The political compass isn’t perfect but it explains it a lot better. If you aren’t familiar, the axes are left-right and libertarian-authoritarian. Tankies are full authoritarians (as evidenced by the fact that they attack the definition of the word every time someone brings it up) so they align on a lot of auth-right beliefs while still being (ostensibly) on the left. Libleft is diametrically opposed to auth-right, so from that perspective, tankies are more closely aligned to auth right than to lib left.