In his recent book In Defense of Populism, historian Donald Critchlow of Arizona State University presents a fascinating history of the main populist protest movements and their political successes in the United States since the late 19th century. Critchlow defines populism as grassroots, anti-elitist movements that change public policy. He argues that these “social movements” are necessary for “democratic renewal” by translating popular discontent into government actions. Populism is necessary for democracy but, he notes, democratic change has paradoxically generated “an enlarged bureaucratic government that is further removed from the people.”

His argument is interesting but has some weak links.

American populism / Critchlow’s story starts with the populism of the last two decades of the 19th century, culminating in the founding of the People’s Party (also called the Populist Party). At the federal level, populist ideas included an income tax, antitrust legislation, more regulation of banks, expansion of the money supply, protection of workers and consumers, and federal aid to farmers. State-level populism often called for even more government intervention.

The populist vision might have been, as Critchlow claims, “to employ statist methods as a means of restoring small competitive capitalism,” but it certainly called for much government intervention. Most of the populists’ demands were fulfilled by subsequent progressives and New Dealers. After the 1912 election, both the Republican and Democratic parties “accepted the construction of the new regulatory state. The era of big government had begun.”

By the time of the New Deal, populism had become more clearly socialist. Sen. Huey Long of Louisiana proposed an annual income for every American family. In 1937, supporters of populist Minnesota Gov. Elmer Benson, “known for his blunt, bellicose rhetoric,” occupied the State Senate chamber to protest the rejection of the governor’s legislative program. At the federal level, the Socialist Workers Party was created in 1933. Often organized or supported by socialist or communist activists, strikes were frequently bloody. The new populists were more radical than Franklin Roosevelt and often turned against him.

Critchlow’s definition of populism is very wide, which has both benefits and drawbacks.

Civil rights movement / The next populist period according to Critchlow was the civil rights movement launched in the 1960s. Let’s mention that a large part of it can be seen as a libertarian movement. In the South, blacks not only lacked an effective right to vote but, more important, were often deprived of equal rights in their daily lives. White mob violence, often with state governments’ approval and even support, was frequent. Juries acquitted white aggressors.

We can conclude from Critchlow’s detailed history that many leaders and activists of the civil rights movement were not “grassroots,” at least in the sense of representative of average Americans. The concept of grassroots is not self-evident. One indication is how, after the passage of civil rights legislation, the movement splintered into small ideological and revolutionary groups. The Black Panther Party had ties with the Socialist Workers Party of Trotskyist obedience and embraced Maoist indoctrination. Promotion of violence spread to other movements, including paradoxically the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which had waged many peaceful and heroic actions against Southern mob violence. After his 1966 election as SNCC chairman, Stokely Carmichael moved the organization toward black power and black nationalism.

There were lots of cranks in the Black Panthers, including founder Huey Newton who bestowed upon himself the title of “supreme servant of the people.” I would not say that libertarian economist and political theorist Murray Rothbard was a crank but, Critchlow tells us, he supported the Black Panthers. Wider public opinion, including its liberal-left component, soon turned against this drift despite a continued support for civil rights laws.

Interestingly, the extreme wing of the black liberation movement offered a foretaste of today’s assault on Western civilization. “When you talk about black power,” Carmichael said, “you talk of building a movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created.”

Second-wave feminism / Extremist feminists traveled the same road at about the same time. Critchlow’s description of second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s (the first wave having started in the early 20th century with the suffrage and progressive movements) is also very instructive. The milestone victories of the new feminism were the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex), Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (which prohibited discrimination in any education program receiving federal financing), and the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act.

Second-wave feminism was partly taken over by misandry, abortion-rights absolutism, and even lesbian separatism. At a 1969 activist meeting, a woman testified that when she learned she was pregnant, her first reaction was “Get this child out of me!” She derided her (probably patriarchal) boyfriend’s reaction of “Isn’t it romantic?” In Shuhamith Firestone’s 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, she wrote that “women stood on the verge of a new epoch in human history in which culture could be reordered” to replace male oppression. She wanted a “revolt against the biological family,” an idea that, Critchlow notes, strangely resembles the test-tube babies raised by the state in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Reading Critchlow’s description, second-wave feminism looked more like an elitist than an anti-elitist movement. It became enmeshed with the New Left and relied on an elite of white, middle-class, privileged women. Betty Friedan, author of the 1963 The Feminine Mystique, was close to communist groups. Under those conditions, it is not surprising that “one of the greatest gains feminism made was inside the academy, as women’s studies took root.”

Feminism was a fractured movement, even over the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Approved by Congress in 1972 with the support of Richard Nixon among other politicians, the amendment seems uncontroversial: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Yet, many “New Deal liberals” and feminists opposed the ERA because they wanted government privileges for women, not equal rights, including in labor law. The National Organization of Women, founded in 1966, favored the amendment but, obsessed with abortion and gay rights, campaigned for it separately from the pro-ERA mainstream.

Critchlow could have added that, from this twisted discriminatory perspective, ERA opponents were right to be scared. The 1972 Title IX has been more and more frequently invoked to prevent colleges and universities subsidized by the federal government from discriminating against men with special programs for women only. (See George La Noue’s “Title IX for Men,” Law & Liberty, February 23, 2021.)

Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly’s STOP ERA movement saw the amendment as “a loosely worded constitutional amendment that would be interpreted by the courts.” She very effectively campaigned against the ERA, which died after failing to receive the approval of a sufficient number of states. Her movement was probably more grassroot and less elitist than the feminist movement. Public opinion polls suggested that women’s liberation remained popular through the rest of the century but that those who called themselves feminists were not.

I would add to Critchlow’s scholarly history that, like other populist movements, second-wave feminism was marred by a clash between two sorts of rights: positive and negative. It is one thing to request negative rights (rights against government-built obstacles to individual liberty and formal equality) and another thing to call for government to grant positive rights (special rights to be exerted against other individuals in society). Critchlow does note that the feminist movement “called on government to redress social problems of women, even while promoting anti-statist policies.” Feminists asked for equal pay for women (regardless of market-determined wage rates), federally supported child-care centers, job training for minority women, and more social welfare programs.

Populism on the right / In Defense of Populism also analyzes what Critchlow sees as a populist reaction of the American political right following World War II. “The grassroots right expressed a rebellion against the welfare-regulatory-administrative state that was a consequence of previous social movements,” he writes. He distinguishes two phases: the anti-communist and religious right of the 1950s and 1960s, and the anti-statist and anti-elitist right of the Reagan sort in the 1970s and 1980s.

Dominated by religion and anticommunism, the first phase was often proto-Trumpian in its simplistic understanding of the world. Critchlow gives many examples. Carl McIntire, a Presbyterian minister and popular religious radio broadcaster, believed that Catholicism was more dangerous than communism. Originally a supporter of Barry Goldwater, who was more a libertarian than a conservative, McIntire later became, more logically, a follower of segregationist George Wallace. Billy Hargis, another radio preacher, thought that “it is ignorant people who are going to save this country.” His associate, David Noebel, believed that the Beatles were part of a Soviet conspiracy to brainwash American youth with hypnotic techniques. Robert Welsh, founder of the John Birch Society, thought that Eisenhower was a Soviet agent and Sputnik was a hoax. Later, the Birchers shifted to attacking the New World Order as a Masonic conspiracy.

All that without the help of today’s social networks — not a mean feat!

Critchlow includes Ronald Reagan in this phase of the right-wing populist movement, which is debatable, as is his claim that Trump amplified Reagan’s message. Although Reagan turned out to be more conservative than libertarian, he was not (let the truth be told) an ignorant buffoon.

Critchlow views the second phase of conservative populism as an extension of the cultural backlash of the first phase as well as a reaction to government corporate subsidies in the Great Recession. He correctly understands that the libertarian element in the Tea Party was rapidly overcome by conservatives.

Among many other interesting facts, In Defense of Populism reports that, as late as 1976, Republicans were more supportive of abortion rights than Democrats. In 1967, for example, Reagan, freshly elected governor of California, signed an abortion rights bill into law. Republicans became anti-abortion to attract Catholics and Protestants, the latter newly converted to that position.

Populism and discontent / Critchlow believes that if democratic politics responds to populist protests, popular contentment will result. But nothing is less sure, as the 20th century suggests. The more government intervenes to satisfy this or that populism by granting positive rights to new electoral clienteles against others, the more discontent and politization results.

The author of In Defense of Populism does not seem to envisage the possibility that popular discontent is more a consequence than a cause of galloping democracy under the form of populism. I think he would benefit from reading Anthony de Jasay’s 1985 book The State, where he sketched out a model of political competition in which, to satisfy more and more grievances, the state must control all of society like slaves on a plantation.

Crichlow suggests that by 2016, “right and left shared little — except on a single point: government should not be trusted.” The reality, I believe, is very different: each side only distrusts a government run by the other side. When government is on their side, both right and left trust it blindly. Each succeeding populism thus adds its own bricks to the construction of the totalitarian state. Discontent grows along.

Critchlow is right to identify Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as populists. But this does not improve his case that populism is necessary for democracy. Another Trumpian episode, this time on the left, would only exacerbate the risk for the future of America.

The source of the problems with Critchlow’s thesis may lie in his initial definition of populism, which confuses competitive authoritarianism or serial populisms with democracy, at least in the sense of liberal democracy. (See “Populist Political Choices Are Meaningless,” Spring 2021.) Populism is a sacralization of the will of the people and a degeneration of liberal democracy, not its savior.

These failings should not distract us from In Defense of Populism as a good book of American history. It is scholarly and as objective as such books can be. When I started working on this review, I had read nothing from Critchlow and knew nothing about his political leanings. I tried hard to ferret them out while reading the book, with no success. As I read, I made a few puzzling observations, such as his use of the words “anti-statism” and “anti-statist,” which do not belong to the vulgate. Only after I had basically finished this review did I check out the author. He is a Republican — obviously an intelligent and knowledgeable one. Hopefully, this means that this sort of Republican is more common than the last five years might have led us to believe.