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.
Charisma is not the same thing as charm or celebrity. Americans have mixed up these concepts since the 1950s and ’60s, when Weber’s idea leached into newspaper election coverage and everyday speech. When I began working on a book about charismatic leaders throughout American history, I was in this muddle myself. I confused charisma with charm: a person’s ability to engage you in conversation and make you feel like the center of attention.
But winning elections, beginning a mass movement or starting a religion requires more than a knack for working a room. Charm, it turns out, is not even a uniquely human quality. The latest intelligent social agent chatbots like Replika have better social skills than many humans. Rob Brooks, an evolutionary biologist who set out recently to test A.I.’s ability to play on our social instincts, wrote that his Replika chatbot always wants to hear about his day, asks great follow-up questions and “really gets me.”
Anyone who has read or heard about Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” knows that charm follows a formula (mainly, offer specific praise and focus on the other person’s problems rather than your own concerns). A.I. agents run these scripts better than we can. They “are really good at making you feel seen,” Dr. Brooks, who works at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, told me. With each generation of innovation, A.I. gets better at manipulating human “algorithms”: the impulses that we share with our fellow primates, especially our desire to like and be liked, just as chimpanzees groom one another to strengthen social bonds.
But charisma may remain one of the few human dynamics that elude A.I., because it is not the conversational allogrooming at which A.I. excels. It is based not on primate instincts of attraction but on our aspirations to higher meaning, enlivened with a dose of the social friction that A.I. agents are designed to eliminate. Charisma can be just as repellent as it is attractive, so it usually baffles or disgusts anyone not under its thrall.
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.
They had something far more important in common: They promised to pull back the veil on secret truth. They revealed how followers’ struggles have a purpose — one that the reigning elites and institutions belittled or missed entirely. In the 1630s, the Puritan midwife-theologian Anne Hutchinson recruited most of the Boston congregation with her promise that her fellow colonists could learn directly from scripture and the Holy Spirit that they were saved.
That divine assurance, she said, meant that they should not meekly accept everything their ministers taught. “I’ll bring you to a woman that preaches better Gospel than any of your black-coats that have been at the ninniversity,” one of her followers declared. When clergy and magistrates banished her from Massachusetts Bay in 1638, they might have expelled the heretic, but they couldn’t extinguish her idea’s core appeal: Americans’ hunger for a role in a cosmic story that turned their private anxieties into assurance that a higher power would, one day, remedy their worldly miseries and justify their suffering.
If leaders can tell stories like this, then they don’t need gravitas or charm. In fact their oratory and personal presence can — and almost certainly will — provoke mixed reviews. In the 1840s, one skeptic who met Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, described him as “a coarse, plebeian, sensual person in aspect, and his countenance exhibits a curious mixture of the knave and the clown. His hands are large and fat.”
Yet converts found an answer to their frustrations with traditional Christianity and personal dead ends in Smith’s story about the gold plates, his revelation of the young Republic’s central role in God’s plan and the divine mandate to build a new Zion. For them, just shaking his hand brought “the Holy Spirit in such great abundance that I felt it thrill my whole system, from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet,” one convert wrote.
These polarized reactions — based on whether the leader offers you a heroic role in his narrative, casts you as a villain or leaves you out entirely — are the real mark of charisma. For all the research on the importance of body language, whether we find a speaker bewitching or irritating depends on our relationship to the person’s message. Mr. Trump’s speeches strike his supporters as authentic truth telling in an era of fake news, while his critics struggle to understand how anyone has patience for his stream-of-consciousness rambling. “Some people would look at Trump and think, ‘That’s ludicrous. That’s not meaningful,’” Cody Kommers, a researcher at the Alan Turing Institute in London, told me. “But clearly for a lot of people, there is meaning being generated there, some sort of narrative that people are tapping into.”
Narratives usually follow patterns. In recent years, scholars have used software to analyze thousands of books and chart the basic emotional arcs of classic literature, ranging from the Icarus narrative of rise and fall to the triumphal Cinderella plot. Psychologists have found that when they interview people about their life stories with a series of questions based on the so-called hero’s journey — a narrative structure present in myths across cultures — they are more likely to find significance in the twists and turns of their own lives. Dr. Kommers and his colleagues have tried the same thing with large language models, or L.L.M.s. “We give them a character profile, give them the hero’s journey and have them tell the story again. The question is, can L.L.M.s show the same effects of restorying? Yes, they can.”
But charismatic leaders do far more than reproduce generic plot structures or parrot the stages of Joseph Campbell’s “Hero With a Thousand Faces.” They tell a strange story that speaks to the anxieties of their moment in history, not a formulaic one that could suit any time or place. They possess an uncanny intuition to zigzag when everyone else is heading straight.
Marcus Garvey supercharged the tradition of Black nationalism by reinventing — even breaking — older models of Black leadership. He arrived in New York City during World War I and honed a flair for pageantry that spoke to African American society of that place and time: full of veterans angry that the promises of Western democracy did not fully apply to them and members of Black fraternal orders who had found the dignity they deserved in uniforms and rituals.
At a time when most attention focused on Black leaders who were fair skinned and college educated, he cut a different figure. His archenemy, W.E.B. Du Bois, described Garvey as “a little fat black man” and a “demagogue.” But Du Bois belonged to the Black elite; Garvey’s working-class followers saw him through the empowering story he told. “If 400,000,000 Negroes can only get to know themselves, to know that in them is a sovereign power, is an authority that is absolute, then in the next 24 hours we would have a new race, we would have a new nation, an empire,” he preached.
Smartly dressed legions of his Universal Negro Improvement Association paraded behind their leader, who often wore a plumed helmet and purple, green and gold robes. Garvey’s vision for Pan-African economic, political and spiritual power was a remix of old and new archetypes: part Carnegie, part Napoleon, part Moses. Those who joined the association found themselves in three roles at once. They were self-made men and women, conquering soldiers and chosen people claiming a divine inheritance.
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.
Our current moment encourages the impulse to retreat to your phone and ask a chatbot to help you sort out the world. It also invites a charismatic leader who can rework classic American story lines and answer the frustrations of people alienated from the invisible experts, confusing rules, profit motives and organizational inertia sometimes just called “the system.” (Weber described our modern condition as an “iron cage.”)
Mr. Trump began crafting a story to explain all this long before he formally entered politics. Since the 1980s, he has cast himself as the hero-entrepreneur who built an empire by working the system and the populist avenger who will vindicate the little guy. “I do get tired of seeing the country ripped off,” he told Oprah Winfrey in 1988, when she asked him whether he had considered running for president. “If it got so bad, I would never want to rule it out totally.”
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.
Let’s be clear about the human strangeness and genius of this. No machine programmed to spew out tropes according to statistical frequency could reproduce the components of Mr. Trump’s charisma or the appeal of Hutchinson, Smith and Garvey before him. Mr. Trump’s abrasive personal style and love of chaos are the opposite of a Replika chatbot’s soothing, frictionless responses. Yet both appeal in our secular, disconnected age, when many Americans choose to sit alone scrolling TikTok conspiracy theories instead of joining live human beings in a church, school board meeting, bowling league, Scout troop or any of the other depopulated relics of an earlier, more connected time.
In our hyperindividualized age, a lot of us are searching for a storyteller: someone or something to tell us what our lives mean. Compared with the sense of purpose and identity that past generations found in sturdy communities, now “it’s very difficult to tell the story of who you are and what you’re doing,” Dr. Kommers said. “Psychology and A.I. don’t have a way to help us with that. That’s one of the reasons there’s this pervasive feeling that technology doesn’t make our lives better.”
Americans are still waiting for a leader who invites us into a plotline that moves beyond 2025. We need a story that reckons with reality, but does not trap us in it.
Molly Worthen, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is the author, most recently, of “Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History From the Puritans to Donald Trump.”
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