@daphlawless

It seems like socialism and other left tendencies gained a rapid entry mechanism into popular culture with the internet. People plugging into the debate/flame online culture plugged into the pragmatic anti-ultra left stuff and felt like their team had all the answers. From there the pragmatism just became nationalism dressed up as materialism.

And beyond the Jacobin left, huge chunks of the anarchist milieu channel Rosa Luxemburg to grease the skids for Putin's invasion while calling it "true internationalism." I find them to be indistinguishable from a lot of the old ANSWER folks, but they complain that when we call them Assadists or Putinists, we are just angry because we allegedly love nationalism, capitalism, NATO, and or the West so much. No one can imagine opposing NATO and Western imperialism while simultaneously realizing we really have no right to tell people facing genocide they should negotiate with their killers.

So I think the why is the popular culture/internet/social media source for a lot of communist discussion. At the same time we had to deal with these tankies in the 90s. The new question is why people who insist they are not tankies take all the same positions as tankies as long as they are a variation on Leninist Revolutionary Defeatism, and therefore seen as pure.

I think you've rightly pointed to the sort of macho posturing against liberal democracy coming before opposition to fascism, which seems a bit out of order to say the least.