What was the Tankie?
A few years ago, the tankie was only just starting to be discussed in the internecine left circles, that pit of vipers, but mostly with a sense of bemusement and good humor. It seemed to be an online-only development—greasy 29 year olds, living in momma’s basement, playing grand strategy games and wearing Che Guevara berets. They whined endlessly about “American imperialism” but were in awe of China and Xi, the main thrust of irony being about how dumb America was, and would soon be put into checkmate by the Chinese and Russians. Look at our polarization and decaying infrastructure and scelorotic political class, compared to those high-speed rail systems and sophisticated COVID tracing systems!
The tankie, for those lucky enough not to know, is pretty much what it sounds like—a half-ironic “anti-imperialist” anti-American subculture of the left that knee-jerk believe America always bad, China, Russia, Syria, North Korea always clever and good. Political power brought in on a tank. Think Hungary 1956 and Prague 1968 or Ukraine 2022. The modern tankie is a kind of armchair Sovietologist and autodidact military tactician that can write Reddit posts with words like “kulak” and “bourgeois wreckers” and “liquidation” without wincing in embarrassment. They admired Putin and Kim Jong Un and Assad and there were basically no stakes in this until about two weeks ago.
I didn’t believe tankies existed in real life—I thought they were keyboard warriors online, but in real life were the pale, mumbling guy in front of me in line at Target— until I ventured to breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk People’s’ Republics in East Ukraine and met some. These regions are a kind of heartland of tankiedom, a live-action Soviet historical recreation theme park for “anti-imperialists” where they could pretend they were with the Red Army standing against the hordes of Nazi collaborators. Unsurprisingly, most of the tankies are from those rich Western countries with tons of WW2 war guilt turned pathological (Germany, Italy, and Spain), but some were from North America, which has its own self-effacing brand of guilt. In Ukraine, I met charismatic and well-spoken young people with collections of t-shirts with pictures of Gaddafi, Kadyrov, Assad, Putin and Xi.
Based on these preceding paragraphs, it might seem like now I’m going to do the move that so many journalists who look into a subculture do, where with a grave face they say: “Watch out, this random subculture of people might seem on the face of it marginal and pointless—but they’re serious, very serious, and very dangerous.”
That is not where I’m going with this at all.
When I was growing up, the default thing to be on the left was some kind of anarchist. Joining political parties was lame, communism was lame, having a program was lame, Guy Debord was cool, anti-globalization and Zapatistas and living and eating out of dumpsters and being against Starbucks and making zines was kind of the thing everyone did. It was odd and rare to encounter someone in their 20s or 30s who talked earnestly about “anti-imperialism.”
Then, as this generation got older and more clever, they turned from being “anarchists” into some kind of vaguely Marxist “insurrectionists” and began to conceal their youthful ideology under layers of dense critical theory and ideas about performance art and luxury brands, because this seemed more sophisticated and mature.
Then the fancy literary people and graduate students joined up with the ex-anarchists during Occupy because they saw which way the wind was blowing and wanted to be part of whatever was the most young and intellectual and radical chic, as Ivy League people always have and always will.
Then everyone became a socialist. They swapped out their old tote-bags for tote-bags with pictures of Marx and Verso. Bernie became the catalyzing thing. Everyone had to come together and work for America to build a basic welfare state. In this period, the tankie was starting to appear in the left-ish debates as a kind of far-left critique of the Bernie thing—people with asthma and nasal congestion who would gripe, “You know, Bernie isn’t a real socialist, he’s a reformist” or worse, “Bernie is a Zionist.”
Then Jeremy Corbyn lost. Bernie lost badly in South Carolina (I campaigned for him in South Carolina, so I feel responsibility for this failure.) Joe Biden won. The rising tide of what David Shor and Yglesias want to call “Popularism”—“We just want to do what’s, like, politically popular, socialized healthcare and infrastructure” fell flat on its face. The candidates were too strange, the whole thing was too strange. Bernie and Corbyn are the type of old guides who invite you for a look around their permaculture garden, not the kind that run a country. Whether they actually were or not up for it, they just didn’t seem built for the nasty business of politics, and seeming is always more important than being, as LBJ seemed. They could not get the votes.
It was in the nihilism and hopelessness the left sank into after this period that the tankie more fully emerged. Just like with antifa and every weird lefty thing that bubbles up from the bottom, the liberals and commentariat started earnestly discussing the tankie, writing their takes. They even came up with a new word “campist,” which is some kind of sub-category of tankie.
What are the characteristics of the victory of moderate liberalism and the response from the left?
—A kind of bitterness about electoral prospects (“It’s the people who are wrong!”).
—Complete and total alienation that moderate reforms can improve people’s’ lives (“The infrastructure bill is bullshit.”).
—Renewed and growing interest in esoteric topics like the CIA and FBI and Chomskyite “anti-imperialist” history, with books like Vincent Bevins The Jakarta Method.
—Disinterest in free speech absolutism.
—Shame over America’s covid response and a perverse, public-health-minded admiration of China.
It seems to me that non-conservative Americans have been growing increasingly self-effacing and ashamed of their country these past few years and they can see nothing good in it. Or maybe it’s that they’re more performative in the “Oh, we’re so bad” self-effacement. People were deeply ashamed of America during the Bush era, but they didn’t wish we were a different country. During the Bernie era, it was “Why can’t we be Finland and Denmark? They’re so much better than us…” Apparently none of these people understood that the therapy and acupuncture and Adderall they love are not actually covered (or prescribed) by Scandinavian socialized health systems.
Then there was the shame of America’s COVID response, with the chorus of, “We are the absolute worrsssssst” while lobbying the government for more extreme lockdowns. Almost as if they want to alienate more and more people, and get a smaller and smaller slice of the electoral map.
I also get the sense that the young American people getting into the left today, the rebellious and default thing to do is not to be a fun-loving anarchist but to be some kind of hard “anti-imperialist” of the 70s model—Black Panthers, Cuba, Syria, China.
But the invasion of Ukraine, the likely coming geopolitical alliance between Syria, Russia and China forces peoples hands, they have to make an awkward decision when things start being a bit more real—do you really mean it? Really? Or was it just ironic?
Some will double-down, but a lot more will fold and realize their rejection of the post-war international order was only skin-deep. The next thing will come.