Yeah ok your point about “there’s no liberal manifesto” neatly describes what I think I was trying to articulate. Which is, I understand more extreme behaviors from left and right—they’re farther from the cultural setpoint, and the farther you are from where you think you should be, the sorta stronger your rhetoric and convictions need to be in order to have a hope of moving things closer to a world you want. But for the liberal it’s basically just I mostly support the status quo (with small incremental changes to social issues at home!), and because of that, anything that’s not roughly the status quo represents a threat immediately.
Also I wonder in some cases, if it actually requires more mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance to maintain a pure liberal viewpoint, than to reside in the right or left. At least when you’re on either side of the spectrum, you have clear thoughts about how you disagree with the present and the direction things need to move, but if you are a status quo enjoyer, you have to somehow discount and explain away internally any thing that is ugly or not working, which is how we saw tons of these liberals urging us to tolerate an actual genocide in favor of preventing a hypothetically worse future genocide under Trump. And certainly, Trump will most likely be as bad or worse for Palestinians, but it was just shocking to see people claiming to hold progressive tendencies accepting what happened to Palestinians over the last year + of the Biden regime.
Clearly there were no actual red lines in terms of what actions were acceptable to undertake, instead it was: no matter how horrible our actions are, they are at least going to be slightly better than the opposition.