I saw Marianne Williamson speak on Independence Day. In Washington, D.C., crowds gathered in a rainstorm to see tanks roll and to cheer on Donald Trump. In Concord, New Hampshire, a group of about seventy people convened at a performing-arts space called Phenix Hall to consider the politics of love. The Phenix is a majestic nineteenth-century theatre awaiting renovation and, perhaps, air-conditioning. It was a hot day for Concord, sunny and ninety degrees on Main Street, with its stolid Yankee Doodle Dandy red-brick buildings. The sidewalks were mostly deserted. The people of New Hampshire were out barbecuing, or setting up for fireworks, or up at a lake house listening to the call of the loons.

Inside the Phenix, the wooden floors were scratched and worn. The afternoon sun poured through the arched windows and the round portals above the wraparound balconies. In the absence of an HVAC system, the rush of fans filled the air. The hall was decorated as if for a wedding rehearsal: rental chairs, fairy lights, cocktail tables draped in white tablecloths and scattered with Marianne Williamson donation envelopes. Women in flowing batik dresses and thin men in shorts and sandals snacked from a platter of fruit and a platter of brownies; volunteers dispensed ice water from the bar. Pretty campaign volunteers handed out buttons that depicted Williamson’s face in wispy watercolor. Williamson’s portraitist, the British fashion illustrator David Downton, had emphasized the shadow of her cheekbones, the soft sweep of her bangs to one side, and the intensity of her smoky-eyed gaze. The look is reminiscent of the album cover of David Bowie’s “Scary Monsters.” The Marianne 2020 logo is as pink as a glass of Zinfandel.

Williamson, a nondenominational psycho-spiritual leader, who mixes references to Christianity with quotes from philosophers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Deepak Chopra, has based her Presidential candidacy on an unspoken premise: that the country might be experiencing an epidemic of mental illness. Actually, it’s not that unspoken: “We have a problem with the psychological fabric of our country,” a section on her campaign Web site, titled “The Issues Aren’t Always the Issue,” says. “A low level emotional civil war has begun in too many ways to rip us apart.”

If you were a therapist and America were your client—if it were your mandate to display forbearance and empathy in the face of insanity—you would attempt to discern the country’s trauma at its roots. Much has been made of Donald Trump as an insulting, mocking, narcissistic patriarch. Some children reject the mean dads in their lives; others, when Trump coos that they are “very fine people” and “incredible patriots,” feel a warm blanket of withheld acknowledgment. Trump has been on tour for most of his Presidency, and, for those who love him, his in-person gatherings are more than just political rallies, they are intense experiences of human connection, which offer a remedy for a culture of isolation. This sense of belonging is generated, in part, by the denigration of immigrants, the news media, Democratic politicians, women, and other people Trump perceives as his enemies. What Williamson presents is an alternative channelling of America’s id: instead of a politics of fear, a politics of love.

For her supporters, Williamson offers a spiritually inflected movement that could rival Trump’s in the realm of emotion—unlike the Democratic Party, whose political gatherings tend to carry about as much communal purpose as an elementary-school assembly. If the Republican Party is an abusive father, as Williamson once argued, in a blog post titled “An Open Letter to Hillary Clinton,” the Democratic Party is the mother who stands by and lets the abuse take place. The broad movement from which Williamson emerges has had many names: New Age, New Thought, New Spirituality, Human Potential, Higher Consciousness. It’s also a movement that has mostly been politically agnostic (probably because, in addition to purporting to help people, it is a profitable industry, with books, seminars, audio recordings, videos, and world tours). Even if Williamson is polling at less than two per cent, she represents something that feels new: the entrance of this spiritual movement into electoral politics. It’s like the time Bill Clinton went on “The Arsenio Hall Show” and played the saxophone and all the baby boomers went wild, but this time this audience is fans of Oprah’s “SuperSoul Sundays” who perhaps never thought of themselves as belonging to a demographic in search of political representation, until Williamson stepped in.

Williamson made her first big impression on the American public in the Democratic debates. In an interview after the second debate, Anderson Cooper compared her to an omniscient narrator in a play. He suggested that she resembled the stage manager of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town”; she suggested that she was playing the part of a Greek chorus. She vibrated at a frequency that was different from her opponents’. Eyes flashing, she evoked the spectre of false gods and dark psychic forces, narrating a dire portrait of America as a country co-opted by multinational corporations, ignorant of the “dark underbelly” of its own history, forgetful of its “moral core,” and at the mercy of a President who has “reached into the psyche of the American people and harnessed fear for political purposes.” She looked into the camera and said, “Only love can cast that out.” Her performance made her the most-searched candidate in the country.

The esoteric lecture circuit has always held a place in American culture as a proving ground for experimental ideas, both good and bad. At times, watching Williamson, I thought of Henry James’s assessment of the feminist lecturer Verena Tarrant, in “The Bostonians”: “If it had been much worse it would have been quite as good, for the argument, the doctrine, had absolutely nothing to do with it. It was simply an intensely personal exhibition, and the person making it happened to be fascinating.”

Much of Williamson’s work has been addressed specifically to members of her own generation. She recalls boomer activism and reprimands boomer self-absorption. But younger people are drawn to her open references to spirituality. “For a lot of people around my age, there’s something unironically enchanting about Marianne Williamson’s rhetoric,” said Arshy Azizi, who was not quite yet a declared Williamson supporter but had come to the event at the Phenix to see what she might have to say. He was twenty-five years old and the recent recipient of a master’s degree in comparative literature from Dartmouth, in Hanover, New Hampshire. His cute Fourth of July outfit—a tank top with red piping, black wire-rimmed glasses, bluejeans, and white sneakers—would not have been out of place at a bar in Bushwick.

I asked Azizi to explain the nature of Williamson’s enchantment. “From the history of the founding of this nation, there’s a firm separation between church and state—which I don’t think any of us wants to meddle with—but I think that has made us think we don’t have to care for others on a moral basis at all,” he said. He was a student of German idealist philosophy. Hegel was on his mind. He told me that American political arguments often lack “a shared recognition of our moral responsibility to each other as a nation, and also to our environment.” Perhaps, in recent history, there was once some consensus about that moral responsibility, but it seems to have fallen away.