It means whatever it needs to mean in the context in which it is deployed.

It’s a tool deployed by liberals against people to the left of them in exactly the same way that woke is a tool deployed by reactionaries against people to the left of them.

It gets deployed against everything from ML to anarchist to even socdems, depending on whether you say something that goes against the US’ imperial core goals.

The purpose of the tool is thought-termination. To prevent people from listening to the person that it is deployed against. Reactionaries use woke to prevent people among their ranks from listening to anything reasonable the ““woke”” person might say, and liberals use tankie to prevent people among their ranks from listening to anything reasonable the left might say.

It is an adaptation of mccarthyite behaviour.

You ain’t done nothing if you ain’t been called a Red applies now to this word just as much as it applied back then.

opposing imperialism, colonialism, racism, capitalism, patriarchy, animal abuse, domestic violence, or pollution in a way that is not utterly ineffectual or pacifistic

Much like “woke” is for conservatives, for liberals, “tankie” means “person that I disagree with that says things that are too leftist for me personally”

A blanket term to denigrate any leftist with Marxist ideas

Basically, gg once you say anything left of soc dem

Tankie is just the lib version of woke

It basically means ‘leftist’

Someone with good opinions.

anyone with the smallest criticism of US Imperialism is a tankie now

Hexbear eat Lemmy already. I want my fucking username back

tankie is when you don’t want to send tanks to ukraine

Liberals think it means someone who lies about wanting socialism and instead just wants to kill people. They think it refers to a proponent of a society where all decisions are made by a single crackpot dictator. They think they have a correct view on how to create and institute socialism, which would involve things like voting in elections, organizing pickets, and very slowly seizing power through mass appeal. As a corollary to this, liberals believe this type of socialism has already been achieved in places like Sweden and Denmark. Depending on how much they’ve read socialist theory they may also point to Catalonia or the Zapatistas, but they’ll usually be referring to completely imaginary mangled versions of these events that don’t reflect history.

What tankie means in practice though is something more like “race traitor.” Or “nation traitor.” Liberals will say they hate the west’s actions and what it stands for, but what they really mean is they hate everywhere else more. Any designated enemies of western countries are permanent enemies and outside of liberal values. People who call themselves socialists will still use this dichotomy. Tankie means someone who expresses sympathy for countries that have been designated as enemies to the west. You’ll notice that Xi Jinping himself isn’t called a tankie. Stalin’s not a tankie. Figures like that get called authoritarians or dictators. Tankie is someone in the west who has broken convention and gone to the bad guys. That’s all it means at this point.

I really believe there’s been a decades long project to usurp socialist rhetoric by liberals, whether they realize it or not. The existence of tankies threatens their reputation, because it draws socialist terminology back into scary communism. Liberals have spent decades trying to position themselves as the true, good leftists. That only works if they can paint socialist movements worldwide as liars and their own internal socialists as traitors

woke

The real Tankies are the friends we made along the way.

Anyone with policy positons that aren’t generally safe towards neoconservatism?

same meaning as “woke”, i.e. a term which has lost all meaning

Someone who drives a tank