NEARSIGHTED VALLEY, MICHIGAN — 42 year old John Jacobson considers himself a progressive voter. That doesn’t mean he always votes for one party’s candidates, necessarily, he told us during a Skype interview recently, but it does mean that he tries to vote for the candidate with the most progressive views. But if he’s not able to find someone who has the “absolutely perfect and identical” views he does, Jacobson says “it might even be worth voting” for anyone at all, even if that means getting four more years of a Trump presidency.
“I’m sorry, but I think people who poo-poo purity tests are doing everyone a disservice,” Jacobson told us. “Isn’t it better to suffer through four years of kleptocratic and outright racist policies than it is to vote for someone who once took campaign donations from a corporation you don’t like? I know it feels that way for me, anyway.”
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Jacobson says that he has a “very strict set of criteria” that each and every candidate who earns his vote must meet. Each election, his list gets longer, John said, and over time fewer and fewer candidates have met that the necessary threshold to get his vote. In the last presidential election, for instance, he didn’t end up voting at all, because he says every single candidate had “something [he] just couldn’t ignore.”
“If someone doesn’t completely and utterly agree with every single, solitary thought I have, are they even worth considering? If someone thinks the marginal tax rate should be three percentage points lower than I do,” Jacobson asked rhetorically, “isn’t that exactly like voting for the literal Monopoly Guy and signing up trillions of people to die in poverty? I’m sorry, but I’d rather have ten more years of Trump than give my vote to someone who doesn’t think, as I do, that all money should be outlawed and we should be forced to fart in jars to save the air supply!”
Though he can’t ever bring himself to vote for Donald Trump directly, John does think there are times progressives must tacitly approve of proto-fascists and authoritarian, despotic kleptocrats.
“Wouldn’t you rather suffer through four more years of lunacy, four more years of brazen racism, and four more years of naked corruption,” John asked, “if the alternative was voting for someone who doesn’t promise to literally end capitalism on day one of their administration? Call me crazy if you want to. Call me immature. Call me shortsighted, even. But the one thing you can’t call me is a shill for neoliberalism, and yes, if that means accepting paleoconservatism for the rest of my life because Trump was able to ram through 400 more unqualified crazies into the federal courts as judges…then that’s what I will do. You’re welcome for my principles, everyone.”
Jacobson admits he “might be coming from a place of privilege” that allows him to not help oust Trump if the Democrats, or any other party, don’t field a candidate that he feels he is “completely and utterly 100% on board with in every single, imaginable way.”
“Is it so much to ask for, that they find someone who is perfect in every way I want them to be, and who will never let me down, ever? Sure, I guess it’s probably a sign of my privilege that allows me to think of life in such starkly black and white terms,” John admitted, “but I guess that means it behooves the liberals in this country to contact me and get my bullet list of 435 separate policy beliefs that any candidate seeking my vote will hold. I mean, if they want to just make me the nominee, that might save a little time, but then again, I once had a bank account at Bank of America, so I’m not sure if that makes me in some way responsible for The Great Recession. In that scenario, I might not even vote for myself.”
Asked to describe his ideal candidate as concisely as possible, Jacobson said they’d be “not too old, not too young” and capable of reading his mind, literally.
“If they could just find someone who is just perfectly situated on the political spectrum to where I never once was disappointed by them or something they say or do,” Jacobs described, “that would do it for me. And if they can find someone with the powers of telepathy, who could read my mind and know how I’m GOING to feel about a subject later on down the line, that’s a home run in my book.”
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Writer/comedian James Schlarmann is the founder of The Political Garbage Chute and his work has been featured on The Huffington Post. You can follow James on Facebook, Spotify, and Instagram, but not Twitter because Twitter is a cesspool.
