In the Democrat race for 2020, Marianne Williamson is proving to be more than the sum of her parts

Can this novelty candidate force America to ask how its presidential elections are really supposed to work – and what should entitle candidates to participate in them?

One of the most valuable legacies of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is that it’ll never be as exciting as it was then for women and people of colour to run for president. That’s an incredible achievement.

Thanks to Bernie Sanders’s 2016 run, the same goes for soft-socialist policy talk, not long ago verboten in mainstream US discourse. But while progressives should take heart at the sight of the most diverse field American politics has ever seen, isn’t it depressing how quickly it’s all become, well, boring?

The trouble with fighting for decades to get yourself and your ideas into the mainstream is that once you’re there, it turns out the mainstream can be a pretty dull place to swim.

But as with all wide-open primaries, this year’s cycle is blessed (or cursed) with the de rigeur candidate-from-nowhere: Marianne Williamson, a pant-suited spiritual quack with the voice of an autumn-years Olivia de Havilland and zero political experience.

Operating in the proud tradition of 2008’s Mike Gravel and the 1976 incarnation of Jerry Brown, Williamson’s theory of elections seems to boil down to a metaphysical battle between the forces of love and hate. She is not going to be the next president of the United States – and given her irresponsible dilettante musings about medicine, psychology and even nuclear radiation (which she tweeted is less powerful than the mind), that’s a good thing.

And yet, with a geological age to go till anyone actually votes for anyone, Williamson should at least be commended for injecting some energy into this coma-like “contest”.

Not one sentence she uttered at the first two presidential debates felt canned or predictable. She’s a vastly wealthy woman, but it’s clear that she hasn’t spent any money on running banal, ass-covering focus groups: what roomful of average Americans would advise her to rail against a “dark psychic force” in a discussion about restoring regulatory oversight of water pollution? Instead, she’s apparently been busy commissioning oblique, artsy campaign tshirts from friends of friends.

So far, so ludicrous. But in this week’s debate, Williamson showed off a certain flair that rose well above the level of pure nonsense.

Going further than her rivals on the subject of reparations, she called them “payment of a debt that is owed” after hundreds of years of slavery and a century of “domestic terrorism”. She proposed a payment of $200bn-$500bn, calculating it based on broken promises made after the Civil War. She called the Flint water crisis racist and classist, and then upbraided the Democrats for failing to look out for people of colour and the poor. And she had the hubris to do this alongside nine very smart people who’ve actually held elected office.

Perhaps “hubris” is too polite a word. Maybe Williamson really is just a demented fraud who can surprise us by stringing together a progressive-minded sentence under pressure? In any case, she’s starting to show a strange aptitude for campaigning that deserves more than a glance.

Most of the field is stuck in a tone of depression and grievance, far short of tangible moral fury. All the while, the embarrassing weirdo stage right isn’t just threatening the prime minister of New Zealand with a sassy phone call, but is embracing exactly the kind of biting discourse on race that the American left is gagging for.

By doing that while also being a wacky nobody with some highly dubious beliefs – about vaccination in particular – Williamson might just force America to ask how its presidential elections are really supposed to work, and what should entitle candidates to participate in them. The 2020 cycle is already grossly distended, with six pointless months to go till the Iowa caucuses and another nine gruelling months till Trump is defeated – or not.

Yet the media is still determined to fashion the thing into a slow-burn thriller, the latest cliffhanger being Joe Biden’s use of the word “malarkey”. Williamson’s ability to frighten and baffle voters, fellow politicians and the media might be enlivening this stale march to Washington, but the greater achievement will be if it makes us question this strange addiction to a circus of campaign “news” that requires a clown in the ring to make it all somehow bearable.

A few hours before Tuesday’s debate, she modelled a #Marianne2020 jacket on Instagram with the caption “I’ve arrived… #detroit #bigtruth.” And arrived she had. That night, cast adrift with a crew of bores, she was impassioned, bewitchingly odd, and once or twice right on the money.

She might not last another week; she might do dangerously well; she might very soon say something so unspeakably offensive that I’ll be forever shamed for ever thinking these thoughts or writing this piece. I say good luck to her.