Even if you disagree with them, Trotskyists are not tankies, simple Marxists aren’t tankies, leftists curious and exploring different theories aren’t tankies, and ffs anarchists like myself are not tankies.
I feel like “tankie” indicated a very specific worldview at one time, but it’s been used lately a lot to mean things like “doesn’t agree with nations supporting oppression and inequity up to and including genocide” – which is drastically at odds with how I’ve seen the term used in the past, no?
I have genuinely only seen tankie used by anarchists and libertarian socialists generally. Didn’t even know that liberals knew of the term. :/
Thanks to .world, a lot of liberals here now know it. The issue is many are using it like the American right uses woke: anything or anyone they don’t like, generally because their political or social commentary challenges their assumptions and makes them uncomfortable.
That sucks. I’ll have to watch my usage of this term, or at least use it in circumstances where it’s clear that it’s not meant to critique leftism. Surely there’s gotta be some new term now, though? The term is quite old at this point, and comes from a very specific situation where it was clearly one authoritarian side, which was criticized from the left using the term tankie. I think someone ought to have come up with an apt term to describe authoritarian “”“communists”“” today.
One thing I’ve seen used for CPGB-ML (an ML party so notable for their transphobia that JK Rowling has repeatedly endorsed them and their members and even the MLs in Britain largely range from looking down on to openly hating them) are the phrases tailism and right deviationism being applied to them
As a general trend in Britain the term tankie (at least in my experience) is used less by the far left because it originated here and has had more time to be misused to the point that most of us remember stuff like Jeremy Corbyn being called a “tankie trot” by Boris Johnson and stuff like that