gb, I gotta tell ya the I waited a while to post anything because I have this contrary reaction to attempts to manipulate me, especially in the mildly offensive way you did involving "the likes of".

First, I have to disabuse you of a fundamental incorrect premise: There is no "Liberal International" that issues membership cards upon signing a blood oath to defend to the death some manifesto. If you try to project the quasimilitary discipline of the Republican Party on to the Left, you'll never understand us. Nobody in their right mind would ever use the words "discipline" and "Democrats" in the same sentence. If you envision the "power structure" of the Left as a herd of cats, you'll have a useful working metaphor.

Liberalism isn't a monolithic global movement, far from it. The Euston Manifesto seems to reflect the Commonwealth brand of Liberalism--its members come from the UK, Canada, and Australia. Frankly, I don't know these people, and wonder why I should care about their manifesto. It has some offputting elements, like the apparent ass-kissing of the Right in all those denunciations of individual groups loosely labeled "Leftist". Not that I'd defend those groups, it's more that I wonder at the blatant self-abasement of the manifesto. Just as I don't demand a "religious conversion" among Conservatives, I don't feel the need for anybody to slit a vein and bleed a little to demonstrate their sincerity.

Another irrelevancy to an American is the pledge to abstain from anti-Americanism. Only somebody in another country needs to do that. I reject the scurrilous claim by the Right that American Liberals are anti-American, and I won't dignify it by taking any such pledge. I have nothing to prove.

A qualitative difference between American Liberalism and other varieties is that it tends to be more issues-driven. American politics focuses on the immediate, and we tend to debate solutions to real problems, albeit through ideological lenses, more than we debate abstract points of theology. The Euston people are marchers and theoreticians; me, I'm an American voter, and I participate through individual debate and by going to the polls.

I don't have any use for a manifesto. The question is irrelevant to me.