I’m sure this is a super common question but why do people (generally liberals or sometimes people on the left) call basically everyone who mildly agree with current more authoritarian leaning socialist states tankies
I wouldn’t nessicarily call myself a tankie but I can also fully understand why people feel that label fits them when so many people call so many perspectives tankie perspectives and just shove them in a corner
Not sure if that makes sense as a question but I hope it does
My response about a year ago: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5459443/4950749
All governance is authoritarian; the question is who are they authoritarian against.
In liberal democracies they are democracies for capital and authoritarian against the proleteriat - especially in the west they will be authoritarian against the workers of the Global South through imperialism. In these capitalist dictatorships they engage in electoralism as a pressure valve of discontent for the masses and claim this political theatre counts as a democracy.
Now consider actual existing socialist states surviving the siege by the West against socialism, under hybrid wars. These socialist states have a deeper understanding of democracy, a whole people’s democracy that goes beyond theatrical electoralism (though if we are counting numbers then China has the largest voting electorate in the world). They are dictatorships of the proleteriat against capital.
In the west you can vote for whichever party you want and critcise whoever you want as long as it is not considered a threat to western capital and hegemony.
Westerners with a straight face will tell you they have more freedom while an Australian journalist was tortured in the UK because he exposed USAmerican war crimes.
These westerners have perceived freedoms because their actions are not considered a threat but if they find themselves on the wrong side of that perceived safety they will quickly be nullified - bank accounts frozen, media character assasination, imprisonment, torture and murder.
Authoritarianism often ends up being meaningless as a term because it is used as a slur for designated western threats.
For further reading I would consider Losurdo’s take on totalitarianism where he tackles the virulently racist Arendt’s concept of it (which was made popular in the west):
https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-totalitarianism/
Also by Losurdo:
https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-china/
(And if you want a direct comparison of a capitalist vs socialist democracy consider India vs China respectively - they have similar timeframes (ie when british formally left India) and population sizes)
Hope that helped