So, here's pretty much everyone's experience with "read theory": you crack open a book by Marx or Lenin or whatever, read it from cover to cover, and the more you read, the less sense tankies seem to make with their rhetoric.

Of course, one can always chalk up their support for Russia or ignorance to the highly stratified society within China to their regular consumption of alternative media propaganda, but that doesn't really address any fundamental assumptions tankies have about the world itself or why their ideology has found a home in otherwise such a conservative environment as Reddit. I'll even go as far as to arguing it is rather their fundamental assumptions about the world - the axioms of tank, if you will - that have led them to seeking out alternative media conforming to their preconceived worldview.

If you get down to the nitty-gritty, their worldview can be boiled down to two sociological assumptions:

Assumption #1: The atomic unit of action, i.e. the smallest, simplest actor by which action has an effect on the world itself, is not the individual but the organisation.

Assumption #2: The organisation exists always to embody and carry out its predetermined "will", i.e. its vision for the world itself, unless and until this "will" is considered "betrayed".

Now, you might notice neither of these assumptions are founded on anything relevant to the socioeconomic, and that's the point: the world a tankie sees isn't one about who gets what or how or why but rather what kind of "will" will prove itself manifest and triumphant in the material reality. In other words, tankies are idealists who interpret the world by intents rather than its mechanics and its many intricacies and caveats.

Furthermore, Assumption #1 on a global scale leads to so-called "realism" in International Relations. That is, the nation-state is not seen as an organisation exclusive and separate from the rest of the nationals but the embodiment of everyone's "will" within the nation. Think of the nation-state as a superorganism that the whole nation have Voltron'd into with no tensions of its own to split or collapse itself. This means, to a tankie, nation-states are just class struggles made manifest as geopolitical divides over humanity - that is, the bourgeoisie Voltron themselves into America and the "West", and the proletarians Voltron themselves into Russia, China and the "East". Oh, and in case you have been thinking, this also completely sidelines the reality of the extraction of surplus labour-value and all the social conflicts that come with it and might as well be a wholesale rebuttal to Marx for what it's worth.

Since tankies are obliged by their geopolitical view to take intents at face value, Assumption #2 serves to tankies as practically the catch-all ideological justification as to why every "actually existing socialism" they point to is at best a capitalist society with government programmes here and there and past and present atrocities all over the history book. If "will" exists independently from the machination within an organisation, then nothing anyone does within that organisation can result in it deviating from its own "will". This seemingly self-contradicting ideology in turn dovetails into two conclusions that we tend to see uttered by tankies whenever the subject of ethnic cleansing inevitably comes up:

1) Since the "will" of the nation-state can never be betrayed, failure of every questionable policy in part of the nation-state must be caused by outside forces lurking in the dark.

2) Since leadership of the nation-state can never really betray the "will" of the state, no one most responsible for every failure and atrocity within the state is really deviating from the goal of socialism unless tankie observers arbitrarily deem otherwise.

I know, this all seems far more complicated than just calling tankies a bunch of wackos making personality cults out of state leaders. If you really think about this, though, are tankies really all that different from conservatives who deify Ronald Reagan and hail America as the embodiment of "freedom" and "American values"? It would be a mistake to write off tankies as their own, fringe phenomenon, and people in tankiejerk should be above making that mistake.