this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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Progressives are separate from tankies. You can have leftist ideals without supporting authoritarians.
You must understand that under first-past-the-post the party that receives the most criticism tends to lose. It's much easier to pressure democrats into doing the right thing then with republicans.
Progressives are not leftists, they are centrist liberals. No matter how many times Sanders calls himself a socialist, he is never going to call for abolishing private ownership of the means of production.
There was a lot of pressure for the most banal, milquetoast, form of representation ever in the form of having a Palestinian speaker at the Democratic national convention with a vetted speech that involved nothing that would have criticized Israel at all.
Even that was too far.
Either the progressives are powerful enough that you have to take them seriously and give them concessions, or they aren't and you get to ignore them.
What you don't get to do is give them nothing and blame them when you lose. Or, I guess you do if you'd prefer to lose the general over letting a progressive win the primary.
Huh, funny that, who knew there is a lot of levers and controls that a primary winner, even one that lost the general, gets.
No one calls themselves a tankie. It is a pejorative term for a progressive. It is used to silence legitimate criticism and helps right-shift politics
(Edit: I think your frustration is really more with the mainstream media and what news they choose to cover and amplify)
It's the term that describes those communists who cheered on the Soviet Union’s violent crushing of the 1956 Hungary revolution protests.
The term is often used when someone claims they support leftist ideals but pushes for authoritarianism.
I get the original etymology. Nowadays it's carelessly used and appropriated like 'woke'
What about "lib" and "zio"?
Those are kind of new and exciting. All the kids are doing it.
I'm pretty sure those are used accurately as specific types of fascists.
Did you know that was recently revealed (through Trump's jfk doc dump) to be yet another CIA backed fake color revolution?
Tankie is in no way a pejorative for Progressive. Hell progressives are usually the ones using it. I wouldn't even say tankies pretend to be Progressive.
So Bernie and AOC are tankies to you?
It's pretty easy to identify tankies. Here, I'll draw some out for you:
Mao and Stalin were just as evil as Hitler. China is engaging in a genocide of the Uyghur people. Putin is a genocidal war criminal fighting a war of imperialism.
So anyone who doesn't engage in Double Genocide Theory, a recognized form of Holocaust denial, is a "tankie".
A tankie is anyone who objects when I do this: shits pants
Wow, lots of tankies in here taking the bait lol
Really not beating the allegations that "tankie" is just an ill-defined snarl word
Oh when you put it that way, it definitely sounds like a serious political descriptor and not just a gotcha used by trolls /s
Ok, well I'm not a "Russian and Chinese" imperialist, so you've already contradicted yourself. Which is unsurprising given you basically tried to treat "tankiesayswhat" as a serious political definition.
Well I'm not Authoritarian either, but I assume you'll once again try to post-hoc redefine the term.
You were "laughing at me" for "falling for it"? Are you 12 or something?
No? You clearly didn't think that.