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Luke Savage Profile picture
Luke Savage
@LukewSavage
Words in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, New Statesman, Smithsonian. Columnist at Jacobin. Seeking Social Democracy w/Ed Broadbent out now.
Jun 1, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Much of the essence of conservatism can be found distilled in these tweets: the overriding belief that there are structures somehow both innate and natural but also so fragile and persistently on the verge of collapse the state must constantly work to impose and reify them. You see this formulation all the time: "X or Y is rooted immutably in nature" + "Unless we stigmatize and outlaw practice X or Y civilization itself will collapse". It's more than just a rejection of pluralism. It's a politics motivated by deep insecurity and fear.
Jun 1, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Throughout the past 18 months or so, I've had the pleasure of working in collaboration with my friend Ed Broadbent and colleagues @FrancesAbele and @jonnysas_ on a very special project concerned with Ed's life and career (incoming in next tweet). Today is cover reveal day and, on behalf of the quartet, I'm happy to announce Seeking Social Democracy: the first ever chronicle of my friend Ed Broadbent's seventy years in public life, out October 10 and available for preorder from @ecwpress now.

ecwpress.com/products/seeki… Image
May 30, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
I was pleased to partner with @justicedems on this short documentary about how the corporate lust for profit drives misinformation — at Fox and beyond. Something made abundantly clear by Dominion's lawsuit against Fox News is the extent to which editorial calculations at the network were being driven by market considerations.
May 28, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
It's the exact inverse in my experience. Right wing books on the left tend to be the most shallow and intellectually lazy caricatures imaginable, but there are countless books from the left that engage the right seriously even if they're critiquing it. Like, find me a single book or podcast from the right that's analogous to something like The Reactionary Mind or Know Your Enemy
Dec 6, 2022 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
I feel like a broken record on this, but it genuinely is my sense that the Democratic leadership has successfully spun last week's events such that many think Republicans are primarily to blame. That simply isn't true. The fact is that the self-described "most pro-labor president in history" spearheaded the effort that ultimately robbed railworkers operating under completely indefensible conditions of their ability to strike. A brazen attack on workers rights led by Joe Biden.
Jun 3, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Sorry, the dominant narrative on this administration just doesn't scan. This isn't what you do if you're intent on passing a sweeping program of reform or inaugurating a whole new political consensus. This piece Ryan quotes below has this playbook exactly right, and we know exactly where it ends.
Jun 2, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Vaccinations initially lagged pretty badly in Canada, but today it looks like we've finally surpassed the UK in terms of the percentage of first doses administered. Quite the logistical feet. Now, when can I get back in the gym
Jun 1, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I do not care for the game thus far Gotta say, I’m really tired of feeling this way when I watch the Leafs. How could this happen again. How many of these will there be.
May 27, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
It can't be said enough: 2017 was the *sole* exception to a declining vote for Labour since 1997. Even 2019, in terms of popular vote share, was higher than Labour achieved in 2010 or 2015. In raw votes (10.2m), it was more than what Blair got in his 2005 majority win (9.5m). These basic empirical facts are willfully erased and ignored by centrist dogmatists who have constructed their whole political cosmology around the idea that triangulation is a winner and policies that actually improve people's lives are electoral poison.
Apr 23, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
It's alarming that anyone thinks this kind of relationship between the WH's chief spin doctor and the press is a good thing. The executive branch of the US government is maybe the single most powerful institution in the world, and a democratic press shouldn't be cozy with power. .@FAIRmediawatch had a great piece in February that's very relevant here fair.org/home/journalis…
Feb 5, 2021 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
For @TheAtlantic, I wrote about the gig economy and what the anti-worker politics of California's Prop 22 illustrate about liberalism's transformation into an ideology of wealth and affluence.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… I'm often asked why I write so much about liberals and liberalism when there's also an increasingly deranged and reactionary right to worry about. There are several reasons I chose to write so much on this subject, but something like this is a good case in point.
Dec 2, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Something that's been quite clear since 2016 is that liberals aren't very good at handling critique and criticism from their left. So much so that they'd often rather pathologize it than engage or even concede that the left is a genuine formation with its own political tradition. I guess this predates 2016, but it's a phenomenon that's really come into prominence during the renaissance of left wing ideas and movements of the past few years. Genuinely difficult to find good faith engagements with the left from centrist liberals.
Aug 17, 2020 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
It's so very difficult not to feel a creeping sense of deja vu in this moment. Here we are, ostensibly living through the final months of the Trump era and the people who run the Democratic Party are hell bent on pursuing a version of the strategy that failed them last time. The calculation, of course, is that the outcome in '16 was a fluke and, in many ways, that's quite correct: Trump didn't win because he brought huge numbers of people to the polls, but because lack of enthusiasm for the Dem campaign mixed with the alchemy of the Electoral College
Aug 12, 2020 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
I once read a fascinating critique by an Indian Marxist of nationalism during the British Raj, the crux of which was the Gramscian idea that elites addressed peasants & workers by invoking symbols/religion/tradition while keeping politics basically contained among themselves It's a running joke within the left that vulgar Marxism can often get you quite a long way, and it's incredible how much this same basic idea applies in many contemporary political settings.
Apr 29, 2020 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
I'd be a lot more sympathetic to complaints about "fake news" and our "post truth era" if some consistent standard were actually applied by the talking heads and commentators who make them - who are quite often centrist liberals. It's only one among many possible anecdotes here, but spend any length of time evaluating Joe Biden's record and you'll quickly see that he lies all the time.
Apr 11, 2020 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
During the 1980s, the conservative right had a number of significant ideological victories - one of which was embedding the ideas broadly associated with "fiscal conservatism" into how people think about governance and public spending. Some of the strongest evidence for this is the resounding liberal preference since for means-testing over universality, which is really just the core ideas of "fiscal conservatism" expressed in the language of liberal conscientiousness
Jan 16, 2020 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Underneath the mostly hollow spectacle of primary politics, there's a critical meta debate happening within America's liberal coalition. Despite cavernous disagreement, there's in some sense a broad consensus that American political institutions are deeply stagnated and that even a mildly progressive policy agenda will be nearly impossible to actualize given the barriers and constraints.
Dec 11, 2019 • 13 tweets • 7 min read
Update: A number of people got quite irritated by the tweet below a few days ago. Buttigieg just released his client list from his time at McKinsey: please note the last organization on the list. As I noted the other day, Loblaws admitted to having illegally fixed bread prices over a 14 year period. The scheme's duration coincides with Buttigieg's time there - and he's said in the past that his specialization was grocery pricing: theglobeandmail.com/report-on-busi…
Dec 10, 2019 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Folks, if you see a poll going around reportedly from YouGov showing the Tory lead down that appears to be from Britain Elects make sure to double check it's not fake - there's a convincing forgery currently making the rounds (look closely at the handle) Based on what I've seen there's certainly a good chance of movement favourable to Labour in these final days. The Tory strategy had grown increasingly defensive and dishonest and there's some cause to believe pollsters are underestimating the turnout Labour will get.
Dec 9, 2019 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
1) Pivot story away from PM rudely ignoring questions about the Tory record on the NHS, taking a journalist's phone

2) Report something potentially major with no evidence

3) "Not actually clear what happened, but this campaign certainly has grown awfully lively!" The phrasing in the second tweet really makes it look like a BBC journalist just regurgitated something she was told by Tory operatives and reported it as news
Dec 2, 2019 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The establishment press have lost their goddamn minds In 2017 the Russian state *literally* endorsed the Conservative Party