I love the Opinionator in general, but this article from yesterday is a little frightening. It’s a review of Last Call by Daniel Okrent, but it’s also a look at how modern politics mirror those at the time of Prohibition.
But the film and book are much more instructive on the political
fevers of the early 21st century, particularly those aroused by
monomaniacal anti-tax pressure groups and their foot soldiers, the
increasingly unpopular Tea Party.Burns has made that general comparison. “This is a story about a
single-issue campaign that metastasized,” he said, when I first heard
him talk about “Prohibition” last year. Initially, I didn’t see it
that way. Still, after finishing Okrent’s book during a summer of
insanity in Congress, I found his conclusion less of a reach.
Consider
how a country with such an appetite for drink could arrive at the point
where it would amend the Constitution to outlaw daily private behavior.
A hundred years ago, as Okrent notes, average consumption of alcohol
per adult was about 32 fifths of 80-proof liquor a year, or 520 12-ounce
bottles of beer. (It is less today by about 15 percent.)
Okrent
asks the obvious question a modern reader brings when trying to
understand this social engineering nightmare: “How did a freedom-loving
people decide to give up a private right that had been freely exercised
by millions upon millions since the first European colonists arrived in
the New World?”
Check out the full article here.