It’s not very well defined for two reasons. Its proponents are incoherent as hell and if they outright say the things that they believe the illusion of them being left wing or communists is going to be immediately dispelled.

Patsocs are American communists that are patriotic. What is your general view of patriotism in the USA? I have always associated it with the most bloodthirsty chuds of the country. They are mostly white settler petty bourgeoisie Americans who love it when their country’s institutions throw black people in prisons and blow brown people up several continents away. A good number of them are Trump supporters who have acquired a false consciousness where they abhor what they concieve to be the “deep state” and think Trump will champion their cause against these undemocratic institutions by draining the swamp. Patsocs believe that communism as we know it on this instance is anti-American and thus is off-putting for American patriots. So Patsocs have come up with their brand of communism where they try to appeal to these patriots where take a few pinches of Marxist theory and adulterate it with the racist, anti-LGBT worldview of American patriots. This is why prolewiki describes them as tailist. Then when normal communists are extremely bewildered or disturbed by theories of patsocs, they throw an out of context quote from Castro or Mao hoping that it absolves them from having to explain themselves.

If what I said sounds like an unfair caricature-ish representation, consider that Haz (a twitter/twitch personality who is one of the more popular proponents of this ideology) and his group (called Infrared) came up with a manifesto called “MAGA communism”. I have also seen Twitter screenshots of them replying to Trump supporters trying to talk to them about maga communism only to be instantly rebuffed but I never verified if they were real.

I know from close of one guy who fell into the patsoc spiral and never came back from it. Leaving aside the grifters that benefit from it and “lead” the movement (kind of sad for a political movement to be led by twitch streamers if you ask me), from what I have seen I would describe patsocs simply as people that, while working class, are in a socially comfortable position (for what I have seen they are mostly straight, white, cis, male and relatively well economically) while at the same time are simply not able to handle the fact that they will likely not be at the forefront of any revolutionary change.

There is an obsession amongst western circles of idealizing revolution into an act of individual heroism and sacrifice (to the point of martyrdom sometimes, it’s been talked about here before) and with talks about decolonization, land back and other forms of national liberation for the oppressed people within the USA, these people simply cannot accept that they could not have that chance to be leading the fight and that this one could be spearheaded by the oppressed peoples of the US’ settler-colonial project. They want the USA of always but with socialism: a socialist USA with the same colonial administrative regions and borders, with the same race relations and with the same cultural settler dominance, because that is the only way they have to keep being the protagonists in this story. It is, fundamentally, an abandonment of what communism is about.

People think they can be patriotic for the founding fathers, the idea of the US, and so on, and still call themselves Marxists.

People who co-opt leftist language in order to siphon people away from the left and into the right. They are the same as “national socialists” in their early days. In other words, they are functionally the same as 1920s nazis who want to pretend they aren’t nazis.

Attempting to rehabilitate the images of the “bad guys from bad country” in an attempt to “convince” right wingers that Socialism/Communism is actually cool and good. Probably falls into the the categories of “entryism” and “tailism” as well.

If ProleWiki’s entry is incoherent or insufficient, I’d like to know in what ways so that we can improve it.

It’s difficult to define it properly because they themselves have no coherent politics.

“Look, you said its okay when this starving person stole food from Walmart, so why can’t I steal this poor guys bike? Both are stealing.”

Ten commandments level of complexity is where their comprehension tops out

Funny thing is Russia was an empire, and the soviets decolonized it. Where did Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, etc come from?

Nope it’s a settler colony, it has no real history, no culture, no national identity aside from white supremacy