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Guest Essay

By Molly Worthen

Dr. Worthen, a historian at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is the author of “Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History From the Puritans to Donald Trump.”

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........

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