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Notes -
"tankies" is a wrong way to think about it.
the best way to think about those ideologies, and the history of those ideologies, in Russia and China, is that they are explicitly nationalist ideologies.
The Chinese revolution and subsequent takeover of the country by the Communists was a direct, slightly delayed response to the failures of the previous governments during the century of humiliation. The failure to properly defend and secure the country against foreign influence and invaders is considered a primary motivation for the revolution, not some great victory of the proletariat over the robber-barons.
The Russians considered the Soviet Union an extension of Russian empire, as the Soviet Union was Russian-dominated for the longest time. The democratic revolutions and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union are strongly linked to nationalism, with states wanting to call themselves anything other than 'comrade'.
If you're asking about why the "tankie ideology" remains popular, just go on a western college campus and talk to some humanities students for a few hours. If in a capitalistic system your worth can be measured in terms of cold, hard dollars, and your worth is intrinsically tied to the worth of the goods and services you can provide others around you, and for whatever reasons you are non-competitive...
...well, then, that's not exactly an incentive to have a pure, perfect capitalist market, is it?
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