Back in July, the journalist Ezra Klein interviewed Elaina Plott Calabro, a staff writer at The Atlantic, on his popular podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show.” Calabro had profiled Kamala Harris the previous year, and Klein wondered whether the Vice-President was “underrated” as a potential challenger to Donald Trump. Harris, Klein said, reminded him of Hillary Clinton, insofar as both politicians “struggled with this question of authenticity, struggled to seem like they were themselves, giving a big speech.” In small settings, he went on, Harris was “extremely warm and magnetic and profane, much more so than a lot of politicians who I know. . . . You’d want to go to the barbecue or the party she hosted.” There was no politician, Klein ventured, for whom “a bigger gap” existed between “charisma on the stump” and “charisma around a table.” Calabro concurred: “Once she gets in a smaller group and she’s able to really level with the person that she’s speaking to and has eyes on them, she, I think, becomes a completely different person.”
Two months later, we all know this completely different person. Harris, suddenly, now comes across as a naturally gifted big-stage politician. In front of even the largest audiences, she radiates intelligence, warmth, and an exuberant swagger characterized by observers, and by Harris herself, as “joy.” Good vibes are at the center of her campaign: one of the core promises of the Harris-Walz ticket is that the people in charge will be normal, human, and positive, rather than freakish, rageful, and “weird.” Originally seen mainly as a generic alternative to Trump (“I’d vote for a cabbage,” a relative told me, this summer), Harris now seems compelling in her own right. What happened? Did she somehow transform? Or did countless observers drastically misjudge a politician who’d been in the public eye for years?
In “Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics,” Julia Sonnevend, a sociologist at the New School, offers some clues about Harris’s apparent evolution. It has a lot to do with the way we see politicians in the Internet era. In past decades, Sonnevend writes, we wanted politicians to be larger than life; accordingly, they cultivated a messianic aura, summoning charisma—an almost godlike quality. (Etymologically, she notes, “charisma” comes from the Greek for “divine gift.”) Today, however, political life unfolds on smaller stages. Voters encounter politicians in a fragmented fashion, by scrolling through clips on TikTok and YouTube. The modern-day equivalent of charisma, therefore, is charm—an “everyday magic spell,” based on momentary glimpses of personality, that renders politicians “accessible, authentic and relatable in their quest for power.”
When we spoke recently, Sonnevend underlined the differences between charisma and charm. “Charisma is built on distance from audiences,” she said. “Think of the bombastic speeches of Churchill or de Gaulle. You are not like that person—that person is distinctly different from you.” When Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and chanted, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!,” he seemed (or sought to seem) like an embodiment of history itself. Charm, by contrast, is, or is meant to appear to be, humble. “It’s built on proximity,” Sonnevend said. A charming politician makes you “really feel like you’re in a common space with them.”
It stands to reason that your average politician has a lot of personal charm. But “mediated charm,” Sonnevend writes, the kind that must reach through the screen, doesn’t happen automatically. It must be painstakingly created through a variety of techniques. “Restaging”—changing the setting of a political event to a new environment where charm can shine through—“is very important, especially on social media,” Sonnevend told me. She sees Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister of New Zealand from 2017 to 2023, as a restaging genius: Ardern announced her country’s COVID-vaccine rollout, for example, on Facebook Live, from the back seat of a car. (Ardern said the car was the best she could do, given her packed schedule.) Last month, the Harris-Walz campaign released a video shot in a Detroit jazz café in which the candidates sat down to discuss “taco recipes, hot peppers, their childhoods, careers, and the rights and freedoms they want to protect.” A video could even just show a candidate “on the way from one performance or rally to the next,” Sonnevend said. By taking us into “the backstage of politics,” politicians make us feel as if we’re all on the same level.
In “demasking,” another technique, leaders seem to drop their guard and briefly become normal people with authentic emotions. Demasking can happen in the middle of a formal address—Sonnevend recalled the moment, early in the Ukraine war, “when Biden, in Warsaw, said, ‘This man cannot stay in power!’ ” (The White House quickly clarified that Biden was not officially calling for the removal of Vladimir Putin.) Masks can also slip in more fluid contexts, as when, in the middle of her debate with Trump, Harris seemed to swallow some unsayable word while referring to her opponent as “this . . . former President.” (In a viral clip, recorded earlier and viewed nearly two million times on YouTube, she explains that her favorite curse word “starts with an ‘M’ and ends with ‘uh’ . . . Not ‘E-R’!”) It can be charming to see our professional politicians act like amateurs, doing and saying the kinds of things we might do if we were in their place. But there’s an art to demasking. “You want them to be authentic and professional—to be professionally authentic—but not to appear media-trained,” Sonnevend said. Calculated demasking comes across as “cringe.”
To some observers, Donald Trump’s entire political career has centered on demasking; it can seem as though he’s thrown away the mask. But in analyzing Viktor Orbán’s “illiberal charm,” Sonnevend, who is Hungarian, suggests that it’s a mistake to underestimate how people like Trump deploy a subtle range of techniques to charm their audiences. Orbán’s international image as a “strongman,” she writes, can overshadow the performance he puts on for domestic voters, which “shows a more nuanced and complicated personality.” Orbán takes awkward selfies with fans which make him seem lovably vulnerable; by musing on Facebook about which toppings go best with lángos, a traditional Hungarian fried bread, he suggests that he has a lot in common with everyone else. (“Garlic or cheese-and-sour-cream?”) Orbán has shared a photo of himself taking care of a grandkid—working the “weekend shift,” as he puts it—and presents himself as an animal lover. “Hi Facebookers. I am here again,” he wrote, in 2021. “We have to pay attention to animals not only on World Animal Day. Let’s protect them!” “These posts are surprising at first, but they fit neatly into his overall image of a protector in a wide variety of contexts in uncertain times,” Sonnevend writes.
If you don’t like Orbán, of course, you are likely to see posts like these as pandering, staged, and ridiculous. Similarly, Trump’s detractors were not charmed when, in 2019, he served the championship-winning Clemson University Tigers a banquet of fast food from McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King. Sonnevend’s book is sobering in that it asks us to acknowledge that charm is neither inherent nor consistent. Some people really do find Trump and Orbán charming; presumably, they experience Kamala Harris as a cackling phony. “Charm is a matter of perception,” Sonnevend told me, and we might have “fewer election surprises” if we reckoned with its polarization. She has written about the charm of Tim Walz. But “I remind myself to check the comment section,” she said. “Someone’s always saying, ‘It’s just propaganda.’ ”
The fact that charm is a two-way street makes it volatile. Charm works especially well when you want to be charmed, as Democrats now want to be charmed by Harris. (“OMG tears in my eyes and if I’m being seduced by very good PR I don’t care!” one commenter wrote, in response to the Harris-Walz video.) But charm often fails if you don’t want to see it—or if you do, but conclude that it doesn’t reflect some underlying reality. Sonnevend thinks of charm as unfolding on a spectrum between “seduction” and “deception.” When you’re being seduced, you know you’re witnessing a performance but you enjoy it, because you think it’s saying something true. If you discover that it’s not, you conclude that you’re being deceived. That’s not a good feeling.
The core issue with political charm may be that it caters to our desire for leaders that are just like us. For Sonnevend, “this is an absurd requirement”—who thinks that denizens of the top tier of political life are regular Joes and Jills?—and its absurdity makes charm an inherently unstable virtue. Sonnevend is not opposed to political charm. It carries “an underlying political message, which is ‘Let’s come together around the issues we agree on,’ ” she said. “But there’s also risk involved in creating a political environment in which one video or one second of failed charm can shape the political future of a candidate.” She points to Angela Merkel as an example of a leader who succeeded through the communication of charmless competence. Merkel, whose social-media presence foregrounded her seriousness and even her uncoolness, embodied “authenticity without charm”—a quality that Sonnevend concedes may be uniquely appealing in Germany, which “had an exceptionally negative experience with charisma during World War II.”
The irony, of course, is that failing to be charming is what’s actually normal. “It’s part of everyday life, of being a human being,” Sonnevend said. Everyone has experienced moments in which “you don’t act like yourself.” An important question to ask about any candidate, Sonnevend told me, is “So what if she’s not appearing as a regular person in this moment? Does that mean she won’t be a good President of the United States?” Charm excites us and, when it works, seems undeniable. But, unlike charisma, it isn’t a gift from the gods. We shouldn’t put too much store in anything so terrestrial. ♦
