NPR ran a story just the other day comparing Trump and Harris on “voting rights.” It is a fascinating look at the perverse way in which the left uses this term.

To believe this article, and indeed from much else from the left or from the Harris campaign itself, is to imagine that Trump’s position is one designed entirely to keep some significant number of people from voting, while Harris advocates merely for preventing evil conservatives from robbing some portion of the electorate (non-white, of course) of the sacred right to the franchise.

Of course this is not the story at all.

What the left wants is total federal control over the voting requirements and processes of each state. There is no evidence at all that any state currently discriminates against potential voters on the basis of race. The left nevertheless insists that granting any amount of local autonomy over the voting process means that a given state might be engaged in such discrimination. What they really mean, however, is that some localities may not follow the left’s dictates on voting, which involve eliminating serious efforts to prevent ineligible people from voting and making the voting as simple as mailing a postcard.

The fundamental question that is never addressed is this: Why should voting be as easy as possible?

We consider voting important, do we not? It may even be the most important responsibility of a citizen in a free society. It is certainly a far more important part of citizenship than passing an exam in school, or getting a driver’s license, or obtaining a hunting permit, no?

Why, then, do some want to make voting easier to do than any of those things I just listed? Why do they want to make it as close to an effortless, thoughtless process as possible?

The answer is clear. The people who support this—and they are highly concentrated on the political left, and in the Democratic Party—do so precisely because they know it contributes to the destruction of traditional American society and culture. And these processes of destruction are so far advanced already that even many of those who oppose making voting easier do so for reasons that fail to grasp the real stakes and oppose it only on the less fundamental ground of possible fraud or delays in reporting results.

The massive growth of mail-in ballots is perhaps the central way proponents of easy voting want to lower the burden of voting. Perhaps the original justification of mail-in voting—in exceptional circumstances, when a registered voter is unavoidably outside his designated area of voting on election day—can be defended. The matter shifts profoundly, however, when we begin to notice that mail-in voting has become normal process for all voters.

There are compelling reasons why we should prevent this from happening and demand that in almost all cases voters must show up at a polling place to vote.

Casting a ballot by mail turns the voting process into something wholly mundane, indistinguishable from quotidian acts such as mailing a payment to a creditor or sending in an acceptance card for six free months of a magazine. There are no problems with performing these tasks by mail because they are purely practical matters that have no greater significance.

Voting is different. It is not merely a practical task. It is intimately tied up with the deepest principles of a democratic republic. We recognize citizenship and the exercise of its chief element and power—that of choosing those who will politically act on our behalf—as something far more consequential than receiving a periodical at home by sending in a card to the publisher.

Removing voting from the interactional context of the social world in which it has always been thoroughly embedded, and for good reasons, threatens it profoundly.

Mail-in voting removes entirely the ritual element of voting.

Human societies—even those that are moving in the direction of increasing irreligiosity—require ritual. We ritualize those aspects of our collective lives that are the most deeply meaningful. We do this because the ritual ensures a certain rigor and precision of action and meaning. The slippage of ritual’s power allows an individualization of the meaning in the involved event. In a materialist society with endless distractions, this inevitably leads to the trivialization of that event.

American civil religion is rooted in face-to-face ritual, a field of sacred symbols and processes that can be touched fully only by venturing outside of one’s home—on election day and on other ceremonial days—to gather with one’s fellow citizens in the public sphere and perform sacred patriotic duties.

The expansion of mail-in voting is an element of the movement in the last half century to desacralize every single aspect of American life and make our public lives come to resemble the same dull, gray process of buying things and doing nothing of any importance.

Mail-in voting also makes it easier to vote without having thought at all about the relevant issues, candidates, etc. To be sure, if one is really dedicated to being a low-information voter, one can pull that off at the polling place too. But the effort imposed by having to get in your car, or on your bike, or to put on your walking shoes and find your way to the polling place demands you spend some extra quantity of time thinking about the seriousness of what you are doing, even if you are not required to do that.

It is a not very onerous extra burden, frankly, and it can be sloughed off, but not quite so effortlessly as for the mail-in voter, who does not even have to set aside 15 extra minutes of his time to vote. Just get a pen as you sit at your kitchen table, check a few boxes, stick the thing in your mailbox, and you’re done. And now you can go back to the more important things in your life—your phone, your TV show, your bowl of snacks, or your video game console.

Our very language reveals what is going on here. Everyone knows both the denotation and the connotation of the phrase “He mailed it in.” When we speak those words, we mean to indicate that someone did something without commitment or effort. Took the easy way out. Did the thing in question in a lackluster, lazy, and uncaring manner.

We are in the process of making this the typical way of voting. If you think that is not accompanied by a depreciation of the act itself, you are kidding yourself.

And the process will not stop here, if the left has its way. Online voting is next. I know that the pundits are currently saying this will not happen, if only for practical reasons having to do with the increased risk of fraud. But mark your calendars and test my prediction if you care to do so. What is being advocated by the left now is never the endpoint for them. It is a temporary destination on the way to a broader horizon of the demolition of traditional American culture.