I think you really have to ask yourself if these people are really your friend if they’d invite you to a gathering where you’d feel unsafe… of why they’d have such a gathering with people like that at all.
Why? I mean, we’re talking about the humanity of others… hell, YOUR humanity.
I’m sorry, but those of us demanding basic rights for our friends, family, ourselves, etc, are NOT the cause of a civil war if it comes. We are NOT the ones wishing death upon our neighbors. We’re not the ones showing up at right wing churches threatening them with guns. We’re not the ones demanding that basic rights be taken away from them. None of that is from those of us who are refusing to be in that gray zone. There are people who want civil war, because they know that they can get away with murdering a whole bunch of “enemies” (who are really just people that scare or anger them - LGBQT+, loud mouth cisgendered women, racial minorities who demand equal rights, and so on). I doubt the people who just don’t seem to care are going to be swayed by you keeping their friendship, despite them holding bigoted views, or just not caring enough to NOT vote for the bigot. They may not really hate trans people, for example, but if they go vote for Greg Abbott or Ron Desantis or Kristi Noem, or Trump, they KNOW they are voting against basic human rights for trans people. They are openly declaring that they do not care about your basic human rights by voting for these scum. They might care about you, they just don’t care if you live in a society that wants to refuse you basic health care…
The only reason why the siege of Sarajevo ended, was because NATO forced it to end eventually. These were largely independent militia groups sitting up in the hills sniping off random people for several years. The only reason why the rump Yugoslav Army did not march into Kosovo and ethnically cleanse the place was because Clinton order airstrikes. He saved thousands of lives in doing so. Milosevic and his staunchest backers did not want to end the war there. And it very well might start again over fucking license plates and voting…
And let’s not forget Northern Ireland, where the Catholic minority and many protestants voted to end the Troubles, there was a contingent of on both sides were not happy about the accords, and have tried very hard to get things started again in the wake of brexit… in the right condition, things could flare up there.
So, not there isn’t always a red phone, especially in conflicts like Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, Israeli/Palestine, etc, because there is someone who benefits from said conflict and wants it to continue…
And that’s nice, and it sometimes works, but not always. You do what you can, but the reality is that ideology is strong and isn’t always responsive to what you might consider rationalitiy. Ideology has it’s own set of internal logic that makes sense to the people inside it, because it is confirmed by their own experiences and biases. That is part of our postmodern condition, and it’s a reality we have to face. We live in a society that has so dismissed and belittled the humanities (literature, art, and culture is seen as a commodity instead of an important expression of our humanity, history and other kinds of social studies are treated like a political football, people invoke science to support their arguments, often without a real understand of the scientific method, etc), that we have a hard time actually understanding stuff outside our own experiences. That makes things difficult for even those of us who like to think we’re edumacated so imagine for people who do not have access to a great eduation or who have been told it’s not cool to value education outside of job training. That of course is the outcome of an educational system that wants to train people for jobs, rather than help people become well-rounded, and knowledgeable about the world in a humble kind of way, and a right wing echo-chamber that pushes for authoritarian forms of education (job training and creating nothing but square pegs).
And what about YOUR humanity? What about the humanity of all the people who are hurt because of them? Do they matter less just because they’re not friends with you and did not invite you to a BBQ? Embracing people’s humanity doesn’t just mean accepting them without judgement. Yes, we’re all flawed and messy, but many of us do not embrace politics that are actively based on hurting others. Accepting that some people are willing to hurt others, because they believe that for them to survive they have to vote against the basic humanity of other people and force them to be like them or to kill them, is also accepting part of humanity. Because that is part of humanity, because it comes out of our society. Making choices based on how people treat others is part of being human. I don’t know your friends or their politics but it might be worth it to ask them why they’re voting for who they’re voting for, and what they hope to gain by voting for fascists… Because at this point that is what the GOP actually is - a fascist party. There just isn’t any wiggle room any more.
But good luck.
