This is What Democracy Looks Like!

The May Day Rally in Des Moines, May 1, 2025

(Note: if you are in the Quad Cities area, check out the event publicized toward the bottom of this column.

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Approximately 300 others and I attended the May Day rally in Des Moines last Thursday. The event was sponsored by 50501, the Iowa Coalition, and other sponsors mentioned in the video. My friend and co-author Van Garmon was also there, and Van created the highlight video below. This column wouldn’t exist without Van’s contribution. I apologize for not knowing all of the speakers. Among others, you will see former state Representative Ako Abdul-Samad, current Representatives Ross Wilburn and Rob Johnson, Charlie Wishman with the AFL-CIO, and Nathan Sage, candidate for US Senate. Enjoy:

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There was so much energy in the crowd. They are furious at the Trump administration, want to do something, and are looking for leadership.

To me, each of the speakers above is demonstrating charismatic leadership. Google AI tells me:

Charismatic leadership is a style where leaders inspire and motivate followers through their personal charm, confidence, and vision. They often connect with followers on an emotional level, creating a sense of purpose, passion, and trust.

If you have time, please watch the video again and think about how those leaders connected with the crowd. We need charismatic leadership on the left, and we need to pay attention to it.

I stumbled across a new concept for me the other day that I heard about on a podcast interview with a right-wing influencer. He said that people are “hungry for charisma,” and the right is providing it. Looking it up, I found that the right sees that people have an “insatiable hunger for charisma.” This study explored Hungarian voters and their authoritarian leaders.

Here is part of the abstract:

While scholarship often assumes that strong leaders and charismatic leadership play an important role in the emergence of populist politics, research has missed a closer exploration of charisma attribution to populists. Addressing this charismatic leadership hypothesis requires populism and charisma to be analysed from the followers’ perspective. This article takes a unique look at the social-psychological dynamics behind populism. Using quantitative survey data that was collected from Hungarian voters (N = 1200), this article examines the relationship between populist attitudes as follower characteristics in modern politics and charisma attribution. To reveal how a populist worldview can affect the follower’s expectations and perceptions, we break charisma attribution down into three phases: (1) the general hunger for charisma (the romance of leadership); (2) perceptions of charismatic behaviour of the top candidates in the 2022 Hungarian parliamentary elections (i.e., Viktor Orbán and Péter Márki-Zay); and (3) emotional attachment to these leaders. Our findings show that populism makes people more hungry for charisma and more sensitive to recognising charismatic behaviour but does not necessarily create an emotional bond with specific leaders.

In the Republican Party, charismatic leaders include Donald Trump and Elon Musk, as much as I find them revolting. Read more about Trump’s charisma here.

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Above, right, is Van in action.

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Now I’m going to introduce another concept. In November 2023, I was at a Family Leader Presidential forum in Des Moines. The Family Leader is a right-wing “Christian” group that seeks to bend us all to their will.

MAGA Blaze TV had a nice studio set up, and I watched and listened for a while. As they took a break, one personality, who shall remain nameless, scolded another personality saying something like, “NEVER criticize someone to our right! NEVER! Those to the crazy right will make us seem moderate, and people will take us more seriously.” To their right includes Nazis. Never criticize them—a MAGA rule.

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So what do Democrats do differently? Let’s start with who some Democratic charismatic leaders are. To me, the most charismatic leaders in the Democratic Party are Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jasmine Crockett, and Ro Khanna, who are all left of “center.” And let’s add Cory Booker to the list.

I think these five have more charisma than anyone else, but that’s debatable. Other leaders that could be considered charismatic include Andy Beshear, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Wes Moore, Gretchen Whitmer, Raphael Warnock, Josh Shapiro, JB Pritzker, Jared Polis, Chris Murphy, and Gavin Newsom (I’ve crossed California Governor Newsom off my list of effective Democratic leaders. He partied during COVID-19 against his own rules and is pandering to far-right influencers and fascists).

I’m probably missing someone.

Regardless, my interpretation is that Sanders, AOC, Crockett, Khanna, and, to a lesser extent, Booker, have been criticized by the media and the Democratic party as being too far to the left, especially Sanders and AOC.

The fact of the matter is that Trump has pulled both Republicans and Democrats so far to the right that Sanders, AOC, Crockett, Khanna, and Booker are really the center. The New Deal Center.

Democrats should stop criticizing their left. The far right is radical because they want to demolish government and democracy. The far left just wants to feed and heal people, and give them a living wage, and that is considered radical. It’s preposterous.

Much of the left is accepting the framing of the MAGA media. Especially the consultant class, as they seek to move to the imagined “middle.” Bernie, AOC, Crockett, Khanna, and Booker ARE the middle. Moving further to the right is getting closer and closer to legitimizing fascism and betraying our values.

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Images from the protest.

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People at the protest in Des Moines are angry, and I am so happy to see that rural people are rising to resist authoritarian rule across the country. The above graphic is from “The Daily Yonder,” and the column is titled “Not Just a Blue Dot in a Sea of Red: April 5th Protests Across Rural America: In many rural towns and communities, people showed up in significant numbers to protest the Trump administration’s aggressive attempts at remaking the federal government.”

The column is by Ilana Newman and Sarah Melotte, and it was published on April 10, 2025 (check our Matt Russell’s Growing New Leaders; Perspectives from Coyote Run Farm later this morning. He will share his thoughts on the significance of this map too).

Rural America has had enough, and we are rising up to object to MAGA atrocities.

And there are charismatic leaders at each of those dots, as there were in Des Moines.

Let’s empower and follow them.

Or even better, you lead. I’m with you.

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Hey, if you are in the Quad Cities area on Friday morning, check this out.

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