cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6197747
it’s true that liberalism was originally conceived as a way of limiting revolutionary democracy from devolving into radical populist movements
Liberalism, when it was originally conceived, was the radical populist movement. There was no alternative to limit.
As the source you sent me pointed out, the definition has changed over time, and since then more radical alternative has emerged, which "liberalism" often opposes. That's what MLK was saying. But at the time liberalism emerged, there was aristocracy or nothing. Like I said, it seems like your whole concept of it is as a limiting factor on progressive movements (which is certainly an element in the modern day), but that's not the whole of liberalism and those progressive movements didn't even exist in the beginning form of it. Liberalism was the progressive movement.
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.
Which is never.
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.
All makes perfect sense, and I actually agree with you completely on this whole part. My point was that you didn't say liberals oppose strikes once they grow to the point that they threaten even a pretty trivial amount of harm to the overall economy but support them otherwise. You said liberals oppose strikes. I think that second thing is completely wrong, and I was demonstrating it by bringing up a person who I would call a liberal (Biden) and his support for strikes as a way of making economic progress for working people.
This is what I was saying about your definition of "liberal" being shifty in a way where it can change to support whatever you're trying to argue at any given time. I can still be a liberal, even though I support pretty much all strikes including the rail strike. Why? Because I'm saying stuff you don't like, and you need to call me a liberal as a way of attacking me. Biden can be a liberal and support 95% of strikes that happened under his watch, because he needs to be a liberal because he's the enemy too. But also, liberals need to oppose strike actions, because you need to be able to criticize some particular "liberal" person by saying they would rather resolve conflicts with the working class within the political system instead of outside it, and so they oppose strikes. See? Shifty.
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
That is precisely the opposite of what I am doing. I feel like you're so thoroughly confused by your type of label-driven thinking that I can literally show you examples of me supporting the uncommitted movement, and then you proceed to explain to me why I take issue with the uncommitted movement.
Try just reading the examples again, I think. You're expecting to see criticism so hard that you're interpreting approval for as criticism against.
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.
Well, you're defending a meme which talks about "liberals." My whole point is that the category you're using is poorly defined in a particular insidious way. I think that there's a community on Lemmy which thinks that Lemmy is full of "liberals," accuses other people on Lemmy of being "liberals," and accuses them of believing certain awful things because they are "liberals." I'm trying to bring specifics to the definitions you're using, because I think they will fall apart when they need to be made concrete in reference to certain particular people, as with the strike example above.
Put another way: I am not asking you a question about myself. I am asking you a question about your definitions, using various specific referents (myself, congressional Democrats, Bernie Sanders, Biden, users on Lemmy who are accused of being liberals). You keep talking in the abstract about "liberals" and explaining how this whole thing operates. And sure, I get what you're saying. What I am saying is how some of your definitions fall apart or become contradictory once you have to apply them to specific people yes or no, and then defend the application of the label to those specific people. Which is why I think it's a bad idea to use "liberal" as a key part of your argumentative style. I get why it's attractive, because you can make compelling arguments with it and lots of people on Lemmy will agree with you, but the whole reason why it works so well for that is because the definition is shifty in a way which makes it divorced from you actually having to prove your case. And, you can try to claim things which are wildly divorced from reality by using it, which to me is a bad thing.
Does that make sense?