Marianne Williamson was on the side of the angels

For a while there — perhaps as long as 30 minutes back in late July — I knew how the 2020 presidential election was going to be decided. Donald Trump was going to meet Marianne Williamson on a vast plain, perhaps somewhere in the Great American Desert. Clad in garments of immaculate white and armed only with a teak-wood staff, she would vanquish him with the power of love before flying away on a cloud. In place of the Dark Lord Donald, we would have a queen, not dark, but beautiful and terrible as the morning and the Night, fair as the sea and the sun and the snow upon the mountain. All would love her, and misery and injustice would vanish from the earth suddenly, like a cold we forget as soon as we are over it.

I soon learned better, which is why I was not remotely surprised to read on Thursday that, with the layoff of her entire staff, Williamson's presidential campaign is effectively over. Despite a strong showing in the early debates, and a certain amount of media interest (perhaps unsurprisingly concentrated among conservative Catholics), Williamson's share in polls never rose above 1 percent. Much of what she had to say about the fundamentally spiritual nature of our political crises and the almost total irrelevance of her fellow candidates' barely distinguishable plans to respond to poverty, disease, greed, and environmental spoliation with tinkering around the margins was ignored or mocked by mainstream journalists. Their jeering was grotesque. It was also the ultimate vindication of her position.

According to Williamson, it does not matter in the slightest whether we adopt the Elizabeth Warren or the Bernie Sanders version of Medicare-for-All (to say nothing of the various incomprehensible Medicare-for-Some-Who-Want-It peddled by other Democratic presidential candidates). Our society will remain sick because its organizing principles are cruelty, avarice, crassness, irreligion, and indifferentism. What she has proposed in her gnomic utterances — and in thousands of delightful messages on Twitter — is nothing less than a Wagnerian destruction of our entire political and economic order, an abnegation of the will-to-power in favor of love.

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Williamson is the only political candidate in my lifetime who has recognized that we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world. This is why she always makes such a fuss about angels. Hearing and reading her it is difficult not to be reminded of that magnificent scene from Izaak Walton's biography of the English divine Richard Hooker:

For her Democratic rivals, the only thing standing between us and a restoration of peace and prosperity is a series of bullet points that no one — least of all the candidates themselves — will ever read on a website. For Williamson the only force preventing nuclear war and I daresay a breakdown in the basic fabric of reality — the laws of physics, various chemical and biological constants, and so on — is the heavenly host.

Which, not quite, paradoxically is what makes the end of her formal candidacy for president easy to bear. Her criticisms of modern life exist in a realm beyond campaigns, candidates, elections, policies, and even words.

I will always think fondly of her — and of the angels on whose side she is ultimately fighting.