Member-only story

Robbery in Progress — Your Voice is Being Stolen

The Republicans won’t leave much once they’ve made off with your right to vote. Here’s what you need to know and say.

Sheldon Clay
6 min readMar 13, 2021
Photo by Elliott Stallion on Unsplash

Disenfranchisement doesn’t really roll off the tongue, does it?

That’s a problem.

The word is unhurried. Academic. Writing out all eighteen letters feels like sitting down to read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment while burglars are kicking in the front door and making off with your TV.

What’s needed here are words that fit the urgency of the situation.

Republican legislators in 43 states have introduced more than 250 bills designed to make it harder for you to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at N.Y.U.’s law school. A Washington Post analysis calls it “the most sweeping contraction of ballot access in the United States since the end of Reconstruction.”

There is nothing unhurried or academic about that.

These legislators are not your father’s G.O.P. Maybe you saw the news coverage of the party’s recent Conservative Political Action Committee convention — the one where the stage was shaped like a symbol from the Third Reich and topped with a golden Trump idol. If the optics were disturbing, the words…

--

--

Sheldon Clay
Sheldon Clay

Written by Sheldon Clay

Writer. Observer of mass culture, communications and creativity.

Responses (1)