Avi Lewis speaks at a campaign event in Winnipeg. Photo courtesy Avi Lewis/X.

Most Canadian leftists are likely happy about Avi Lewis’ successful leadership bid to head up the floundering New Democratic Party. After all, many of us grew up on his Much Music commentaries and CBC CounterSpin debates from the 1990s. He was a “hip” Gen X progressive looking towards a more egalitarian future, and he reflects a more mature version of that persona today. As a scion of one of Canada’s most progressive families, it’s hard to see his leadership missing the mark, particularly given his lineage and his partner, writer and activist Naomi Klein.

His election as NDP leader evokes a broader North American tradition of populism, one that frames politics as a struggle between elites and ordinary people. That dynamic is evident in the party’s effort to rebuild its base and widen its appeal through a more assertive, “big government” lens. Both Canada and the United States have long histories of this kind of politics. These histories are worth revisiting in light of recent developments.

In the US, the Populist Party of the 1890s remains the closest any third party has come to seriously challenging the two-party system in the modern era. Yet, as historian C. Vann Woodward observed in his classic The Burden of Southern History, populism’s promise has always rested on a difficult balancing act: forging a coalition across divergent interests—farmers and workers, small business owners and labourers—united less by shared identity than by a common opposition to entrenched economic power.

The challenge for this third party in the 1890s was the flexibility required to build broad coalitions across deep differences in status, ideology, and........

© Canadian Dimension