I suppose another take on Marianne Williamson and the neomystic turn generally is it’s a turn inward. It takes all the energy floating about that had been aimed at society and structure and turns it to self and sensibility. And that’s a thing that happens, and you’d kind of expect it to happen around now, and diverted into culture the energy can even get pretty golden-agey as the dialectic grinds towards synthesis.

That’s the social unrest of the 60s diverting into the “Me Decade” 70s and “Morning in America” 80s. That’s the revolutionary period of the 1910s being suppressed in the First Red Scare and yielding to the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, the Harlem Renaissance.

That’s second-wave feminism falling to an ‘80s pincer move between cultural conservatives and S&M postmodernists – falling as a sociopolitical project. And then its themes got turned inward and coopted and reemerged in the 90s as Wicca, as Lilith Fair, as lesbian chic, as riot grrl, as Xena and Scully and Buffy, as the music I think of as VH1core chick-rock – Shawn Colvin, Natalie Merchant, Meredith Brooks, Paula Cole. As a sensibility, a subculture, a product, an aesthetic (that could be digested into more products, into Target collections and remodeling TV about shiplap and healthy relationships)

When I say “notice how 90s issues we thought settled or even tabooed are suddenly live again”, tonight’s breakout US Presidential candidate is antidepressant-critical

That said. There’s total context collapse now, human followings are transferable from mass-appeal field to field: performing, acting, celebrity, spirituality, politics (which is why I have an eye on Taylor Swift).

And I said the 90s were back, and noticed women were witchy and zodiacal again, and how we were all post-rationalist and playing with Jewish and Christian myth now…

Of course this neomystic wave was going to hit politics eventually, but I wasn’t even thinking of that.

Maybe because I coded it, at least in her form as female and dismissible? Hm. I hear there are woman pastors and bloggers birthing paganisms out of the rotting shell of American Christianity recently, maybe I should pay that more attention. I bet Sister Aimee would have a shot today.

I don’t think she’s a threat to win it though, she’s got a bold new style and positioning but it doesn’t really align along obvious cleavages like how Trump offered a party realignment. If Ben Carson had had her talent, eventually the question would still have come up “what are we supposed to be getting out of this?”