In my experience, "tankie" is more or less used these days to refer to "authoritarian leftists", people who claim to be on the left but support authoritarian nominally socialist regimes.

There's plenty of USA-hating anarchists who aren't being called tankies. The authoritarianism is a pretty important part of the term.

Though this isn't entirely incompatible with what you said, the major non-US geopolitical powers have historically been nominally socialist, and also happen to be authoritarian; so people who support non-US-aligned powers will have been supporters of the USSR or China, and I'm comfortable calling those people tankies.

It is one of those contrarian ideologies where people willingly brainwash themselves that the thing they oppose is bad, therefore the other thing has done nothing wrong. Just like the far right, they are so allergic to sharing facts and thinking that they will instantly use mod tools to remove anyone who attempts either when it hurts their feelings.

So I'd define it more as primarily someone willfully ignorant of genocide and other appalling human rights abuses with a mild preference for an economic system.

You're not wrong on any point of that, in the final analysis, BUT, I think it's worthwhile to compare tankies to the current set of kool-aid drinking Christian Republicans who are supporting the banning of books and other overtly fascist laws, because they really are two sides of a coin in this case, and illustrate the breakdown of social bonds we are currently experiencing.

If you step into the tankie mindset for a moment, you will zoom in on the book banning and anti-trans cudgel that's currently getting swung around, and they will contextualize that with our 400 year history on this continent, and pretty rightly conclude that there is no moral champion at the nation state level, and if there is, it cannot possibly be America, but if they're here, America is the one they are able to fight.

Likewise, if you step into a naive geopolitical viewpoint and say to yourself that Russia is a country that lost the cold war and which the West did not really help to become more democratic in the aftermath - you sent your capitalists and that equated to sending freedom, in the minds of Reaganized America.

But Capital does not concern itself with anyone's freedom but it's own, and Capital does business with anyone willing to do business with it, including its morally-liberated, and now ideologically-liberated, former rivals, who were never fucking communists in the first place; they were the new autocrats, same as the old autocrats, and likewise, Yeltsin was just a drunky thrown up there to give speeches while they reestablished control under the new capitalist branding.

And for thirty years, mostly anyone who question it has been shouted down. "These are our trading partners and they're totally super into freedom, guys! China wants to be like us!"

And here we are. But anyways, rant aside, to the tankie and to the book-banning Christian Fascist alike, the enemy has lost all moral status, they are outlaw, and therefore any measure used against them is just, no matter how inherently unjust it might be in and of itself. As long as it's used against them.

This is how "good" people like you and me end up joining the organizations that end up living in infamy, whether it's my sainted grandmother who went to her grave believing Stalin was fine or whoever ends up as the evil poster boy for the current attempt at Christian Fascism that Barry Goldwater was already warning yall about.

If he had leaned into it like Trump did, he would've brought this all on much sooner, and we would be dealing with some other calamity here in 2023, but Goldwater called it, these people believe in apocalypse as a good thing, so all of us who are right-thinking, whatever economics we may favor, are gonna have to get on the same page about this one.

I agree that tankie-ism is very similar to various other far-right ideologies, and I think the only significant difference between a tankie (or late-stage USSR or CCP supporter in general) and other authoritarian ideologies is an aesthetic one. In my opinion, the core of left-wing politics is a radical opposition to authoritarianism, where the authoritarianism of the worker's relationship with capital is but one important example.

It's extremely telling to me that the mainstream right-wing view of the Russia/Ukraine conflict is one which supports Russia -- in perfect alignment with the tankies.

Right? It's never been easier to spot, really.

"I'm a vegetarian who won't turn down a burger" basically?

"My ideal form of government would be something like Marxism but I live under a capitalist regime."

Marxism has to do with pointing out how capital operates on societies; there are no Marxist governments, though he did theorize that the world would eventually work its way to communism, in much the same way that we somehow worked ourselves almost to the point that we're not using slavery anymore.

Of course, we are all still carrying around child slavery in our pockets, most of us. It's got a shiny touchscreen and it helps us find our way around, through the power of child slavery.

The above paragraph is me being a Marxist.

Well yes, there aren't any capitalist governments either but economic system and government are intertwined. Bartering is the state of nature, everything else is government.

So you're right but I think people know what's meant.

I think any government that is bought and controlled by capital is a capitalist government, so in my opinion, you are either wrong or lying.

>I think any government that is bought and controlled by capital is a capitalist government, so in my opinion, you are either wrong or lying.

So did communist states have capitalist governments then? Is this boiling down to "real communism has never been tried" again?

Nah, and I'm no communist either. I'm the kind of wishy washy leftist that they hate.

Authoritarianism does not know a political stripe. Before 1917, the government of Russia was a self-identified autocracy with a god-given right to make Russians live how Russians have mostly always lived.

The worker's movement that took that down instituted a thing they called communism, but which was really just the old system with different uniforms and modernist art. Not that efforts were not made, and not that the old guard in the rest of Europe didn't take steps, but it was mostly that the revolutionaries didn't really know how to operate a ship of state, so they fell back on old habits and kept the branding.

It ended up as a collectivist nightmare, and it still had a privileged class at the top, but there was no ideological conviction that capital was a positive force which could do no wrong, so no, they did not have a capitalist government, and pejoritavely calling it communist is fair IMO, I think communism is a thing that could be done but which won't, in a just way, in the lifetime of anyone alive now. It can be done badly and people keep trying.

I'm a 30s-style socialist, myself. I think the New Deal was doing well and Americans could have had a nice country all this time, but I dunno, everyone wants to roll those dice and be one of the upper class instead of demanding justice now.

Real capitalism has never been tried either, there is no such thing as an ideologically pure society. Though it is important to note that all of the worlds governments are influenced by capital while "less" are influenced by the effort to achieve a classless society.

Capitalism happens every time someone sits on their ass and collects dividends while other people work. Don't kid yourself.

> Marxists were and remain tankies, I was raised by such and have family friends who think Putin is awesome

A curious irony is that the 45th POTUS once characterized Putin's decision to invade as "genius".

Actually I take the above as further evidence that the usual projection of political thought onto a single left-right axis remains hopelessly reductive.