defeatist

Converse of object

• become: It is far too easy to become defeatist, far too easy to claim that we cannot compete in the Tests that lie ahead.

Adjective modifier

• revolutionary: Those who advocated a ' revolutionary defeatist ' policy in the Second World War assumed something similar would occur.

Modifies a noun

• attitude: The defeatist attitude shown in the face of the nationwide report is not good.
• position: The result was that the defeatist position adopted in 1938 by the founding congress of the Trotskyist Fourth International lacked political purchase.
• line: To say this, however, is still not to imply that the defeatist strategic line was wrong.
• policy: The first and the essence of the split was Lenin's response to World War I - the idea of a defeatist policy.
• notion: They fought the defeatist notion that the socialist ratchet was irreversible.
• statement: Yes Mark, it does sound like a naïve, foolish, and defeatist statement.

Modifying Another Word

• rather: In this article I shall argue that to think simply like this would be wrong and rather defeatist.
• too: And they are in too defeatist a frame of mind to think positively.
• so: We can do something about it, and I can't understand why all the left has become so defeatist.
• not: Yet the consultation paper takes a very complacent if not defeatist line on such issues.

Used with adjective complement

• become: In Scotland and Northern Ireland over the last two decades, unionism has become defeatist, defensive and apprehensive about the future.