n data-reactid="4">Sometimes charismatic people don’t know their own strength. And sometimes they do. In private, charismatic people light up a room and make each person feel beloved. In public life, they’re the ones who convince us of unlikely futures, the big personalities who feel like friends, the politicians who inspire joyful screams and hopeful votes and angry hollers. How charisma relates to democracy is harder to describe. This is partly because charismatic people appear so toweringly unequal, for democracy isn’t supposed to have a class of superior beings. But it’s also because charismatic leaders set our hearts racing, calling our emotions forth in public when we should–or so we imagine–be thinking and acting rationally.

Political charisma seemed less dangerous, frankly, at the end of the twentieth century when all citizens really wanted was to be inspired and Western democracies swooned regularly over boyish heartthrob leaders. It was the age of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, after all, a time when democratic leadership was synonymous with the ability to feel voters’ pain, to make politics seem vital and desirable and sexy. By the 2000s, it was easy to think that democratic feelings were hollow but harmless: a consumerist thrill or a splash of celebrity. 
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