Marianne Williamson got the loudest applause of the night at the first Democrat debate in Detroit — and that says all we need to know about how extreme the Democratic Party has become.

The self-help author, representing the “flower children” wing of the party, managed to out-crazy the other candidates on the stage, dreamily rattling off positions that left even her most radical opponents struggling to defend their bona fides to an audience that was clearly hungry for even more crazy.

When the candidates were asked about reparations, for instance, Williamson dazzled the audience with made-up math, “calculating” that the country probably owes trillions of dollars to the descendants of slaves. In the interests of racial reconciliation, though, she’d settled on $500 billion. She calls this a “politically feasible” amount, because apparently she has no idea what those words actually mean.

Top candidate Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, mumbled his way through a thoroughly uninspired response about reparations legislation that other people have introduced in Congress, confusing and boring the audience.

Williamson pulled off the same trick when the topic of the Flint water crisis came up. She gave a non-answer composed of social justice buzzwords strung together into nearly cogent sentences that most college sophomores could rattle off from their class notes, and the audience went wild.

When she went even further, and declared that institutional racism is responsible for all of society’s ills, the applause got even louder.

The moment made it absolutely clear that she had struck a chord with the party’s liberal base, which evidently likes its extremism packaged into easily digestible sound bites and vague platitudes.

The other candidates have been almost cautious, by contrast, defensively trying to disguise the true radicalism of their policy agendas with deceptive slogans such as “Medicare for All” and fiery, faux-populist tirades about big businesses and corruption.

Interestingly, the only time Williamson deviated from her strategy of throwing red meat to the farthest-left fringe of the Democratic Party was when she declared, in her peculiarly subdued way, that she thinks eliminating private health insurance — as several of her rivals have proposed doing — will make it “harder to win” the 2020 general election. At every other opportunity, though, she threw caution to the wind with unhinged rhetoric that almost seemed deliberately tailored to drive away moderate voters.

When she channeled George Lucas to warn about the “dark psychic force” threatening America, for instance, Williamson was essentially declaring that anybody who has ever supported anything President Trump has ever done is the “enemy” of progressives such as herself.

The other candidates will undoubtedly take note of the impact she made with her unabashed insanity, and several will probably try to mimic her strategy, driving the whole primary field even further to the left than it is already. Make no mistake: Marianne Williamson was the clear winner of that debate, and that should terrify anyone who isn’t completely insane.

The Democrat candidates are letting the hoots and hollers of a few hundred liberal activists in a debate auditorium distract them from the thunderous applause of the tens of thousands of ordinary Americans who turn out to see President Trump every time he holds a rally. All the while, they’re just making the president an even more appealing choice for Americans as they decide whom to vote for in the 2020 presidential election.

The echoes of Marianne Williamson’s applause lines will reverberate all the way to Election Day, and the Democrats are going to be left with a portfolio of socialist-inspired plans that virtually nobody in America wants or needs, which thankfully will never be implemented.

Donald Trump, Jr. is the executive vice president at The Trump Organization.