It's a situation that I have been expecting for a while, but I wasn't fully ready to accept it. Specifically it's one of my LGBTQ friends who honestly believes in the democrats will protect them and their partner. I have tried to make the point that both parties are eroding any sort of civility towards all marginalized groups, but fear seems to drive them more than logical observations. They make the excuse that change doesn't happen over night and that the left continues to grow and will have meaningful affects down the road. I fundamentally just don't agree with that idea and vocalize it regularly. More and more it is ending up in a circular argument where I am painted as unrealistic and my rhetoric (leftist rhetoric) is doing more harm than good because it promotes distrust in the only system we have to work with. I try to tell them it's kind of the whole point. We gotta start somewhere if we want to see a better, more representative system, but they are so hung up on the immediate future while simultaneously saying that my idealistic feelings are shortsighted and I cant expect change in the immediate future... The double-talk is wild, I know.
I am trying my hardest to stop from engaging at this point because on the most basic level we agree on a lot of stuff, but they are just way to wrapped up in the fear mongering of the democratic party. They know that the two party system is broken, they know that something drastic needs to change, but they also think that they are powerless to do anything except choose the lesser evil. It pains me because I am watching them do the same shit past generations have done, where they give up on their ideals for the sake of preserving the current status quo that they benefit from. I am legitimately watching them imply "fuck you, got mine" under the guise of civic duty and I hate it. I want nothing more than to be able to finally say "I told you so" without being a smug asshole about it and ruining our friendship.
Thanks for reading my rant. It's probably a bit disjointed, but the frustration is boiling over and I needed to vent to the only group of people that seems to understand the hopelessness of being a disenfranchised leftist.
I'm sick of arguing with people about electoral politics, so let me just ignore most of your response and address only the end, because maybe I can make a positive difference to your worldview there.
The issue with the phrase "man up" is not only that it implies your interlocutor is a certain gender. That's a bit of an issue, sure, because assuming men are the default humans is pretty misogynist. However, the real misogyny of the phrase is much more insidious than just assuming everyone is a man. What the phrase "man up" does is inextricably tie strength of character to manhood and masculinity. And that's misogynist tripe. Womanhood and femininity have as much strength inherent in them as manhood and masculinity. Men are not morally stronger than women, so exhorting someone to moral strength by telling them to be more like a man is full on misogyny. Yes, it's the type that's so normalized in our culture that you can be forgiven for not seeing it, especially if you yourself are a man (which you may or may not be, I don't know). But please, excise the phrase "man up" from your vocabulary.
Hey, I'm sorry, but I need to hammer this in, because brainworms burrow deep and I'd like to make sure you understand yours. The issue isn't simply that you implied something you didn't mean to imply, that's true so far as it goes, but the more important part is what you implied. That's the problem. If you take away from this experience "I need to write more carefully on the internet so people don't read anything into what I've written" that's an ok lesson, but it isn't the one I'm hopeful you'll learn. My hope is that you'll come away with something more like "wow, I seem to have some internal feeling that men are morally stronger than women, I wonder where that came from and how I can go about unlearning this feeling."
I want you to deprogram the underlying misogyny, not just learn to disguise it better, you know? Still, thanks for admitting fault, that's hard to do on the internet.
I prefer the reality where liberals like you grow a spine and understand that genocide is a red line that you can never excuse without selling your soul. The people who Biden is killing are real people with experiences, emotion, families, internal lives, dreams, and soul. They aren't NPCs or numbers on a screen to be weighed against in some demented cost benefit analysis. To ignore their plight is to ignore your humanity. The hypothetical continuation of the genocide does not excuse your support for the current actually existing genocide.
I need you to understand that a vote for Trump is what enables Trump. Voting for the party that holds 99% of his positions, will soon hold 100% of his positions when it becomes politically expedient, is not resistance.
And if it's only 0.01% of the population that understands that the correct thing to do right now is learn how to handle a gun and get organized with likeminded individuals to fight the genocidal fascists, that 0.01% of the population has the right idea. It does nothing to validate the 99.99% that have no morals and believe in nothing. That 99.99% are the ones who need to get with the program.
If you hate us so much, why do you want us to vote? Wouldn't it be better to convince us to not vote so we don't fuck you over in your holy battle at the ballot box?