I live in the UK and nearly every older Communist you meet is a Trot and all the protests that I've been to that have had communists at them were mostly Trot orgs but online everyone just seems to shit on them for no clear reason. Am I missing something? Or is it just regular leftist infighting
I think there's a real split (heh) amongst trotskyist positions here. Many Trotskyists would reject eh "Deformed Workers State" analysis, and take the Cliffite view that China/Cuba/USSR were "State Capitalist" and should not be critically supported at all, and the dominance of that view in the UK/Aus has coloured the Trotskyist position as a whole.
You’re not wrong about the Cliffite deviation, but you literally contradict yourself within your own two-sentence comment with the lazy addendum that “the dominance of that view in the UK/Aus has coloured the Trotskyist position as a whole.”
Perhaps I should clarify, I mean the "public" (here meaning "weird politics nerds") perception of the Trotskyist position is widely seen as a State Capitalist one. So when someone says they're a Trotskyist they assume the next words are basically "China/USSR/Vietnam/Cuba/Laos Bad and not Socialist" rather than "Maybe the Nomenklatura wasn't a super great move"
Funny enough, I tend to associate the "X country is good/bad" categorical thinking with the M-L's online who are Marxist in aesthetic, but don't possess the ability conceive of anything dialectically.