Marianne Williamson Quotes
The right tends to posit that the market fuels social good. The left tends to posit that the government fuels social good. At bottom, democracy claims that citizens drive social good, but there is currently no container for a political force-field that stakes claim to the unbelievable resources now virtually untapped in every man, woman, and child in our society.
Williamson, Marianne. Healing the Soul of America: Reclaiming Our Voices as Spiritual Citizens. Simon & Schuster, 1997.
Before America, many political thinkers believed that popular sovereignty and liberty are incompatible concepts—that the tyranny of the majority would trample liberty of all kinds of minorities: intellectuals, the wealthy, different religion, smaller religions, original thinking, cultural independence. However, Mandelbaum’s theory is that the social safety net, makes everyone wealthy to enough an extent that most will not trample others liberties for an even greater wealth. Inequality of wealth is tolerable if all have a modicum of a standard of living, but if some or many do not even have that, other’s liberties are less important than their own survival.
Socialism in its then pure form had the state owning and controlling all the major assets of the nation. In this sense it was contradictory to individual freedom and hence democracy. However, in the years after Tocqueville’s quotation and the industrial revolution, socialism has gradually moved away from state ownership and operations of all institutions and resources. Democracy has tended to adopt a more regulatory view to control the excesses of unbridled capitalism. The range of democratic nations by the 21st century encompassed differences but some were described as “social democracies” and had some state ownership but were basically capitalistic economies. Even the self-described Communist nations had become heavily capitalistic albeit with less political freedom. At the same time, even the United States—the epitome of 21st century capitalism, owned and controlled a few of the resources and means of production and tended to regulate the others—a substantial difference from the American democracy which Tocqueville studied.
Theodore Roosevelt and Taft were both strong advocates of an expanded Federal government much to the distress of the conservative wing of their Republican party. However, they also had strong public support for expanding the size and scope of the national government. It was not the left wing socialists who expanded the Federal government. It was the Republican administrations with a Republican control of both houses of Congress.
Marianne Deborah Williamson is an American author, spiritual leader, and political activist. She has written 13 books, including four New York Times number one bestsellers in the "Advice, How To, and Miscellaneous" category. She is the founder of Project Angel Food, a volunteer food delivery program that serves home-bound people with HIV/AIDS and other life-threatening illnesses. She is also the co-founder of the Peace Alliance, a nonprofit education and advocacy organization supporting peace-building projects. She has received national attention as a result of her frequent appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show and was known as Oprah's "spiritual adviser."
