That subcommunity is just… depressing to read. They love repeatedly equating ‘tankies’ with neofascists, but don’t bother subjecting the former to class analysis and making a concerted effort to understand why anybody would turn to supporting the USSR and the PRC.

Let me give you an example. In this article about propertarians becoming alt‐right, there is class analysis (propertarians are quite often white, male, and petty‐bourgeois), and there is an explanation as to why propertarians to frequently become alt‐right: neofascism’s aggression suits many propertarian demands well. That is an analysis; an etiology.

Never have I seen anybody make an analysis even comparable to that in the case of ‘tankies’. The class background of this crowd goes entirely unmentioned, and more importantly, they never explain why people become ‘tankies’ in the first place.

The closest thing to that that you’ll see is this:

I think a lot of them are in it for the aesthetics and are fundamentally unserious and immature people who don’t know and especially don’t care about the meanings of the things they’re saying

And that is all that they’ve got.