Ever since his first novel V. came out in 1963, Thomas Pynchon has been a master architect of the “and so forth,” and we can count on him to roll pineapples and memos underfoot along the path to it. I remember from my teenaged years trailing after Mrs. Oedipa Maas in bewildered joy through that mirror-walled prison maze The Crying of Lot 49, then essaying Gravity’s Rainbow, whose hero Tyrone Slothrop was “obsessed with the idea of a rocket with his name on it,” hence with meticulous dream-logic kept unconsciously calling Nazi V-2 rocket-bombs down on the sites of his recent, well, you know. 

As for the mysterious heroine of V. … — but like Pynchon himself, I digress, if not quite all the way to the haunted castle called And So Forth. The point is that you and I, caught up in Shadow Ticket, his latest novel, are now in Milwaukee, 1932, with another blizzard of pineapples about to fall, Prohibition still in hypocritical force and Al Capone’s heirs blowing up the competition. Although every now and then some sage may see fit to remark that “this caper’s got German storm kiddies written all over it,” for next year Hitler will become Chancellor, and he has sympathizers right here in the American heartland (if you don’t believe me, try bowling at New Nuremberg Lanes, where the doggerel is a cheerfully, idiotically vicious as anything out of Gravity’s Rainbow: “Hold yer flag up high, yeahh, / Let’s swing it, for the Nah-zis—”) — yep, dear old 1932! 

Our protagonist will be Hicks McTaggart, who for money used to crack strikers’ heads, because “at the time in Wisconsin not a week went by there wasn’t a strike at least being voted on someplace, plenty of opportunity to kick asses on behalf of management,” so that Hicks almost resembled one of Adolf’s Brownshirts, except that they kick ass gratis, for righteousness’s sake. Well, Hick surprised himself by getting softhearted. And rather like Slothrop not (consciously) knowing the baleful power of his penis, Hicks simply felt relieved when his sap somehow misplaced itself (nothing to do with him) just before it would have split some little Bolshevik’s skull. So he became a private eye. Now won’t that be just the ticket?

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His boss was a cards-to-his-chest type named Boynt Crosstown — and here I admit to having dropped that in as the merest excuse to revel right now in more of Pynchon’s christenings: Dr. Swampscott Vobe, Wisebroad’s Shoes, Connie McSpool, Glow Tripworth de Vasta, Cousin Begonia, “child sensation Squeezita Thickly” — for this author’s longstanding genius there on that private swivel chair of the Department of Character Appellations matches long-gone Lord Dunsany’s for imaginary gods and cities. I cast my grin back upon Tyrone Slothrop, who was first printed in 1973, and wonder to what extent my delight in Shadow Ticket derives from nostalgia. For I’m getting decrepit, while Pynchon is even older, so which will come first, the old lion’s last roar, or my last read? Enriching the nostalgia is Pynchon’s lyrically sad and squalidly beautiful Milwaukee, a place to which I have no connection, and at a time before my parents were born, so why should I care about it? But I do, because it’s a shadow Milwaukee, all the more worth missing for being unreal. 

There is a gentleness to Pynchon, and sometimes even a cynical sweetness (and so forth); then come prankish pineapples. We may discover ourselves “haunting given stretches of sidewalk just as the shops close down and the girls come out dazy and chattering, cigarette smoke and the slowly more intensifying light of the evening street” and believe in what we see, but what about when two fortune-telling penny scales in a row print out consistently insistent bomb warnings about the Christmas package received by Hicks from two of Santa’s elves? 

We can now commence tiptoeing or maybe goosestepping over bowling balls and rolling pineapples on the way to the “and so forth”. For this, you see, is a genuine “Milwaukee bildungsroman, as they call it locally” — I just bet they do. And there are many ways to get in trouble in Milwaukee, so why on earth would Hicks ever want to depart? But what happens in Milwaukee does not infallibly stay in Milwaukee, because Boynt Crosstown has handed him that real lulu of a ticket, whose invisibly inked purport reminds me of a certain refrain: “… oh get away / from me, you — /ol’ mid- / night… in Milwaukee…” Hence halfway through this thumb’s thickness of smooth, sly pages, Hicks will be glumly making the best of interwar Europe.

Reader, what gives you your get-up-’n’-go? Are you a Jane Austen character hunting for marriage, a money-starved Dreiser protagonist, a Thucydidean demagogue, or would you rather get your love ticket punched? In Shadow Ticket there will be dancings, rubbings, copulations, flirtations, and yet we are far from the romantic mystifications of V.: Hicks’s heart does ache, but it’s more jealous than committed. In short, the motive power of his personal narrative, however greased up by dalliances, will not be his dancehall girl April Randazzo, because not only does he stay uncommitted, but the gangster Vumvum soon breaks it to him that she is the willing moll of a mobster titan. And if you still hope against hope that Shadow Ticket will turn into Love Story, let Vumvum set you straight: “Padrino, this far down the chain nobody gives ungazz about that emotional stuff.” — April stays behind to marry Don Peppino. What snatches Hicks out of Milwaukee is that lulu of a work ticket from Boynt Crosstown. And the pineapples roll. Sometimes they detonate.

To maintain narrative suspense I have sworn not to tell you that Hick’s not-quite-friend Stuffy Keegan has recently escaped gangsterous assassins thanks to an Austro-Hungarian U-13 submarine that snuck in beneath the midnight ice of Lake Michigan, which disappearing act a certain ominous new breed of policemen inexplicably threatens to blame on Hicks himself. Hence he accepts Boynt Crosstown’s dragooning of him into returning to her fiance and Mommy (Daddy being on the lam) Daphne the Airmont cheese heiress, whom Hicks once rescued from a mental asylum. Now this may be tricky to close out, because she would rather be in Europe with her mercurial boyfriend. Boynt does hint at a potentially generous expense allowance. He further advises Hicks to “better just be yourself — with you, not the perfect option, I agree…”

Well, so off goes our hero to the Airmont mansion, in what is almost a quasi-semi-parody of noble gumshoe Philip Marlowe meeting his fat cat employer at the beginning of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and in both books we know everything will become more sinister and complicated, because that’s what all discerning readers demand. Here for instance is one of Shadow Ticket’s complications: Cheese turns out to be “self-aware… maybe not exactly the way we are, but still more than some clever simulation… Long-time spiritual truth in Wisconsin”. And coincidentally, Daddy Airmont, forenamed Bruno, is “known in the industry as the Al Capone of cheese”. A Viennese policeman (who might be something else) refers to him “the way Dracula pronounces the name Van Helsing”. I am sorry to say that the battles and extortions of the Internationalist Cheese Syndicate run out of laughs, as do such easy digs at Nazi “culture” as “an unremitting suite of Wagnerian works transcribed for zither”.

But those are my only cavils with Shadow Ticket, and having made them I had best hasten on by padding out this essay with plot summary: drugged in New York, poor Hicks wakes up on an ocean liner bound for Europe, about which place one of his fellow passengers and mysterious keepers inspires him as follows: “With the old lot on their way out, there’s a second chance, not only for Germany but for all civilization.”

“Routine ticket, only over here for as long as it takes, till everything’s back to normal.” “OK, maybe this ticket is takin’ longer than it should, but that don’t mean—” Sorry, Hicks, but oh yes it does: routine ticket, runaway heiress ticket, extra ticket, unknown ticket, fishy ticket, shadow ticket…! “Still trying to keep on with it before it gets too dark.” Another secret I promised not to tell you is that pretty much every Pynchon novel entails cruises to and from Shadowland, as in the very first pages of The Crying of Lot 49: “I think it’s time Wendell Maas had a little visit from The Shadow.” If you distrust ambiguity and are masochistic enough to read this author regardless, why, sure, he knows how to project bright stillness, just to trick you — imagine an interrogation cell, or maybe a superego’s lightbulb glaring inflexibly in the prison of your very own frontal lobe —: “a good enough vision,” says Gravity’s Rainbow, “of what’s shadowless noon and what isn’t”. But noons never last very long for the hag-ridden victim of a shadow ticket. As Gravity’s Rainbow has it: “So much has to be left behind now, so quickly.”

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Pynchon passes out shadow tickets left and right, just as God does, because that’s how life goes, right? We all long to know what the rules are, in order to stay out of trouble by following them or else get ahead by breaking them. For instance, why did those two sleazy Christmas elves present Hick with a ticking package? — “In the business,” a bomb-cooker explains, “we understand that an explosive… is actually somebody with something to say… a message we aren’t so much receiving as overhearing” — because had Hicks been exploded, the message could hardly have been to him (no more Hicks to receive it) but about him. But what is it? It garbles itself, on purpose, or maybe gets parasitized, à la William Burroughs, by unimaginably alien cipher-mongers, and so the shadowless noon turns shady, then as opaque as cuttlefish ink; until, just as in the very last sentence of V. the Mediterranean Sea “showed nothing at all of what came to lie beneath, that quiet June day,” namely THE END, so Hicks McTaggart sleepwalks blind in blackness, wondering where the next pineapple will catch him. What can he do but keep pretending compliancy? 

To cope with alogical, amoral and possibly inescapable shadow tickets, The Crying of Lot 49 advises “silence, impersonation, opposition masquerading as allegiance,” which will be Hicks’s exact way of getting by in Europe’s fear-spiced “desire for what has almost arrived… [in] a long erotic buildup before the shuddering instant of clarity, a violent collapse of civil order which will spread from a radiant point in or near Vienna,” which I take to mean Berlin. The foreplay includes a kind of paranormal pre-Cold War between Nazis and Soviets, while Ustasha terrorists and Hungarian Jew-killing “Vladboys”, “small, nimble, predatory, full of pep”, operate between Pynchon’s lines. 

Meanwhile, where the hell are we? In a line which could have been lifted from Philip K. Dick retails the possibility of getting “thrown by some occult switchwork into an alternate branch line…, where Stalin and crew are no longer possibilities…” It almost seems as if this could happen to anyone, even you and me! What if it did? Lot 49 ends with Oedipa Maas still waiting for answers, Gravity’s Rainbow with another rocket about to come down on us, and in V. we never find out for certain who V is; while right back here in Shadow Ticket, when the cheese monster Bruno Airmont gets kidnapped onto Stuffy’s submarine so that he can be safely exiled instead of bumped off, they take him to a New York whose Statue of Liberty has become now someone else. “It’s the U.S. but not exactly the one you left. There’s exile and there’s exile.” That sounds slightly unnerving but not necessarily worth dreading, for at least we’re not trapped in William Burroughs’s Ticket That Exploded. 

The bottom line is that Hicks McTaggart’s Milwaukee is hopelessly far away. Fortunately, when hailed by Stuffy Keegan’s submarine he was informed, maybe even guaranteed, that thanks to some “swell beer joints”, the home base of Fiume (AKA Rijeka) is “the Milwaukee of the Adriatic”. Anything can happen in one Milwaukee or another, maybe even something good, for even “as Hicks begins to understand that he’s not going back to the States right away,” Pynchon gives him one lulu of a ticket, because his ever closer friend Terike starts teaching him Hungarian, which necessarily involves kissing lessons.

A Gallup poll last week found that only 54% of American adults drank alcohol in 2025. Drinking among Republicans is in a rapid collapse, with only 46% of Republicans reporting that they drank in 2025, down from 65% two years ago. (Democrats, by contrast, are drinking only slightly less than before, 61% this year, down from 64% in 2023.) The phenomenon seems to be, at least in part, mimetic: President Trump doesn’t drink. RFK Jr. abstains. Charlie Kirk preaches sobriety. Tucker Carlson is sober.

This might seem like a winning issue for the Right — and one that unites the Trump coalition, since the tech libertarians who now finance the party don’t drink, either — but anyone who cares about human conviviality should be skeptical. 

Republican teetotaling is part of a general decline in having fun; partying — drinking, sex, going out — has slumped since the pandemic (during which public authorities told Americans that physical alienation from each other is a responsible social pattern). It turns out that when you lock up members of an already atomized, lonely society, people don’t easily recover the sociality that Aristotle taught is one of the fundamental characteristics of the human animal. Restless un-leisure — doom-scroolling, scrambled attention spans, ordering in — has gradually become more normal than being together. 

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Across the board, alcohol consumption is declining — men, women, white, nonwhite, rich, poor. Biohackers like Bryan Johnson or self-optimizing influencers like Andrew Huberman believe no level of alcohol is safe. Sobriety or “California sober” — no alcohol, but plenty of cannabis — is another emerging trend and is increasingly normal among Gen Z and millennials, who prefer stimulants, nootropics and nicotine. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic are also reducing consumption in general, drinking included.

Against the backdrop of a broad decline in social trust and socializing, the general decline in alcohol consumption becomes relevant — and the more specific decline in drinking among Republicans is especially ominous. 

To some extent, the embrace of sobriety on the Right is a reversal, since lately it’s been progressives who are anti-pleasure. But in the longer historical perspective, it’s a return to form. Over the last 150 years, temperance has been a consistently Republican virtue. The reputation for drinking and “fun” belonged to Democrats. 

It was the Republicans who were the “drys” during Prohibition, casting themselves as the party of sobriety, order, and Protestant reform, while Democrats were associated with saloons, ethnic political machines, and speakeasies. The old Republican rallying cry “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” — caricaturing Democrats as the party of booze, Catholic immigrants, and Confederate nostalgia — was first uttered by a Protestant minister during the 1884 presidential campaign. 

Excess drinking and alcoholism are deadly, to be sure, and some people should never drink. For many others, not drinking is super fucking lame; moderate drinking is fundamental feature of a good life. Certainly, that’s been the position of Western civilization both before and after the advent of Christianity. “Mix stronger wine,” Achilles commands in Homer’s Iliad, “a cup for the hands of each guest — / Here beneath my roof are the men I love the most.” Wine is used for cooking, at meals and during religious rituals in the poem. The guests in the Platonic dialog The Symposium negotiate how much they’ll drink at the beginning of the evening — and then go on to imbibe more than planned, joking about their drunkenness and referring to each other as “o my companions in drink.” 

Christianity, of course, incorporates wine in the central mystery of the Eucharist, though sometimes some of the more dour denominations have substituted grape juice. Medieval paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder portray village life as scenes of rowdy and joyous drunken revelry, and the still life tradition in the 1800s showed tables laden with glasses, bottles and carafes. Private drinking parties made life tolerable, for me personally, during the pandemic; good dive bars are part of what justify the price of rent in New York City — or any other big city.

Anything that unites — even accidentally — the neuroticism of tech optimizers, progressive scolds, and rightoid incels is probably bad. Americans need convivial practices like drinking with friends. The decline of drinking is a decline in spending time with other people, learning about them, and knowing them. Temperance promotes isolation and alienation.

Politically, the neo-temperance movement also threatens the plurality and energy of the Trump coalition. Part of Trump’s appeal was his basically liberal attitude toward the good life (he doesn’t drink, but doesn’t proselytize about it, either). The better aspects of Trump-era populism implied solidarity, community, revelry, and a good time, and stood against the dominant qualities of the Left: moral superiority, hyper-rationalism, fear of the body, fear of spontaneous community, fear of mixing it up, fear of confession, fear of the local, the street, the bar, the friend. Drinking promotes a neighborliness and bonding essential to a conservative view of the polis.

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Republican neo-temperance, moreover, not only smacks of a 19th-century purity and social stiffness, but a 20th-century clubbiness and suburban rejection of blue-collar values of the union hall or the bar — and even of the emotions that emerge from working class people in the tempo of drinking. Temperance culture is repressive.

Similarly, a Calvinist-in-spirit shunning of imbibing and inebriation — the spurning of the social and even moral uses of alcohol — is suggestive of a larger rejection of courtship, reproduction, and communal behaviors. There’s something about energy drinks and Zyn that seems suited for staring at a screen, for locking in to a kind of isolated work practice, but not conducive to talking, flirting, boasting, taking pleasure in free-spirited afterwork hours.

The Trump coalition will endure if it stays chill. An abstemious, Puritan attitude threatens the gains of the post-pandemic counterrevolution against progressivism and Bidenism, against the antisocial, judgmental, unpragmatic, and anti-communal behaviors of late progressive culture. Neurotic liberals have already driven less-neurotic liberals out of the Democratic Party; Republicans should remember that those voters can move the other way.

Moreover, temperance is, whenever enacted, unpopular and a losing position. Sermonizing conservative Protestant neuroticism about drinking resembles sermonizing liberal post-Protestant neuroticism about everything else. If conservatives embrace and accelerate accidental temperance, they risk creating a mirror image of the progressive Left: afraid of doing things, afraid of the world, afraid of irrationality.

In the 2020s, a good rule of politics, policy, and culture might be: normal is good. Most of what people were doing 40 or 50 years ago was better than the antisocial mores of today. Social drinking is a traditional good that conservatives ought to be conserve.

Hygiene theatre is mostly gone now, but the habit of policing others’ choices has proven too hard to quit, and now one of its preferred targets is alcohol. This has been in the offing for some time: the temperance movement, which had struggled to shed the air of puritanism surrounding it since the repeal of prohibition in America, has refashioned itself in recent years through an emphasis on health. The first rumblings of alcohol hysteria could be detected in the relish of the abstemious when it turned out resveratrol, an antioxidant found in red wine, might not be the elixir of life it was once touted as. Then there was the clawing-back of guidelines for moderate drinking: in 2023, for example, Canada dropped its so-called “low-risk threshold” from 10 drinks per week for women and 15 for men to two or fewer for either sex.

More recently, the progressive press has jumped on the anti-alcohol dogpile, with headlines calculated to horrify. “There is No Such Thing as a Safe Level of Alcohol Consumption,” The Guardian warns us, while The New York Times, now a surrogate parent for those who stopped talking to their own parents because they voted for Trump or refused to tack a land acknowledgment onto the end of the Thanksgiving dinner prayers, chides readers virtually every day with articles like “Even a Little Alcohol Can Harm Your Health,” “Alcohol Carries New Risks in Middle Age,” and the condescending “Is That Drink Really Worth it to You?”

And worldwide, health authorities have responded. In 2026, Ireland will become the first EU country to place warning labels on alcoholic beverages. In 2024, the World Health Organization published its “Global Alcohol Action Plan” a masterpiece of bureaucratic jargon that employs the stock aims of “empowering people and communities”, “ending poverty”, and “achieving gender inequality” to encourage member states to monitor their citizens’ alcohol use, engage in anti-drinking campaigns, and ultimately reduce consumption by 20% by 2030. Finally, this past January, the US Surgeon General issued an alarmist report entitled “Alcohol and Cancer Risk”. I will not contest the Surgeon General’s findings, though they fail to include alcohol’s possible protective effects against kidney cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, dementia, and other diseases. What I will not accept is their significance. In America, it appears, alcohol “contributes” to 100,000 cancer diagnoses and 20,000 cancer deaths each year. Putting aside that the nature of such a contribution is indeterminable — and that confounding factors, which there are in virtually every case, should be a motive for caution, rather than conclusiveness — this means that alcohol is deemed to be a factor in 5% of cancer diagnoses and 3% of cancer deaths per year. These deaths constitute .006% of all deaths in the United States — significantly lower than mortality due to influenza or unintentional falls.

The report goes on to state that alcohol is the third leading cause of preventable cancers, after smoking and obesity. But smoking is the only one of these where the link is clear-cut: around 14% of smokers will develop lung cancer, with the number higher for men than for women. For everything else, it’s a guessing game, because the factors are too difficult to disentangle: if an obese drug user who binges on processed food comes down with cancer of the colon, who is to say whether one or all of these, or none, caused those first cells to mutate?

Of course, cancer isn’t the only thing you can die of, and a mere month before the Surgeon General’s doomsaying appeared, the National Academies of Sciences, Medicine, and Engineering released its own report on moderate alcohol consumption and health outcomes, the findings of which reconfirmed two things: first, that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk of heart attack and stroke, and second, that compared with abstinence, it also correlates with a lower risk of mortality. This last datum in particular is a source of consternation to the new temperance advocates, who have tied themselves into all sorts of interesting knots to explain it away. Most entertaining of these is the “sick quitter” theory which suggests that the pool of hale teetotallers is befouled by the wrecks of ex-drinkers who gave up the bottle too late, and remain ravaged by their years of sin; if only their numbers could be excluded, the appearance of any health benefits of alcohol would vanish.

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This hypothesis is nonsense, and has been shown to be nonsense in repeated studies of lifetime abstainers; likewise, the faddish notion that moderate drinkers owe their health to their generally better socio-economic standing is not borne out by statistical data. Whence, then, the moral panic?

A hint, paradoxically, lies in the near absence of heavy drinking from these discussions. Because an alcoholic is an addict, and over the past several years, the addict has been configured as a powerless object of pity and solidarity, the alcoholic lies beyond censure; his “disease” is the likely product of trauma, and following the precepts of “harm reduction”, he must be coddled until he chooses to get better. The moderate drinker, on the other hand, is a being self-possessed, one who consciously takes a drink or two or five in full awareness of the minuscule danger, because he is enjoying himself, and would like to enjoy himself more. Contemporary progressive dogma is fundamentally anti-responsibility, placing the blame for social ills anywhere but on the subject; and the calculated risk-taker is a constant and exasperating reminder that maybe all that is bullshit, and that accepting the consequences for one’s possibly unwise actions is a basic criterion for participating in society. Moreover, as the editorializing classes have fallen for a “standpoint epistemology” according to which one’s measure of illness or trauma determined how much of a right one has to speak, the mere fact of self-composure has acquired the illiberal stink of “privilege”.

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I would put down the bottle if what I were offered in return were worthwhile, but I fear the antidote is worse than the poison. I am aware of drinking’s association with violence, sexual assault, deaths on the road, liver disease, and a host of other problems; this is what makes it a vice, though unlike the slow-motion disaster of legalized marijuana, at least it’s one we have lots of practice in handling. The harms of not drinking are harder to track, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there, and their consequences are ominous for our societies. In a 2010 study, Charles Holahan, a psychologist of the University of Austin, found associations between abstinence and an enormous suite of problems: obesity, depression, avoidance coping, poor social engagement, lack of support from friends, significantly decreased likelihood of marriage. He concluded: “All of these factors that were associated with abstention significantly predicted mortality.”

Why harp on these benefits, though? The social neurosis surrounding alcohol is no more concerned with health than Covid vaccine-shaming was five years ago (I say this as a believer in vaccines, but one who feels intransigence was a moral and policy failure). And even if we take others’ alleged concern for our bodies at face value, what is health, and what is the point of it? To quote Nietzsche, “In order to determine even what health involves for your body, what matters is your purpose, your horizon, your powers, your impulses, your errors and in particular the ideals and phantasms of your soul.” Life in itself is not an unalloyed good; it is only worthwhile to the extent that it is lived; and much of what people mistake to be health is preparation for a life they never get around to starting. “Is it not,” the Swiss novelist Hermann Burger wrote about his own weakness, tobacco, “far worse, more frustrating, to have to renounce life’s most sublime pleasure hundreds of thousands of times over than to pay for decades of wishes granted with a narrowing of the vessels in old age?” Quite so, I’d say, and if you’ll excuse me, I must step away to pour myself a glass.

I stopped drinking because I knew I would die, and I wasn’t ready. I went to AA, clinging on to a willingness, if not a pleasure, to live, and recited the dogma. Jonathan Franzen said his friend David Foster Wallace, who killed himself, was so terrified of what he had seen of his id while using, it decimated his trust in his lovability. I understand this perfectly. I know I became a writer to form myself, but I wonder if I invented the person writing these words to disguise the monster that is my true self. I am 20 years sober, and this is my settled state. Fear.

Some addicts think critically about their condition: or they can try. Carl Erik Fisher, a child of alcoholics, is a psychiatrist and he was, during his training, addicted — a phrase that has no settled meaning — to alcohol and pharmaceuticals. He was, “greedily grasping after a new identity for myself”. Fisher used, denied, hallucinated, and collapsed. He believes that denial, a crucial and hitherto mysterious element of addiction, allows the addict to lie more effectively to others, and this makes perfect sense to me. He was tasered by the police in his flat in New York City, “dangerously near the peak of my heart”. He recovered, in the sense that I have: he stopped using. Instead, he wrote The Urge.

It’s a seeking, of course: an attempt to make sense of his life. It is a search for reason because he lost his, and it is as diffuse as his using was simple: just give me more of it. The Urge contains history, memoir, science, miscellanea, literature and polemic. There is a mountain of information out there about drug use — if only we could process it meaningfully — and Fisher read it all, amid his sullen, yet hopeful, quest to return to psychiatry.

It asserts the primacy of the psychiatrist over the primacy of the addict. It is Fisher’s internal conversation with footnotes, and the reader is the listener and, in my case, the patient. Addiction need not, he says — primarily, I suspect, to himself — be a mystery filled with fear.

I found using drugs a return to early childhood state because the feelings I remember are those of childhood: wild freedom; wild hunger; wild sensibility; wild terror. They are life, magnified, and life runs out. Drug use is both a metaphor and a paradigm of the human tension that exists in our consciousness: between the ego and the id (if you are a doctor) and between the sacred and the profane (if you are a priest). It is a truism that they expand our consciousness. For the addict who cannot stop taking them, it expands too much. Then — I speak for me — it dramatically contracts, and that is when I went insane.

But the terror itself moves from the internal life of the addict to society itself. Almost no one here is rational or in control. Most people do not become like Fisher and I, because drugs, he writes, drugs “are not ‘addictive’ in themselves”. They are not the draught of a demon king, then; they need a social hinterland to flourish, which we summon glibly and continually. “Pray for her,” my friend was told when he rang 999 to say I had collapsed with alcoholism, as if medicine had nothing to offer me because I was peculiarly cursed. Yet there is no definitive personality type for a drug addict and no evidence that addiction is genetically determined. Of those who become addicted — those who continue to use long after it is pleasurable and, as AA says, “unto the gates of death” — most get better.

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There is a predictable narrative to drug use. A drug is discovered and sold — morphine, cocaine, alcohol, cannabis, oxycontin, LSD. There is an epidemic, a panic, and a repression: a very metaphor for the id itself. Drug epidemics, Fisher writes, are chiefly a response to “social wounding”, which occur when familiar structures fall apart, and drugs are too-easily available. Native Americans suffered a drug epidemic as their lands were stolen. So did the women of Gin Lane,  as the population moved from country to town. America is suffering one now, chiefly among whites without a college degree. According to Fisher, there were 150,000 “deaths of despair” in America in 2017. Individual recovery, he says, should not be exempt from social change, but that seems remote.

Those with a full life do not need a fantasy one; or at least, not just a fantasy one. The addicted need treatment and societal change but rather we offer criminalisation. This didn’t happen to Fisher or to me, of course. We are both white and middle class. Yet drug laws are used to criminalise and intimidate vast swathes of society. The War on Drugs, Fisher writes, was really a war on some people who use drugs. White women suck down legal pills in their homes, or drunk themselves insensible and, though they suffer, they do so in comfort. Billie Holliday was hounded to her death by racist prohibitionists.

To wound yourself with drugs you need easy access to them, and we have that: the alcohol industry is worth $1.5 trillion and few of its profits go towards rehabilitation. It’s cheaper to punish the addict: for the manufacturers, at least, who through lobbyists, push the fault onto the individual, and the cost onto the state. Four disparate African nations, Fisher writes, have drug policies drafted by alcohol salesman, and I find that more debasing than anything in Thomas de Quincy’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

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Writers tend to make addiction a mystery too thrilling to be solved. Who wouldn’t rather read Hunter S Thompson than ponder the carnage the illegal drugs trade has inflicted on the people of Mexico? The Temperance movement — a drug panic in response to a drug epidemic — commissioned novels like Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There. It was the second best-selling book of the time, after Tom Sawyer. Walt Whitman was paid to write Franklin Evans, a tale of a boy lost to alcohol, which he did, in three days, while drunk. I laughed at this.

Fisher asks: is addiction part of me, or is something apart from the self? Mexican American drug users in southern California, he says, speak of the “tecato gusano” – an indestructible junkie worm that brings evil on the innocent. Addiction, whatever it is, is not boring. It is a battle between good and evil, and within you: something pleasingly self-important for the essentially alienated and prone. I thought of it as a female demon, which now I think was only a strategy to protect the non-demon part: to make her stronger. It was a coping mechanism. I knew it was me. I read Fisher, and I can accept that it was me. Even so, his question is a better way of phrasing the question we have asked for as long as we have used drugs, but have never answered: whose fault is it?

The useful but disappointing answer is we don’t yet know. And perhaps we should stop asking. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps it isn’t even a fault. To panic at the altered state of the drug user — to criminalise, to prohibit, to write cautionary, overblown memoir — is to panic at the essential state of being human. And I suspect, that is where the real fear lies.

For a year, beer, wine and spirits had been illegal throughout the United States. From a public health perspective, it seemed a reasonable enough measure. That alcohol was a dangerous substance was clear: disease, violence, poverty and crime were intimately bound up with it. Even now, despite its failure, it is known as the “noble experiment”. But was it right to prevent people from making drinks they not only enjoyed, but that also served important cultural and religious purposes? Not for the first time, Americans found themselves torn in a balance between freedom and security — nor for the last.

Until recently, prohibition remained the largest experiment in social engineering a democracy had ever undertaken. And then, in early 2020, a new virus began to spread from China. Faced with this threat, the world’s governments responded by closing schools, banning people from meeting, forcing entrepreneurs to shut their businesses and making ordinary people wear face masks. Like prohibition, this experiment provoked a debate. In all the democracies of the world, freedom was weighed against what was perceived as security; individual rights versus what was considered best for public health.

Few now remember that for most of 2020, the word “experiment” had negative connotations. That was what Swedes were accused of conducting when we — unlike the rest of the world — maintained some semblance of normality. The citizens of this country generally didn’t have to wear face masks; young children continued going to school; leisure activities were largely allowed to continue unhindered.

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By Freddie Sayers

This experiment was judged early on as “a disaster” (Time magazine), a “the world’s cautionary tale” (New York Times), “deadly folly” (the Guardian). In Germany, Focus magazine described the policy as “sloppiness”; Italy’s La Repubblica concluded that the “Nordic model country” had made a dangerous mistake. But these countries — all countries — were also conducting an experiment, in that they were testing unprecedented measures to prevent the spread of a virus. Sweden simply chose one path, the rest of Europe another.

The hypothesis of the outside world was that Sweden’s freedom would be costly. The absence of restrictions, open schools, reliance on recommendations instead of mandates and police enforcement would result in higher deaths than other countries. Meanwhile, the lack of freedom endured by the citizens of other countries would “save lives.”

Many Swedes were persuaded by this hypothesis. “Shut down Sweden to protect the country,” wrote Peter Wolodarski, perhaps the country’s most powerful journalist. Renowned infectious diseases experts, microbiologists and epidemiologists from all over the country warned of the consequences of the government’s policy. Researchers from Uppsala University, the Karolinska Institute and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm produced a model powered by supercomputers that predicted 96,000 Swedes would die before the summer of 2020.

At this stage, it was not unreasonable to conclude that Sweden would pay a high price for its freedom. Throughout the spring of 2020, Sweden’s death toll per capita was higher than most other countries.

But the experiment didn’t end there. During the year that followed, the virus continued to ravage the world and, one by one, the death tolls in countries that had locked down began to surpass Sweden’s. Britain, the US, France, Poland, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain, Argentina, Belgium — countries that had variously shut down playgrounds, forced their children to wear facemasks, closed schools, fined citizens for hanging out on the beach and guarded parks with drones — have all been hit worse than Sweden. At the time of writing, more than 50 countries have a higher death rate. If you measure excess mortality for the whole of 2020, Sweden (according to Eurostat) will end up in 21st place out of 31 European countries. If Sweden was a part of the US, its death rate would rank number 43 of the 50 states.

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This fact is shockingly underreported. Consider the sheer number of articles and TV segments devoted to Sweden’s foolishly liberal attitude to the pandemic last year — and the daily reference to figures that are forgotten today. Suddenly, it is as if Sweden doesn’t exist. When the Wall Street Journal recently published a report from Portugal, it described how the country “offered a glimpse” of what it would be like to live with the virus. This new normal involved, among other things, vaccine passports and face masks at large events like football matches. Nowhere in the report was it mentioned that in Sweden you can go to football matches without wearing a facemask, or that Sweden — with a smaller proportion of Covid deaths over the course of the pandemic — had ended virtually all restrictions. Sweden has been living with the virus for some time.

The WSJ is far from alone in its selective reporting. The New York Times, Guardian, BBC, The Times, all cheerleaders for lockdowns, can’t fathom casting doubt on their efficacy.

And those who’ve followed Sweden’s example have also come in for a lot of criticism. When the state of Florida — more than a year ago and strongly inspired by Sweden — removed most of its restrictions and allowed schools, restaurant and leisure parks to reopen, the judgement from the American media was swift. The state’s Republican governor was predicted to “lead his state to the morgue” (The New Republic). The media was outraged by images of Floridians swimming and sunbathing at the beach.

DeSantis’s counterpart in New York, the embattled Democrat Andrew Cuomo, on the other hand, was offered a book deal for his “Leadership lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic”. A few months ago, he was forced to resign after harassing a dozen women. But the result of his “leadership lesson” lives on: 0.29% of his state’s residents died of Covid-19. The equivalent figure for Florida — the state that not only allowed the most freedom, but also has the second highest proportion of pensioners in the country — is 0.27%.

Once again, an underreported fact.

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From a human perspective, it is easy to understand the reluctance to face these numbers. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that millions of people have been deprived of their freedom, and millions of children have had their education gravely damaged, for little demonstrable gain. Who wants to admit that they were complicit in this? But what one American judge called the “laboratories of democracy” have conducted their experiment — and the result is increasingly clear.

Exactly why it turned out this way is harder to explain, but perhaps the “noble experiment” of the 1920s in the US can offer some clues. Prohibition didn’t win because the freedom argument prevailed. Nor was it because the substance itself had become any less harmful to people’s health. The reason for the eventual demise of the alcohol ban was that it simply didn’t work. No matter what the law said, Americans didn’t stop drinking alcohol. It simply moved from bars to “speakeasies”. People learned to brew their own spirits or smuggle it in from Canada. And the American mafia had a field day.

The mistake the American authorities made was to underestimate the complexity of society. Just because they banned alcohol did not mean that alcohol disappeared. People’s drives, desires and behaviours were impossible to predict or fit into a plan. A hundred years later, a new set of authorities made the same mistake. Closing schools didn’t stop children meeting in other settings; when life was extinguished in cities, many fled them, spreading the infection to new places; the authorities urged their citizens to buy food online, without thinking about who would transport the goods from home to home.

If the politicians had been honest with themselves, they might have foreseen what would happen. For just as American politicians were constantly caught drinking alcohol during the prohibition, their successors were caught 100 years later breaking precisely the restrictions they had imposed on everyone else. The mayors of New York and Chicago, the British government’s top advisor, the Dutch Minister of Justice, the EU Trade Commissioner, the Governor of California all broke their own rules.

It isn’t easy to control other people’s lives. It isn’t easy to dictate desirable behaviours in a population via centralised command. These are lessons that many dictators have learned. During the Covid pandemic, many democracies have learned it too. The lesson has perhaps not yet sunk in, but hopefully it will eventually. Then perhaps it will be another 100 years before we make the same mistake again.

This is an edited translation of an article that first appeared in Sydsvenskan.

Similarly, when we think of historical opposition to the public consumption of alcohol, temperance and prohibition inevitably come to mind — the very opposite of happiness. The people behind these movements, we assume, were rural, reactionary busybodies who hated fun. They were also probably racist. And they definitely had no sense of humour. They were people you wouldn’t want to have a drink with because they wouldn’t want to have a drink with anyone.

Richard Hoftstadter, the influential American mid-twentieth century historian, eloquently expands this characterisation. “Prohibition,” he wrote, was “a pinched, parochial substitute for reform which had a widespread appeal to a certain type of crusading mind”. He describes this “crusading mind” as “linked not merely to an aversion to drunkenness and to the evils that accompanied it, but to the immigrant drinking masses, to the pleasures and amenities of city life, and to the well-to-do classes and cultivated men.” It was a “rural-evangelical virus”, spread around America by “the country Protestant”.

You can picture these people with fine precision: the ideological ancestors of Pat Robertson and every other Christian fundamentalist crank. This viewpoint, however, is a myth. An excellent myth which appeals to our contemporary intuitions about religion and secularism, freedom and authority. But a myth, nevertheless.

The “crusading mind” that characterised the temperance movement was underpinned not by reactionary impulses, but by the principles of social justice. As Mark Lawrence Schrad puts it in his utterly fascinating new book, Smashing the Liquor Machine, “Prohibitionism wasn’t moralising ‘thou shalt nots’, but a progressive shield for marginalised, suffering, and oppressed peoples to defend themselves from further exploitation”.

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Consider, for instance, someone like Carrie Nation. Born in Kentucky and raised in Missouri, she became infamous for going into taverns and smashing their windows with a hatchet. She has been described as a Bible-thumping Amazon. Some historians blame her strange behaviour on menopause and sexual frustration. If you search for her name on Google Images, the first picture that comes up shows her holding a hatchet on her gloved right hand and an open Bible on her left. She looks absolutely terrifying; Mary Whitehouse decked in black in Midwest America.

But looks, as they say, can be deceiving. As Schrad puts it: “She was not some Bible-thumping, conservative ‘holy crone on a broomstick’, seeking to legislate morality or ‘discipline’ individual behaviour”. Rather, she was a “populist progressive” who viewed alcoholism as a social evil that, among other things, endangered women.

In Kansas City, she built a women’s shelter. And when she retired, she built an institution called “Hatchet Hall”, which Schrad describes as “part rest home for the impoverished elderly, part safe haven for women fleeing abusive husbands, and part homeschool for their children”.

Crucially, she didn’t view the “drinker as a sinner”, but as a victim, like “prostitutes” or “slaves”. The sinner was the person selling the drink. The same is true of other prohibitionists: they made clear that their objection was not against the person drinking, who they saw as a victim, but the liquor traffic that exploited them. Some people today would say they had a saviour complex.

Nation was also anti-racist. She donated “her lecture proceeds to the black African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. And when she did speak at churches that denied blacks, she demanded that all be admitted entry. If that made racists uncomfortable, well, then they could leave”. Indeed, the relationship between temperance, women’s rights, and black civil rights was a close one. Most abolitionists, suffragists, and civil rights leaders in the nineteenth century supported prohibition.

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William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the influential abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, was also a staunch prohibitionist. In a letter he wrote in 1830, he states his principles clearly: that because “all men are born equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” it means:

“That intemperance is a filthy habit and an awful scourge, wholly produced by the moderate, occasional and fashionable use of alcoholic liquors—consequently, that it is sinful to distil, to import, to sell, to drink, or to offer such liquors to our friends or laborers, and that entire abstinence is the duty of every individual.”

Women’s rights leaders like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were also prohibitionists, and formed together the New York State Temperance Society. There they proclaimed it was the duty of women “to speak out against the liquor traffic and all men and institutions that in any way sanction, sustain, or countenance it”. At the women’s rights convention organised by Anthony and Stanton in 1866, Frances Harper, whom Schrad describes as “the most prolific and bestselling black poet and author of the nineteenth century”, spoke. Like “most abolitionist suffragists”, she was also a “proponent of temperance”.

Or consider the more recent example of Walter Rauschenbusch. He was a Baptist minister during the Progressive era — the early decades of twentieth century America — who espoused Social Gospel: a form of Christianity utterly dedicated to fighting against social injustice and exploitation. Rauschenbusch saw the liquor industry as a source of these evils, and was cited by Martin Luther King as a key influence.

So why is he overlooked in accounts of prohibitionism? As Schrad puts it: “Walter Rauschenbusch upsets all of our two-dimensional stereotypes of evangelical Christianity. He was compassionate, not commanding; cosmopolitan, not conservative; socialist, not reactionary”. As a result, “the most influential evangelical of his day almost never appears in traditional prohibition histories”.

Nor was the temperance movement limited to America. To strengthen his point that the movement was progressive, rather than reactionary, Schrad widens his analysis by examining prohibitionism around the world. He points out social democrats like Belgian Emile Vandervelde and Swedish Hjalmar Branting espoused it; Tolstoy and Gandhi, advocates of non-violent resistance and opponents of social injustice, also promoted it.

Even Lenin, perhaps the most consequential Leftist of the twentieth century, subscribed to temperance; he viewed Vodka as a tool used by the authorities to stupify and subjugate the masses. (Lenin was also opposed to free love, which he considered a bourgeois rather than proletarian demand. He thought sex had a “social interest, which gives rise to a duty towards the community”. Shame he was also a mass-murdering tyrant.)

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Closer to home, there was also a temperance movement in Britain and Ireland. Henry Vincent, an influential leader of the Chartists, wanted to connect the Chartist movement with the Temperance Society. Meanwhile, nineteenth-century Ireland, under the influence of the Irish priest Thebold Mathew, had a greater proportion of people who followed temperance than anywhere else in the British isles. (Yes, you can read that last sentence again.) As Schrad writes, when mass immigration to the States happened in the wake of the Irish famine, “the Irish Paddy fresh off the boat was statistically more likely to be a teetotaler than the heavy-drinking white, nativist evangelicals in the American heartland”.

Frederick Douglass, the iconic abolitionist leader, was particularly inspired by his friendship with Father Mathew. In a lecture Douglass delivered in Cork, he said: “Seven years ago I was ranked among the beasts and creeping things; to-night I am here held as a man and a brother”. He added: “If I can but forget the position in which I once was, I can turn my attention to teetotalism, and shall be able to speak as a man for a few moments”.

The dignity conferred on him by a teetoller is the same dignity as being a free man — the implication being that slavery and drunkenness are fundamentally akin. Both are ways through which we exploit our fellow man. Douglass emphasised this connection between drunkenness and slavery by stating: “If we could but make the world sober, we would have no slavery”. Two days after his speech, Douglass took Father Mathew’s temperance vow.

So why has our understanding of prohibitionism been so distorted? The main reason, I suspect, is because we project contemporary assumptions to the past. Prohibitionism was reactionary because it was led, in our mind, by evangelical Christians — while forgetting or ignoring the fact that the campaign against the slave trade, for instance, was led by evangelical Christians, or that many influential early feminists, like Josephine Butler, were also evangelical Christians.

Yes, abolitionists and early feminists, like the temperance movement, were irritating busybodies. They did often look a bit scary. But they also proudly espoused views — such as the inherent dignity of black people and women — which may seem common sense to us now, but were certainly not back then.

So, strange as it may sound, when we clink our glasses today, let us spare a thought for the temperance movement. Many of the same people involved in that cause were right on fundamental issues. More to the point: the principles that underpinned those correct views were the same principles that animated their prohibitionism. Surely we can all drink to that.

This story isn’t true — most early Chinese history is unencumbered by truth — but it is illustrative of the way that rulers have (almost) always looked at booze. It’s always alcohol and those who provide it who get it in the neck.

Thus Scotland at the time of writing, and, for all I know and dread, most of England soon. All licensed premises in the Central Belt have been closed. Unlicensed premises — cafés, tea-shops, juice bars — are left open, because… well, here the becausery becomes a little indistinct. But it’s something about the behaviour of those in pubs. It’s the kind of people who go to pubs, and it’s the kind of things they do there. Hugging strangers all the time and kissing vague acquaintances.

I have been to pubs in Glasgow. The hugging of strangers is not a major problem there, even after 10pm. The only hugging of strangers I have ever seen in a pub is at the moment of a significant international football victory. This is a reasonably rare beast in both England and Scotland, yet we have this vague feeling that when Other People drink they behave abominably. When we drink, we’re simply lovely.

This was, in essence, the cause of Prohibition in the United States. Very few Americans were against alcohol per se. They were against saloons, and what they were sure people did there. The general idea was that saloons served men, almost exclusively (this was true) and that those men spent all their pay there and then went home drunk and angry and took out their frustrations on their family. Whether this actually happened much is debatable. But it is certain that Prohibition was the first great feminist movement in American politics, which is why it was enacted at the same time that women got the vote.

The cause was helped along, though, by a large section of the American population called the “Drinking Dries”. Where the “Wets” were proud drinkers, and the “Dries” were ferocious teetotallers; the “Drinking Dries” were those who liked a drink themselves, but were very, very concerned about the way that other people drank, especially those in saloons. It is a less ridiculous position than it sounds. If you want to stop football hooliganism once and for all, ban football; this wouldn’t mean a kickabout in your own garden, but the football that happens over there. So the idea was to stop the saloon louts drinking and thus save them from themselves.

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Unfortunately, Prohibition was enacted in two stages: first, the 18^th Amendment, which allowed the government to ban “intoxicating liquors”; and second, the Volstead Act which defined what “intoxicating liquors” were. It had been widely assumed that the act would only cover spirits, perhaps fortified wines, and just possibly normal wine; very few thought that it would include beer. But, of course, the act was drafted by the extremists — so the Drinking Dries discovered that it applied to them, too.

It’s splendid when other people are banned from drinking, but we are all other people.

Still, Prohibition wasn’t all bad. It meant women got to drink, too. The saloon was replaced with the speakeasy, and as the speakeasy was a brand new thing there was no tradition banning ladies from entering, and no agreed rules on how much they could drink once inside. One upmarket speakeasy in New York had a sign up saying “Through These Portals the Most Beautiful Girls in the World Pass OUT”. Some even installed powder rooms.

There were upmarket speakeasies, and downmarket ones too. A speakeasy could be anywhere and take any form, so long as it sold booze. One of the stranger consequences of Prohibition was that it made Italian food popular in America. This was because Italians with access to alcohol would simply open their apartments up as bars and make some extra money by serving their patrons some fine Italian home-cookery. Food Historians cite this as the great break-out moment for pizza and pasta in the USA.

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But there were other unintended consequences of Prohibition. Obviously organised crime got a fillip, although this can be wildly exaggerated. The murder rate in Chicago is now more than double what it was under Al Capone’s homicidal sway. More insidious was the fact that everybody was breaking the law and nobody cared. In Boston there were four speakeasies on the same block as the police headquarters, partly because the policemen wanted somewhere to drink. A new word was invented: “scofflaw”, meaning a person who flouts the law because they know that almost every else is doing so.

You don’t need to be Albert Einstein to realise that scofflaws are bad for society, but Einstein was actually in America during Prohibition and observed that: “The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.”

And this brings us back to our current lockdown. For months everywhere I have gone has had a one-way system in place, and, for months, nowhere have I seen anybody obeying it. Shopkeepers sit smiling next to a sign saying that everybody must wear a mask. At an airport in Italy recently I found myself crushed up against a sign that told me to keep two metres away from everybody — yet none of us could escape. There was also a hand-sanitiser station that we were required to use. The bottle was empty.

When the rules forbid normal behaviour, it becomes normal behaviour to break the rules. Why do other people feel the need to behave like that? Because we are all other people. You can tell a chap’s politics these days simply by asking him which mass gatherings are bound to cause a Second Spike, and which ones are harmless and entirely justified anyway.

Lockdown forbids the little, unquantifiable actions that make a human tick. A drink with friends is an inessential luxury, touching is unnecessary, smiles are masked away. Nobody knows why other people persist in these irrational and unnecessary activities, but we continue with them, because we are certain that we aren’t other people. And so lockdown makes scofflaws of us all.

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That won’t end lockdown, of course. Lockdown will be ended by the same thing that ended Prohibition: the economy. The Great Crash and the Great Depression meant that the USA could no longer afford to ban an industry that could provide employment to the destitute and tax to the treasury. It was not a yearning for beer and freedom that prevailed, but a yearning for economic growth that accidentally permitted freedom and beer.

Of course, these comparisons with America’s Prohibition (capital P) are imperfect. In America all alcoholic drinks were banned with the exception of communion wine, which I believe is also the personal rule of Mr Trump. In Glasgow and Edinburgh pubs are still allowed to serve drinks outside this October, but given the sadistic Scottish weather gods that is as close to a ban as can be, for now.

Before it goes too far, the government should, perhaps, remember another attempt at prohibition. In 1914 Tsar Nicholas II banned the sale of vodka in all Russia. It was a time of national emergency, there was a war on, everybody had to play their part, and alcohol is inessential and promotes undisciplined behaviour.

It didn’t end well.

Mark Forsyth’s ‘A Short History of Drunkenness: How, why, where and when humankind has got merry from the Stone Age to the present’ is published by Viking Penguin.

Some sensible folks were prepared: the Yale Club laid on enough booze for its members to last 14 years. For normal people who wanted a drink, however, it meant liquor that made you go blind, mobsters and non-stop Charleston competitions. Pretty much everyone agrees that “the Great Experiment” was a total failure. Yet if you actually look at what its architects wanted, it’s not so clear-cut — because Prohibition wasn’t really about banning alcohol, it was a feminist crusade.

The roots of the temperance movement in both Britain and America lie in the campaign against slavery. Once this had been achieved, rather earlier in Britain (1807 & 1833) than America (1865), all that energy needed a new outlet, someone else needed saving. The new goal was to emancipate the working classes from the tyranny of the saloon bar where the men would spend all their wages before coming home and beating the wife and children. Spirits were cheap and Americans drank an astonishing amount. In his book The Alcoholic Republic WJ Rorabaugh estimates that the average American in the early 19th century drank a pint of spirits per day!

Mostly female-led and female-dominated organisations like the American Temperance Society, Women’s Christian Temperance Union and Anti-Saloon League fought the good fight, and fought it well. Women didn’t have the vote, but they could exercise their political muscles in other ways. Many of the techniques of the anti-slavery movement were used: religiously-infused public meetings, mass petitions, articles placed in the press and striking prints depicting the misery of alcohol. In Britain there was The Bottle by the caricaturist George Cruikshank showing the alcoholic decline of a family over eight prints. In America lurid novels like Ten Nights in a Bar-room and What I Saw There by Timothy Shay Arthur made the same argument.

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Some temperance campaigners were more forceful, among them Carrie A. Nation who used to smash up bars with a hatchet. “Hatchetation” she called it. She was born Carrie Amelia Moore but got her stirring name from marrying a Methodist preacher named David Nation. As you can imagine her antics made her very unpopular with America’s saloon keepers; on a visit to Britain, she was almost lynched by a crowd of 3,000 Glaswegians.

These organisations were not campaigning to ban alcohol per se. In his stimulating book, A Short History of Drunkenness, Mark Forsyth writes: “They weren’t really against alcohol. They were against a pattern of behaviour associated with men in saloons. They absolutely did not care if a New York novelist had a glass of claret with her Sunday lunch.”

You will be familiar with this argument from people who are intensely relaxed about minimum alcohol pricing because it won’t affect their Sauvignon Blanc habit or junk food bans while quite happy to eat lardo on sourdough. People went along with the dry movement because they thought that it was aimed at drinkers of hard liquor in saloons, and, it has to be said, the Irish. Yes, like “Whacking Day” in The Simpsons, there was a large anti-Irish element to the Prohibition movement.

Prohibitionists were largely Protestants who didn’t like the influx of whiskey-drinking Irish Catholics and wine-drinking Italians. There was even a whole school of theology like Reverend William Patton’s 1871 work Bible Wines “proving” that Jesus didn’t actually drink wine. It was also town versus country, and there are parallels with Trump here, with your God-fearing rural folk being in favour of Prohibition against city dwellers, often Catholic or Jewish, religions with no traditions of abstinence.

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America was divided into wets and drys, allegiances that cut across party lines. Both Republicans and Democrats had strong dry factions, and as drys tended to vote on the single issue, unlike wets, it was politically expedient to pander to them. Temperance was becoming a powerful political force, and before the First World War, 13 states had already gone dry with 31 others having dry counties. There are still dry counties today, including the one where Jack Daniel’s is made.

In America, the people who held things in balance were the Germans, who dominated brewing and provided most of the political capital against the temperance movement. But after the United States entered the First World War they lost their influence, since who would want to be associated with those nasty war-mongering Germans? With the Germans out of action, Prohibition became a shoo-in. But when it was finally passed in 1919, all those Americans who thought it wouldn’t apply to them were in for a rude shock. The Volstead Act, which was largely dictated by the Anti Saloon League, applied to anything over 0.5% ABV.

Prohibition lasted until 1933, and, it was a success in terms of the original aims of the temperance movement. The male-dominated saloon was no more. The new bars that emerged allowed women. This is one of the ironies of Prohibition, which curbed, to some extent, male drinking, but made it more socially acceptable for women to visit bars as they had been welcome in speakeasies. Drinking became an equal opportunities past-time. What could be more feminist than that? Yet many Americans stayed dry, and by 1939, 42% of the country still didn’t drink.

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It had some positive unexpected side effects. Many Americans discovered a love for Italian food when they realised that immigrant restaurants had access to wine either smuggled in or home-made from Californian grapes. White people mixed with black people in cities like New York where they picked up a love of jazz music. A newspaper columnist wrote: “the night clubs have done more to improve race relations than the churches, white and black, have done in ten decades.”

The Catholic Church became unusually popular as it was exempt from Prohibition for altar wine. Meanwhile, the rest of the world benefitted as bartenders went to London and Paris, spreading cocktails and jazz music. Hotels all over the world opened American bars to cater to tourists escaping Prohibition. It was boom time for Scotch whisky, since Scottish producers had no qualms, unlike their Irish cousins, of shipping vast quantities of booze to the Bahamas or Canada to be smuggled into the US.

Of course, it wasn’t all cocktails and Duke Ellington. American society at all levels was corrupted by making such a staple illegal and putting it in the hands of organised crime. Prohibition was the making of the American Mafia. And surely the curbing of America’s hard liquor habit could have been achieved with more moderate legislation?

It was also a disaster for the American drinks industry, one which it has not fully recovered from. Hundreds of regional brewers closed to be replaced after repeal by a few giants, Californian wine only took off again in the 1970s, and the American whiskey business, once the biggest in the world, was destroyed. Selling alcohol is still incredibly bureaucratic. Only now with the emergence craft beer and the rediscovery of classics like rye whiskey, is the industry returning to its pre-First World War vibrancy. One hundred years after the Volstead Act was instituted, Americans are still feeling the effects of Prohibition.

The habit of mind I term “asymmetrical multiculturalism”, which combines white intellectuals’ hostility to their own group with a romantic celebration of minorities, began not in the 2010s, but in the years following the First World War. Likewise what we call wokeness is a sensibility rooted in a set of ideas I term “Left-modernism”, a hybrid ideology of liberal cosmopolitanism and cultural egalitarianism. This blend crystallised before the War, but spread within US high culture in response to nativist populism in America and nationalism in Europe.

Then, as now, ethno-demographic change had been the catalyst for a populist cultural nationalism. The prohibition of the selling of alcohol, per the 1920 Volstead Act, was motivated by the animus of the country’s “dry” rural Protestant majority against the “wet” Catholic immigrant-descended populations — who formed a majority of most northern cities — and their “smart set” allies among the urban, often Episcopalian, elite.

Anglo-Protestant populism had helped curtail immigration from southern and eastern Europe through the Literacy Test of 1917, and National Origins (Johnson-Reed) Act of 1924 which established immigration quotas for countries based on their share of the 1890 immigration population. The year was deliberately chosen to skew the numbers in favour of north-west Europeans, although it was later adjusted to the 1920 share.

Concurrently, a revived Ku Klux Klan, focused this time in northern states, and anti-Catholic rather than anti-black in focus, enrolled six million members, and controlled several relatively Protestant northern cities such as Indianapolis. As in our time, the radical cultural Left had developed ideological innovations before the rise of Right-wing populism, but was energised by the populist surge.

Meanwhile, the genocidal excesses of Stalinism in the 1930s produced a breakaway anti-communist Left which influenced the post-1945 cultural order. In the 1960s, Left-modernism achieved mass penetration with the expansion of television and the universities, influencing the ambitious members of the new Baby Boom generation and steadily capturing society’s elite institutions in the 80s, 90s, 2000s and today.

The story begins in the 19th century, when nations were still considered an instrument of liberal progress. Cosmopolitanism prior to 1900 was typically yoked with admiration for the nation. Giuseppe Mazzini, for instance, founded both the nationalistic Young Italy and supranational Young Europe, seeing little in the way of contradiction.

American liberals like Ralph Waldo Emerson crowed, in 1846, about the US as “The asylum of all nations . . . the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles and Cossacks, and all the European tribes, of the Africans and Polynesians, will construct a new race.” Yet Emerson was equally adamant about the Anglo-Saxon ethnic basis of America, suggesting that the free population of America was of British stock, and that the “foreign element, however considerable, is rapidly assimilated… [into] a population of English descent and language.”

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Like the 1920s, the 2020s will be an age of anxiety

By Richard Overy

In the 1900s, the national-cosmopolitan intellectual synthesis of liberals like Emerson began to decay into its warring components: a universalist cosmopolitanism and a closed ethnic nationalism. In America the former steadily gained ground after 1905; the progressive movement, coalescing around liberal Protestant figures such as John Dewey, William James and Jane Addams, began to spurn the idea that immigrants should assimilate into the Anglo-Saxon Protestant matrix which had defined the melting pot to that point.

Universalist cosmopolitanism was adopted by the country’s liberal Protestant elites of the Federal Council of Churches (FCC) in the 1910s, with the ecumenist New Testament idea that “there is neither Jew nor Greek” in Christ replacing anti-Catholicism and temperance as the organisation’s guiding ethos.

Into this brew came a wholly secular new force in American life: bohemian modernism. Taking root among a small cadre of highly-educated radical WASPs in Greenwich Village, New York, the “Village Renaissance” gave birth to the first fully-formed Left-modernist cénacle, the so-called Young Intellectuals. Among the innovations pioneered by this group in the 1912-17 period were modern art and theatre, “slumming” tours of ethnic ghettoes like the Jewish Lower East Side, and, thanks to Carl Van Vechten, the habit of travelling to Harlem to hear black jazz.

Expressive and interesting ethnics were contrasted with the stale Anglo-Protestant majority. Randolph Bourne, a prominent Young Intellectual, distilled the new ethos into a powerful oikophobia in his seminal 1916 essay in the Atlantic Monthly, “Trans-National America”:

“It is not uncommon for the eager Anglo-Saxon who goes to a vivid American university to-day to find his true friends not among his own race but among the acclimatized German or Austrian, the acclimatized Jew, the acclimatized Scandinavian or Italian. In them he finds the cosmopolitan note. In these youths, foreign- born or the children of foreign- born parents, he is likely to find many of his old inbred morbid problems washed away. These friends are oblivious to the repressions of that tight little society in which he so provincially grew up. He has a pleasurable sense of liberation from the stale and familiar attitudes of those whose ingrowing culture has scarcely created anything vital for his America of to-day.”

Remarking upon New York Times writer Sarah Jeong’s tweets against white people, Reihan Salam wrote in the Atlantic in 2018:

“A lot of them [anti-white intellectuals] have been whites who pride themselves on their diverse social circles and their enlightened views, and who indulge in their own half-ironic white-bashing to underscore that it is their achieved identity as intelligent, worldly people that counts most, not their ascribed identity as being of recognizably European descent.”

Bourne, an old-stock New Englander like most New York writers of his day, established the template for angry Left-modernists of the 1920s, who watched helplessly as Anglo-Protestant populism won the day. Consider H.L. Mencken, who parroted Bourne’s oikophobia in more strident tones in 1923:

“The Anglo-Saxon American[‘s] is a history of… blind rage against peoples who have begun to worst him… The normal American of the ‘pure-blooded’ majority goes to rest every night with an uneasy feeling that there is a burglar [ethnic minorities] under the bed… His political ideas are crude and shallow. He is almost wholly devoid of esthetic feeling. The most elementary facts about the visible universe alarm him, and incite him to put them down. Educate him… and he still remains palpably third-rate. He fears ideas almost more cravenly than he fears men.”

The Anglo-American majority was dehumanised as an automaton subservient to authority. Mencken called them “serfs and goose-steppers” or the “booboisie”. Van Wyck Brooks dubbed them “the apotheosis of the average” while Matthew Josephson scorned the “well-fed, indifferent masses”.

In Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street, protagonist Carol is trapped in the monochrome confining world of Gopher Prairie, a town in Minnesota. Yearning for cosmopolitan New York, she appreciates the local Scandinavian immigrants for injecting a dose of culture into a town whose Anglo-Saxon element was of “standardized background… scornful of the living…. A savourless people, gulping tasteless food… and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.” The thought of the Scandinavians being assimilated filled Carol with horror.

In Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the villain is Tom Buchanan, an old-stock New Yorker who is suspicious of Jay (Gatz) Gatsby’s ethnic provenance and approvingly cites tracts which are thinly disguised versions of the work of restrictionist intellectuals Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. The sense that Prohibition-era America was a cultural wasteland helped produce the “Lost Generation” of American Left-liberal intellectuals, many of whom left for Europe in disgust.

The difference between the culture wars of the 1920s and now is that the Left is far stronger today. After the Second World War university education exploded, more than doubling between 1950 and 1970 and eventually reaching nearly half the US population. Television sets could be found in just 9% of American homes in 1950, but by 1965, 93% had one. This spread the sensibility of relatively liberal New York, Los Angeles and Washington across the entire nation.

In 1976, Daniel Bell wrote that “the life-style once practiced by a small cenacle . . . is now copied by many . . . [and] this change of scale gave the culture of the 1960s its special surge, coupled with the fact that a bohemian life-style once limited to a tiny elite is now acted out on the giant screen of the mass media.”

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In 1924, ecumenical Protestant clerics and liberal progressives had vigorously opposed immigration restriction but had almost no political clout: the Johnson-Reed Act passed 323-71 in the House and 62-6 in the Senate. Unions like Samuel Gompers’s American Federation of Labour led the battle to limit immigration. Today, by contrast, progressives are powerful in the media, Hollywood, unions, large corporations, government agencies and the universities. So much so that they are now in control of social norms and institutional sanctions.

Where communists, atheists and Elvis alike once felt the sting of conservative moral panic, today’s Inquisition is progressive, enforcing panics over racism and sexism, and concocting such faux-racist notions as cultural appropriation. Indeed, Left-modernists influence the direction of the Democrats to the extent that the party cannot speak of “illegal” immigration, deportation or assimilation, while most primary candidates feel compelled to endorse reparations for slavery.

The populism and polarisation of the 1920s faded in large part because the new immigration laws constricted the flow of newcomers, allowing for assimilation. First, Protestant immigrant groups like the Scandinavians and Germans married into the WASP majority, then, after the 1960s, Catholics and Jews began marrying Protestants, creating a new “white” majority. By that time, the rising influence of 60s liberalism reopened the country’s gates, which has produced a level of diversity that rivals that of the 1920s.

Trump is a response to the ethnic shifts which followed the liberalising 1965 Hart-Celler immigration Act, but will today’s culture war repeat the cycle? Will restriction and assimilation calm passions and heal divides? The power of today’s Left-modernism places that outcome in doubt.

Regardless of what happens in 2020, the Left may eventually prevail at the presidential level as Democratic-leaning Hispanic and Asian voters form an ever larger part of the electorate. These groups have not yet melted into the majority the way white Catholics did after Kennedy’s election, and until they do, they are unlikely to lean Republican.

The outcome in America may therefore be one in which a provincial populist minority bitterly resents a liberal urban majority, obstructing Democratic legislation in the Senate. In Europe, restrictionists are more likely to prevail, but a significant group of disgruntled “Anywheres” will continue to revolt, fomenting cultural division. History repeats itself, but never in quite the same way.