"Tankies" And Changing Political Alignments

One bit of information I've been chewing on recently is that by far the best reporting on the Russo-Ukraine war is at the uber-left Daily Kos. Up at that site yestesrday was Ukraine update: The tankies think everything—even the Ukraine invasion—is America's fault. "Tankie" was a new word for me. According to Wikipedia, "Tankie is a pejorative reference to hard-line, pro-Soviet members of the Communist Party of Great Britain." Kos goes on at the link,

The pejorative term “tankie” comes from American leftists who defended the violent Soviet crackdown of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, an uprising crushed by tanks. They were our allies during the Iraq War, so it may come as a shock seeing them become pathetic apologists for Vladimir Putin’s ambitions to reconstitute the Soviet empire.

In their telling, the Ukraine invasion is the United State’s fault because it “expanded” NATO too aggressively, threatening poor Russia. How would we like it if Mexico joined a military alliance with Russia? We didn’t like it when the Soviet Union tried to place nuclear bombs on Cuba!

In the tankie worldview, no one has agency except the United States. Poland and Slovakia and Romania and Bulgaria didn’t have the ability or right to choose to join NATO. Neither do Finland and Sweden. These are all imperialist provocations and machinations by the American empire. What other option did Russia have but to defend its borders by, uh, explicitly advocating for its own empire?

Well, I turned 21 in 1968, and although as a student I was generally sympathetic to the so-called New Left of the time, by the early 1970s it was increasingly plain that many prominent New Leftists had actually been "red diaper babies", which again according to Wikipedia were "child[ren] of parents who were members of the United States Communist Party (CPUSA) or were close to the party or sympathetic to its aims", which is to say Stalinists. The New Left was simply a rebranding of the Old Left.

Oddly, Kos is calling out the remnants of those bad old days. The piece links this tweet from Glenn Greenwald:

Noam Chomsky, in an interview this week, says "fortunately" there is "one Western statesman of stature" who is pushing for a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine rather than looking for ways to fuel and prolong it.

"His name is Donald J. Trump," Chomsky says.

WATCH: pic.twitter.com/z3Cug8kFHS

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 1, 2022

The piece concludes:

The tankies like to pretend that President Joe Biden and nearly all European heads of state begged Russia to hold off any invasion, or maybe think it was some dastardly effective reverse psychology ploy. They point to increased defense spending and new riches enjoyed by the military industrial complex and say “aha! It’s all going according to their plan!” as if this unfortunate new round of defense spending hasn’t been foisted by Putin’s actions.

But nothing galls more than their utter disregard for the choices of free nations to decide their own destiny. They have been so impacted by America’s real foreign policy sins that they have lost the ability to understand that the world is a complex place, and sometimes, other people get a say in their own affairs. And sometimes, America is on the right side.

So all of a sudden the Daily Kos is endorsing a Reaganite, essentially neoconservative foreign policy in all but name, indeed going so far as to draw a distinction between seeing the Ukraine conflict as a "proxy war" in which Ukraine is simply carrying out US imperialist designs, versus a view that regards eastern European countries as following a freely chosen course intended to forestall Stalinist revanchism. But I think Kos is also repudiating the New/Old Left of C Wright Mills, Staughton Lynd, Bettina Aptheker, Abbie Hoffman, and others, which became increasingly Stalinist in its outlook and would seemingly never have agreed to a foreign policy of Soviet containment, much less rollback.

Yet what we're seeing in Ukraine and NATO, with a new policy of explicit military alliance intended to oppose and even reverse Stalinist revanchism driven by Poland and attracting Sweden and Finland, is something leftists of even my generation would never have countenanced.

On the other hand, the current US Right that once was fully on board with what had once been a bipartisan consensus for Soviet containment, now has at least prominent skeptics highy critical of US funding for Ukraine's war. These include Rand Paul and even Donald Trump, while Biden, whom everyone had assumed would look the other way for a Russian invasion, has come out fully in favor of an essentially Reaganite policy.

So I guess it's no coincidence that the single best source of daily updates and analysis on the war is at the Daily Kos. But I'm scratching my head.