.  We have to realize and remember that you can't just take a democracy for granted.  It has to be tended to, generation after generation.  And democracy doesn't just give us rights.  Democracy gives us responsibilities.  We need to live up to ours now, rise up in our time, do what other generations before did in theirs.

If I run, that's what this is going to be about.  It's going to be a co-creative effort, an effort of love, and a gift of love to our country, and hopefully to our world, by which we take the United States of America back to the truth of who we are.

That's why I might do this.  And I look forward to hearing what you think.

Thank you.


video [5 Minutes]

https://marianneforamerica.com/