Certainly in the eternal pundit’s quest to figure out what a “Donald Trump of the left” would look like, a figure like Williamson is an interesting contender. If Trumpism spoke to an underground, often-conspiratorial populism unacknowledged by the official G.O.P., Williamson speaks to a low-on-data, long-on-feelings spirit that simmers just below the We Are on the Side of Science and Reason surface of the contemporary liberal project. As Alex Pareene wrote for The New Republic after her weird but weirdly compelling debate performance:

If the superficial version of “Democratic Trump” resembles him aesthetically, the proper version would be closer to his opposite: Not just female but powerfully and unabashedly feminine, aiming her message not at the raging car dealer dad but the anxious Wellness Mom. … And while it is fun to scoff at her hokey spiritual woo and self-help bromides, it is easy to forget that hokey spiritual woo and self-help bromides are extremely powerful and popular among a massive subset of Americans, many of whom represent the exact sort of voters who decide Democratic primaries.

The post-debate polling, however, shows no Williamson surge — and my sense is that the path to a New Age answer to Trump would require a candidate who crosses racial boundaries more easily than Williamson (meaning, basically, Oprah), and a Democratic rank-and-file more alienated from their party leaders than today’s Democratic voters seem to be. Trump arose in the aftermath of both a failed establishment-Republican presidency and then the failed Tea Party insurgency; by comparison the Democratic Party still regards its last president fondly and regards itself as the country’s natural governing coalition, requiring no gambles on the power of Pure Love.

But Trump had his forerunners (from Pat Buchanan onward), and if we aren’t likely to get President Marianne in 2020, in the long run her fusion of spiritual celebrity and political activism might be imitated and amplified, even as her distance from the technocratic norm points to a potential schism in the mind of liberalism.

The liberal intelligentsia has long prided itself on taking the side of reason and science against first religious conservatism and now right-wing populism — defending a particular version of the Enlightenment against televangelists and superstition and Fake News. But because man does not live by Neil deGrasse Tyson memes alone, and because the mix of hard scientific materialism and well-meaning liberal humanitarianism has always been somewhat incoherent, the cult of reason necessarily shares space in liberal circles — especially liberal circles outside the innermost ring of the meritocracy — with other cults, other commitments, of the sort associated with “A Course in Miracles.”

The spirit of deGrasse Tyson and the spirit of Williamson can certainly coexist, especially when politics supplies a common enemy as vivid as Donald Trump. But they can also fall into war with one another, over differences more significant than the debate over Medicare for All.

Such a war is not exactly upon us, but there are interesting skirmishes happening, interesting skeptic-on-believer battles. For instance, the recent measles outbreaks have focused media attention on left-wing vaccine skepticism — something Williamson has dabbled in, unsurprisingly — and the spirituality-soaked cultures in which that skepticism flourishes. One of these cultures is the world of Waldorf education, increasingly popular among a left-leaning base of parents precisely for its anti-technological and frankly mystical approach to childhood — which was given a witheringly skeptical treatment in New York magazine recently, a case of liberal-on-liberal conflict as stark as anything on the Democratic debate stage. (Full disclosure: My daughters attended a Waldorf preschool.) And if their children’s education is often the place where people’s deepest commitments are revealed, you might usefully describe certain potential intra-liberal conflicts as left-romanticism versus left-technocracy, or “Waldorf versus STEM.”