New York Times Op-Ed: Charisma Rules the World, by Molly Worthen (North Carolina; Author, Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump (2025)):

The 2020s should have been the decade when American politics began to make sense. The multibillion-dollar industry of public opinion polling can turn vibe shifts into tweetable bar graphs and trend lines. Surveys have found that affiliation with traditional religious institutions has mostly declined over the past generation, so one might conclude that more Americans now form their worldviews and choose leaders based on cool logic and material interest. And over this data-driven landscape extends the lengthening shadow of our artificial intelligence overlords, who promise to rationalize more and more of our lives, for our own good.

Yet somehow, despite the experts’ interactive graphics and the tricks that large language models can do, it has only gotten harder to understand the worldviews and political choices of half the country (whichever half you don’t belong to). Perhaps, then, we should pay more attention to the human quirks that confound statisticians and that A.I. can’t quite crack — desires and drives that have not changed much over the centuries. That means rescuing a familiar word from decades of confusion and cliché: charisma.

In New Testament Greek, the word means gift of grace or supernatural power. But when we use it to describe the appeal of a politician, a preacher’s hold over his congregation or a YouTube guru with a surprisingly large following, we are taking a cue from the sociologist Max Weber. He spent much of his career studying what happens to spiritual impulses as a society becomes more secular and bureaucratic.

A little more than a century ago, he borrowed “charisma” from the Bible and Christian history to describe the relationship between leaders and followers in both religion and politics. Charisma, he wrote, is a form of authority that does not depend on institutional office, military might or claims on tradition. Instead, charisma derives from followers’ belief that their leader possesses a supernatural mission and power: “a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men.”

Weber described himself as “religiously unmusical” and insisted that he was reinventing charisma in a “completely value-neutral sense.” But the magnetism that he observed in some leaders — and their followers’ sense of calling and duty — seemed to demand a spiritual description. The secular vocabulary developing in his corner of academia, the new disciplines of the social sciences, was not up to the task. “In order to do justice to their mission, the holders of charisma, the master as well as his disciples and followers, must stand outside the ties of this world,” he wrote.

Even as he resisted his colleagues’ tendencies to reduce human behavior to animal instincts and reflexes, Weber missed a key element. Charisma is not something that leaders have; it’s something that they do. Charisma is a kind of storytelling. It’s an ability to invite followers into a transcendent narrative about what their lives mean. …

My research took me from Puritan mystics and early Mormons to Black nationalism and Pentecostal revivals to the cults and management gurus of the 1970s and ’80s, all the way to President Trump. Some of these figures possessed good looks, great oratorical skills, sex appeal or charm — but surprisingly few, as far as I could tell. …

Charisma has no inherent moral valence. It can empower freedom fighters or enable tyrants. But in a healthy society, other authorities counterbalance the new picture of reality that a charismatic leader claims to reveal. Universities and government institutions staffed with experts, religious and philosophical traditions that place current events in a longer context, established media with professional journalists and international news bureaus — all these help ordinary people evaluate the story a leader is telling. But for more than a generation, study after study has documented the collapse of public trust in these institutions….

Mr. Trump is the bard of the burn-it-down age. His mix of national and personal mythology fuses political strategy with his gut reactions. The more those reactions horrify his critics, the more his most committed supporters adore him, because you don’t have to be likable to be charismatic. Likability can be an impediment if you’re crusading to break through the polite lies of mainstream politics.

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