Me, being called a liberal:
Lolno I just don't think their red authoritarianism and denial of reality looks much different than conservative fascism and denial of reality.
Anything left of the far right, is a liberal idea to someone who lives their life on the far right.
Which just goes to show that they misunderstand who their supporters and opponents are.
It seems to me that academics who study horseshoe theory routinely miss the point. For example, the Wikipedia article on this topic uses this to try to refute the theory:
Simon Choat, a senior lecturer in political theory at Kingston University, has criticized the horseshoe theory. In a 2017 article for The Conversation, "'Horseshoe theory' is nonsense – the far right and far left have little in common", he argues that far-left and far-right ideologies only share similarities in the vaguest sense, in that they both oppose the liberal democratic status quo, but that the two sides have very different reasons and very different aims for doing so.[29] Choat uses the issue of globalization as an example;[30] both the far-left and the far-right attack neoliberal globalization and its "elites", but identify different elites and have conflicting reasons for attacking them.[31]
But it's a total strawman. Nobody is arguing that tankies oppose or support the same things as Nazis, or that they share the same goals. What they have in common is an embrace of authoritarianism. Of course the tankies like different authoritarians, like Maduro or Putin instead of Hitler or Mussolini. But the love, or at least tolerance, for authoritarianism is the one thing they have in common - that the ends justify the means.
But not all of the far left is authoritarian. That’s where horseshoe theory fails. The fact that tankies and fascists share some common traits isn’t enough to save it.
Also, while tankies grew out of the left in some sense, it’s pretty debatable whether it’s still a left movement at this point. The philosophical differences with the rest of the left are enormous.
Political Compass Memes is the most accurate model humanity has ever invented to effectively categorize politics.
The Political Compass, also known as the Nolan Chart, is used in political science to map political ideologies on a left/right and authoritarian/libertarian grid. The memes are just using that template.
How would socialism organize and maintain order among millions of people without authority?
trotsky had some ideas about that. and because of those ideas, he had to be killed.
I often wonder when it was that tankies inherited the far gone misanthropic crazy of the Chans. Both enjoy hate-posting in each others’ communities, so cultural overlaps were bound to occur, but when did the scales tip and aggressive antisocial behavior become pervasive?
Might just be that the "Everyone is against us and we are special" mentality of tankies and 4chan (see: hate for 'normies') attract the same kind of personality.
.... I'll ask. Does it matter if they're one or the other? Will you somehow like them more if they're a specific one of the two?
If push comes to shove, I would still prefers tankies, who are only opportunistically genocidal, to Nazis, who hold genocide as their highest goal. But neither are acceptable, and both are absolutely atrocious. Insofar as one can eschew both of them, one should.
At least things have gotten confusing again, because that's like 5 different potential political groups now.
So, horseshoe theory?
This hate among leftists for each other is disturbing. The defense of Marxist-Leninism and Anarchism isn’t productive and only serves those in power. There’s a great possibility that socialism in America and the west will not look anything like socialism of the past or present. I encourage everyone to think of themselves as post- capitalist.
We don’t have a socialist movement in the West, we have an anti-capitalist movement. We need to show that socialism will work without examples from the past, or comparisons to China. We need to give people a framework for the future, not a dogmatic defense of the past.
The meme said nothing about anarchism. ML and anarchism aren't even remotely the same. And are highly incompatible. Thus no need to defend anarchism.
I agree that socialism in the west will likely look different. Which is all the more reason to not repeat the mistakes of leninism. Capitalism and Leninism both are well disproven outdated ideologies.
Anarchism and ML are both anti-capitalist. That was my concern. Climate change requires a post-capitalist future. Capitalism will not operate under a degrowth or sustainable economy. The debate about centralized versus decentralized states or autonomous regions will never happen without cooperation to dismantle capitalism.
People in the West don't dislike the tenets of socialism, per se. They dislike the autocratic implementation obsessively favored by MLs, which unfortunately represent most historical examples. This is what the tankies refuse to admit, because they are more obsessed with relitigating the cold war than realistic politics.
The sad thing is that there's like 100 years of revisionist theory which gets past a lot of this baggage, but again - the tankies despise it because it isn't their historical home team.
