Your political ideology can use whatever leftist symbolism it wants to, but if the system you enact is an authoritarian, top down hierarchy that supresses the will of the masses in favor of a privileged elite, then you aren’t on the Left.

Even Marx and Engels at their most statist wouldn’t be in the same zipcode as Lenin et. al.

To be on the left means being for democracy from the bottom up and being agaisnt the concentration of money and power in the hands of a few.

Tankies tend to point to the USSR, China, and DPRK - I’d argue all of them fit Umberto Eco’s widely used definition of fascism pretty well.

In this context, it’s a distinction without a difference. What difference does this even make?

From Wikipedia: in psychology, the right-wing authoritarian (RWA) is a personality type that describes somebody who is highly submissive to their authority figures, acts aggressively in the name of said authorities, and is conformist in thought and behavior.[1] The prevalence of this personality type in a population varies from culture to culture, as a person’s upbringing and education play a strong role in determining whether somebody develops this sort of personality.[2]

The right-wing authoritarian personality was defined by Bob Altemeyer as a refinement of the research of Theodor Adorno. Adorno was the first to propose the existence of an authoritarian personality as part of an attempt to explain the rise of fascism and the Holocaust, but his theory fell into disfavor because it was associated with Freudian psychoanalysis. Altemeyer nonetheless felt that Adorno was on to something, and so developed a more scientifically rigorous theory.

The RWA scale was designed to measure authoritarianism in North America. It has proven to be similarly reliable in English-speaking countries such as Australia, but less effective in other countries such as France due to cultural differences and translation issues.[3]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarian_personality
I see where some confusion lies. There is a discrepancy between the psychological and political definitions. I’m largely interested in why people think x and is they make it make sense, discard/set it aside until it does. I didn’t account for that and it’s on me.

As far as I can tell, your intended meaning is absolutely correct, but you have some of the terminology wrong: fascism is an explicitly right wing form of oppressive authoritarianism. The extreme left can be authoritarian and oppressive, but never fascist.

Stalinism and the ideology of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge are notorious examples of tankies: left wing fanatics who engage in oppressive authoritarianism and violent persecution of anyone different from their narrow definition of the ideal citizen, often using arbitrary metrics just like fascists do.

Is the end result the same for an LGBTQ+ person, a pacifist or anyone else demonised by all forms of oppressive authoritarianism? Yes.

But that does not make the ideologies identical and the distinction is important because the differences mean that different tools are more effective in combating one than the other.

There is an argument that tankies aren’t exactly ownership by the people.

Like you don’t look at the USSR and think "oh yeah the people really had ownership over their means of production*.

Ownership by the people implies the people have a say.