There’s been an uptick in talk about “tankies” in liberal media lately. Noah Smith has been banging the drum on them for some time now, but in just the past few days we’ve seen articles using the term in The Intercept and New York Magazine as well. Since none of these people actually seem to be familiar with the term, however, I thought I’d post a quick explainer:
Tankie is a right-wing slur that vilifies critics of capitalism and imperialism by associating them with communism. That’s all it is. Why is that a problem?
It plays upon — and stokes — anti-communist bigotries pounded into the American psyche during the red scare and the Cold War. Most people do not hear the word “tankies” and think about some incident in 1956; they think stuff like “communists / socialists / Marxists / Soviets / China.” Using this word tells people that we should all just take for granted that it’s bad to be a communist. Which is obviously a problem if you’re a communist, but it’s also a problem for anyone that the right wants to call a communist…
…which is why anyone who is critical of capitalism and imperialism needs to be critical of “tankie”. I’ve been called one for opposing every war I have ever opposed — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and now Ukraine, among others. I’ve been called a tankie for supporting Bernie Sanders, single payer healthcare, Covid vaccinations, expanded research budgets for carbon capture, and automatic voter registration. Leftists can try to use it in some kind of narrow and nuanced sense all they like, but that is clearly not how the word is understood among the general public or powerful elites; for them, it just works as a right-wing slur.
Perversely, the word “tankie” can also become an attractive brand for actual reactionaries by presenting them as more radical than they actually are. Amid current debates over the conflict in Ukraine, for example, communists have labored to clarify that support for the invasion is not the anti-imperialist position — in sharp contrast to what LeftEast calls “the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing solidarity [Putin] receives from parts of the Left.” Characterizing their position as a “tankie” position aggrandizes what is really just banal right-wing militarism, and it undercuts the efforts of communists to criticize it.
If you’re a leftist or even a liberal and these points seem implausible to you, a simple challenge: remember I said this. Why? Because every so often the rhetoric of anti-communism becomes so ferocious, extending to even the mildest anti-war criticism or the most trifling measures to expand the welfare state, that even liberals suddenly remember their old objections to it. “Tankie” is not a word that invites careful and reasonable consideration of someone’s politics; it’s a bomb, and its shrapnel always hits the left. The best reason not to use anti-communist rhetoric is that nine times out of ten it’s wielded against people who actually have the correct position. But even if you think you have a “left” or “progressive” critique of a so-called “tankie,” using that term is pouring fuel on a fire that’s going to eventually burn you, too.