Luke Savage is a writer and essayist whose work has appeared in <em`>The Atlantic, The New Statesman, The Washington Post, and The Guardian</em`>. Born in St John’s, Newfoundland, he studied political science, history, and philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he edited Canada’s largest student newspaper The Varsity. Having worked for several years as an investigative reporter covering Canadian politics and the far right, Luke has been a staff writer at Jacobin since 2018 – where he is a frequent commentator on American, British, and Canadian politics. He is co-host of the popular Michael and Us podcast, a twice-weekly show about politics, cinema, and our crumbling world.

Liberalism’s Loss of Confidence

Though it would be reductive to isolate a single moment or point of rupture, the financial meltdown of 2008 and its aftermath is certainly a worthy enough place to begin the story of liberalism’s loss of confidence. Appropriately enough, 2008 also saw the ascendancy of Barack Obama: a figure who for many (including my nineteen-year-old self) represented the best hope for a different kind of world after the crisis — a crisis that plenty outside of elite circles, whether versed in the inscrutable workings of high finance or not, understood to be the product of deep structural flaws in the architecture of the world economy.

The administration’s willful decision to forgo any serious reordering of the political settlement and the subsequent global march into austerity caused untold human suffering and emboldened the most sinister currents on the political right. But it also helped instill in a generation of downwardly mobile young people a hardened skepticism of centrist platitudes, political saviorism, and liberal doublespeak. As you’ll see from the pages of this book, the inveterate conservatism of so many would-be progressive figures has played a major and undeniable role in the development of my own politics. Though I certainly cannot claim to speak for others, I suspect this trajectory is one that many millennial readers in particular will identify with.

Life on the left, of course, is ultimately about much more than finding fault with centrist triangulation or rolling one’s eyes in the direction of individual liberal politicians. Unless grounded in materialist analysis and undergirded by firm egalitarian commitments, anti-liberal critiques can all-too easily slide into shallow contrarianism or various genres of ersatz iconoclasm that are really just conservatism by another name. Events of the past decade, however, have been remarkably clarifying for those of us who once believed that the leaders of a conventional institution like the Democratic Party could, or even wanted to, deliver progress in any meaningful sense of the word.

Among other things, the breathtaking liberal hostility to both of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns was emblematic of an orientation whose guiding ethos remains hierarchical and corporatist, whatever its official branding may suggest to the contrary. The same applies in my native Canada, where Trudeaumania 2.0 has proven to be every bit as hollow, politically staid, and change-averse a phenomenon as early critics like myself argued it would be. In Britain, the other Anglo-American democracy to make an appearance in this book, the stunning and unlikely success of Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour Party’s 2015 leadership election was met with a reaction from establishment pundits and media oligopolies so hysterical that it made the attacks on Sanders look tame by comparison.

Luke Savage is a writer and essayist whose work has appeared in <em`>The Atlantic, The New Statesman, The Washington Post, and The Guardian</em`>. Born in St John’s, Newfoundland, he studied political science, history, and philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he edited Canada’s largest student newspaper The Varsity. Having worked for several years as an investigative reporter covering Canadian politics and the far right, Luke has been a staff writer at Jacobin since 2018 – where he is a frequent commentator on American, British, and Canadian politics. He is co-host of the popular Michael and Us podcast, a twice-weekly show about politics, cinema, and our crumbling world.

Liberalism’s Loss of Confidence

Though it would be reductive to isolate a single moment or point of rupture, the financial meltdown of 2008 and its aftermath is certainly a worthy enough place to begin the story of liberalism’s loss of confidence. Appropriately enough, 2008 also saw the ascendancy of Barack Obama: a figure who for many (including my nineteen-year-old self) represented the best hope for a different kind of world after the crisis — a crisis that plenty outside of elite circles, whether versed in the inscrutable workings of high finance or not, understood to be the product of deep structural flaws in the architecture of the world economy.

The administration’s willful decision to forgo any serious reordering of the political settlement and the subsequent global march into austerity caused untold human suffering and emboldened the most sinister currents on the political right. But it also helped instill in a generation of downwardly mobile young people a hardened skepticism of centrist platitudes, political saviorism, and liberal doublespeak. As you’ll see from the pages of this book, the inveterate conservatism of so many would-be progressive figures has played a major and undeniable role in the development of my own politics. Though I certainly cannot claim to speak for others, I suspect this trajectory is one that many millennial readers in particular will identify with.

Life on the left, of course, is ultimately about much more than finding fault with centrist triangulation or rolling one’s eyes in the direction of individual liberal politicians. Unless grounded in materialist analysis and undergirded by firm egalitarian commitments, anti-liberal critiques can all-too easily slide into shallow contrarianism or various genres of ersatz iconoclasm that are really just conservatism by another name. Events of the past decade, however, have been remarkably clarifying for those of us who once believed that the leaders of a conventional institution like the Democratic Party could, or even wanted to, deliver progress in any meaningful sense of the word.

Among other things, the breathtaking liberal hostility to both of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns was emblematic of an orientation whose guiding ethos remains hierarchical and corporatist, whatever its official branding may suggest to the contrary. The same applies in my native Canada, where Trudeaumania 2.0 has proven to be every bit as hollow, politically staid, and change-averse a phenomenon as early critics like myself argued it would be. In Britain, the other Anglo-American democracy to make an appearance in this book, the stunning and unlikely success of Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour Party’s 2015 leadership election was met with a reaction from establishment pundits and media oligopolies so hysterical that it made the attacks on Sanders look tame by comparison.