It sounds like your entire conception of what “liberal” doesn’t have much at all to do with this article you sent me, and is kind of centered around this one thing:

This willingness is tempered by an aversion to sudden, cataclysmic change, which is what sets off the liberal from the radical.

Kind of - it's true that liberalism was originally conceived as a way of limiting revolutionary democracy from devolving into radical populist movements, but what's important about it is the way it constructs its framework to do that. Liberalism chose to focus on 'individual liberty', but that comes with problems. Edmund Burk saw individual liberty and egalitarianism as a way of ensuring that the aristocratic class - which was well educated and already governed over productive systems - could guide democratic norms and resist the pull into populist hysteria. The side effect of this framing is that it gives space for other systems of power (e.g. capital and governance over the means of production) to accumulate without a real way of setting a limit.

The next two hundred years of liberalism split into two factions that sought to either rectify that problem or dismiss it as a non-issue, but it had already handicapped itself by setting individual liberty as its guiding principle. It meant that even the American flavor of liberalism - which sought to regulate capital through democratic reform - could only conceive of that question through the lens of individual liberty, and still had no way of establishing a limit to the accumulation of individual power other than by the question: 'could this amount of power be used to threaten the liberty of individuals?'. This meant that capital could freely accumulate without regulation, so long as it never abused that power to the detriment of individual liberty.

Basically, it sounds like you’re defining liberalism as “allegiance to the government and rejection of methods of change outside of the formal government structure,” and kind of nothing else beyond that.

No - even though that's what liberalism initially sought to accomplish, it's more broadly the way it goes about it that concerns me. Having a stable government that resists reactionary populism is a metric of success of any political system, but how they go about doing it is what distinguishes them.

By this definition Biden is not a liberal, since he supported basically every strike aside from the rail strike that took place under his term.

You really need to take a step back from specific policy decisions if you actually want to understand this. Biden isn't a liberal because he supports worker unions - what makes him a liberal is they way in which he weighs his positions against how it does or does not threaten broader systems of individual liberty. The way he handled the rail strike in 2022 is actually a pretty good example of this - he ended up blocking that strike (and in the process undermining the long-term collective bargaining power of the rail unions), because allowing it to go through threatened the stability of the capitalist economy. Liberalism is happy to concede to worker demands so long as they don't impact the functioning of their individualist economy. This enshrines the 'ratcheting effect' into our system, because it shields capital from the threat of collective organizing. Liberalism is happy(or maybe confortable..?) to watch injustices happen if taking action threatens liberalism's dominant position, and will couch that decision in heroics for having saved us from the chaos of extended conflict.

something like the “uncommitted” movement is at least organized in a fashion where it seems like it could produce an improvement, by putting pressure on the Democrats, so that sounds fine. Just not voting for Democrats and hoping they’ll figure it out and move to the left seems pretty much guaranteed to give us something along the lines of the catastrophe that happened

Yeaaaa, except that's not really where your criticism is being directed at. You're taking issue with people involved with the uncommitted movement engendering a sense of apathy, since their protest of the democratic party necessarily involved persistently pointing out how complicit they actually were. You might project that onto people actually 'choosing not to vote', but there are eligible voters in every election that opt out of voting. The only to be upset this time is that those non-voters were being given ample reason to feel apathetic, but that isn't the fault of protestors bringing the genocide into the national conversation, that's the fault of democrats for trying to ignore it.

What makes this a liberal idea is how the political calculus is constructed and the underlying assumptions within it:

• how much does taking action against Israel threaten individual liberty (within the us) and the influence of liberal governance
• how much does protesting the democrats threaten individual liberty (within the us)

The amount of harm being done in Gaza is never a part of that calculation, it's only ever a question of how much does this or that action threaten individual liberty. Democrats did the math and figured that turning on Israel made losing to the fascists more likely, but if that's the only question they ever pose to themselves, there is nothing preventing them from sliding further and further toward fascism/oligarchy and it never happens that they stand up against evil despite the risk of personal harm to themselves and liberalism. They become passengers and unwilling (at best) collaborators to fascists, rather than true anti-fascists.

It’s going to mean that I’m going to have to spend an entire week clarifying what I believe and what I support, because you have such a strong narrative in your head that “PhilipTheBucket is a liberal -> PhilipTheBucket opposes protest movements if they might hurt Democrats’ chances -> because that’s how liberals are and he’s a liberal and I know that.”

I can only comment on what I hear from you, and I hadn't even tried to assign you that label until you repeatedly asked me to. I have a firm understanding of what liberalism is - or at least, the broad framework within that diverse ideological discipline that distinguishes it from other political movements. Whether you fit into that category is immaterial to me. But that doesn't change my criticism of liberalism as I see it pop up into political discourse on lemmy, or my criticism of you when you participate in it.

Of course, if your whole point is just to trash me for being “a bad liberal,” then it suddenly does become really difficult to distinguish between them, and you can constantly keep swearing that I said the first one.

There is no such thing as a 'good' liberal. There are only good times where liberals don't stand in the way of liberation politics, and bad times when they do. It just happens that we're in very, very bad times, and so liberals look pretty fuckin' bad by extension.