The democratic elite should resign

by Junna Base November 9, 2024

Last night at half past ten, Democratic activist Marianne Williamson was a guest on our epic six-hour livestream. Marianne has run for the Democratic presidential nomination twice: in 2020, when she ultimately supported Bernie Sanders, and in 2024 against Joe Biden. When she came to us, Trump’s victory seemed inevitable. We asked them about their first reactions. What follows is an edited transcript of her response.

Well, obviously I’m not happy about it. But I also feel like everything that went wrong is what I’ve been saying over and over again for the last year and a half. I ran for president because I knew that the traditional Democratic playbook — corporate Democrats are now in charge of that playbook — wouldn’t be enough to defeat Trump this time. I have said repeatedly that this election would be more like 2016 than 2020, and it is very clear to me that the Democratic Party and media elites do not know how to read the room. The Democratic elite should resign from office tonight. Many of these people haven’t been out of their gated communities long enough to understand what’s going on out there.

Over the last year and a half, we could have had an in-depth conversation about the following facts:

46 percent of Americans regularly skip meals to pay their rent.
70 to 90 million people are underinsured or uninsured.
Over half of our bankruptcies are medical bankruptcies.
One in four Americans lives with medical debt.
1.3 million Americans ration their insulin.
Over 70 percent of Americans say they live with chronic economic anxiety.

The people of America now feel hopeless. In my opinion, Donald Trump gives false hope. He will name a problem, but he will not name a policy that will fix it. But people will choose false hope over no hope.

And the Democratic Party offered no hope. Instead of talking about these things, the Democratic elite have done this: They have simply committed to an agenda. We shouldn’t even discuss what an agenda might be. They suppressed a presidential primary. They felt such a sense of entitlement in their smug arrogance: They would choose Joe, then they would choose Kamala, and they would suppress any candidate and any conversation about broader issues that might have offered a compelling alternative – a compelling vision . for the American people.

Watch Marianne Williamson talk about why the Democrats failed:

Where are we going now?

You could say: We have already experienced four years of Donald Trump! Things haven’t fallen apart that much! But things are different now, especially since the Supreme Court has granted him this outrageous immunity. They basically established that we have a king and not a president. And so there is a sense of collective trauma among us on the left.

My priority now is that we don’t hope for the DNC to save us. They will tell a narrative about where we need to go from here. They will blame everyone and everything but themselves. The last place we should go is the people who put us in this place. There needs to be a real reckoning. And that goes for CNN and MSNBC too. It includes the Jon Favreaus, it includes the ladies The view. Enough is enough.

The lesson for Democrats is to become the Democratic Party again. You know, FDR said that as long as democracy keeps its promises, we don’t have to worry about a fascist takeover. And that’s what the Democratic Party used to stand for. It used to stand for unequivocal advocacy for working people in the United States. That would mean universal healthcare, like in any other developed country. It would mean that colleges and technical schools would be tuition-free, like in any other advanced country. It would mean advocating for fair taxation. It would mean recognizing that we now have a society in which government and financial resources simply flow to the top one percent – at the expense of everyone else.

The Democratic Party tried this campaign to make it so that the right would like us. I sometimes feel like the Democratic Party today is almost – maybe subconsciously, I don’t know – intent on shrinking its base. The truly progressive issues that the Democratic Party has traditionally championed have been jettisoned in this race. And sometimes Donald Trump just says: Hey! You left that diamond on the beach! I’ll take it! You won’t talk about how to create peace in the world? Fine! I’ll take it! I’ll pretend I’m a peacemaker!

I mean, he’s a very smart salesman. And so the Democratic Party must become the Democratic Party again. But I think it will be in terrible shape for many years to come – as long as the elite I mentioned feel they are entitled to suppress the candidates they don’t want in favor of the candidates they do strives to oppress not wanting, shaming who they don’t want, making a joke about who they don’t want.

The narratives in this campaign were so absurd, such as: We are not highlighting a sitting president. Well, I’m old enough to remember Eugene McCarthy. I’m old enough to remember Senator Robert Kennedy Sr. nominating Lyndon Johnson for the primary. This primary actually drove Johnson from office – because of the Vietnam War. But in this 2024 campaign, the elite did not want to engage in conversations that did not further their goals.

We must ask ourselves: What has happened to the critical thinking of the average Democratic voter? When did we become the party that just said: Okay, whatever the DNC says! What happened to the Democratic Party is the nightmare that George Washington and John Adams feared. The party’s role is supposed to be to stand in the background, let the voters decide, and then the party intervenes. But when your major media partners suppress, blacklist, or defund everyone but the candidate you voted for; If they are willing to lie and insult others to ensure that no one even wants to hear them, even if they know they exist, then we have gotten to where we are going. They did this twice. They did it in 2016 by suppressing Bernie Sanders. I don’t know who would have won that primary if he had left the scales, but I believe that either way, Trump would never have been president because the Democrats would have been happier.

So this is a real turning point for the Democratic Party, and unless the Democratic Party once again stands up unequivocally and unabashedly for the working people of the United States – and the Republicans obviously aren’t, but at least they are if you’re smart enough, to say it, then something else will arise, a phoenix will rise from it. I don’t know what it will look like, but it has to happen, otherwise this country will be in a very, very bad state in the years to come.

Marianne Williamson is a New York Times bestselling author and longtime political activist. Follow her on Substack and listen to her performance on Honestly by clicking below: