After the 2008 financial crash, Leftism was reborn in ways that I think we're still coping with today. Specifically, it was reborn very suddenly. A lot of people just woke up one morning and realised that capitalism didn't work. They reached out for whatever fragments of socialist ideas happened to be nearby and which made sense to them personally.
This led to the weird situation where a century and a half's worth of discussion and evolution all appeared to people as if it was a single coherent body of theory. Marx, writing in 1867, would be read alongside Kropotkin in 1892, Gramsci in 1935 and Davis in 1981. It became easy to forget that huge things had happened in between those publications, and that many of them disagreed vehemently with one another.
I call this "the great flattening."
As a result of the great flattening, we saw some people emerge who picked up strains of Left thought which had been mostly abandoned, or which had been tried and found to be unviable. One of those was mid-20th-century Soviet supremacism: driven by campism, idolising brutality, often very misogynist and homophobic, and conspicuously lacking the general socialist urge to be a better person.
The term "tankie" has been recycled for those people, partially because they have a lot in common ideologically with the original tankies, and partially because they tend to respond as the original tankies did in 1956 and 1968.
They're a heterodox lot, though, partially because a lot of them are suffering from the great flattening, and partially because a lot of them are just very new to Leftism and so they're still discovering what their own beliefs are. While it's easy to point at certain people and say that in this moment they're being tankies, it can often end up being very blurry.
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"content": "After the 2008 financial crash, Leftism was reborn in ways that I think we're still coping with today. Specifically, it was reborn very suddenly. A lot of people just woke up one morning and realised that capitalism didn't work. They reached out for whatever fragments of socialist ideas happened to be nearby and which made sense to them personally.\n\nThis led to the weird situation where a century and a half's worth of discussion and evolution all appeared to people as if it was a single coherent body of theory. Marx, writing in 1867, would be read alongside Kropotkin in 1892, Gramsci in 1935 and Davis in 1981. It became easy to forget that huge things had happened in between those publications, and that many of them disagreed vehemently with one another.\n\nI call this \"the great flattening.\"\n\nAs a result of the great flattening, we saw some people emerge who picked up strains of Left thought which had been mostly abandoned, or which had been tried and found to be unviable. One of those was mid-20th-century Soviet supremacism: driven by campism, idolising brutality, often very misogynist and homophobic, and conspicuously lacking the general socialist urge to be a better person.\n\nThe term \"tankie\" has been recycled for those people, partially because they have a lot in common ideologically with the original tankies, and partially because they tend to respond as the original tankies did in 1956 and 1968.\n\nThey're a heterodox lot, though, partially because a lot of them are suffering from the great flattening, and partially because a lot of them are just very new to Leftism and so they're still discovering what their own beliefs are. While it's easy to point at certain people and say that in this moment they're being tankies, it can often end up being very blurry.",
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