Charismatic leaders can roll their base

Over the weekend, I went with some friends to see “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.”

None of us knew anything about it — we’d never seen the Canadian web series and television show that it’s based on — and just went on the basis of Sean Fennessey’s strong recommendation. It’s really funny! But also kind of sweet. And includes some fascinating “How did they do that?” movie magic. I recommend it highly.

I also recommend the act of going to the movies. One issue with the modern paradigm, in which it takes a lot to get people out and into the theaters, is that by the time your butt is in the seat, expectations have often been ratcheted up to a point that it takes some of the fun out of the movie. But the three films I’ve seen this year without knowing much about them — Nirvanna, “The Housemaid,” and “Send Help” — are all movies with strong points and weak points, and because I just saw them casually without much in the way of expectations, I had a lot of fun.

Now for this week’s questions.

Stale: You have said that the purpose of charisma is to streamroll your own base. Can you expand on what you mean by that? It seems weird to me that Dem pipeline or machine hasn’t produced a politician with Obama or Clinton level skills yet. I wonder if structurally after Bernie, it is impossible for such a politician to come from the moderate wing. And that’s why the closest figure with Obama/Clinton level skills is from the left left (Zohran). Did we have such clear factions back in the day? I think Bernie fundamentally changed internal Dem party dynamics and it remains an underexplored reason why we haven’t had a charismatic moderate since then.

What I mean by this is just look at Zohran Mamdani.

In office, he has not suddenly remade himself as “a moderate,” but we’ve seen — starting with the decision to re-appoint N.Y.P.D. Commissioner Jessica Tisch — that he has been grappling with the realities of municipal governance, and doing that requires a lot of pragmatism.

You see that also in the fact that he has forged constructive working relationships with Hakeem Jeffries and Kathy Hochul. One of the terms of those relationships seems to be that he has undercut left-wing primary ...