Who’s Responsible for Prohibition?
From what I suppose we can call “The Right“:
Prohibition was the pièce de résistance of the early 20th-century progressives’ grand social engineering agenda. It failed, of course. Miserably.
From what I suppose we can call “The Left“:
The Temperence Movement of the 19th Century would look familiar to us today. The movement, led mainly by pious women, opposed alcohol on moral grounds. They weren’t just trying to stop their no-account husbands from drinking away the family’s nest egg; they wanted to stomp out alcohol altogether. Imagine a beet-faced Southern preacher imprecating gays, and shift the nown to demon liquor and you get the picture.
It’s not quite that we see what we want to see.
December 7th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
I won’t weigh in on the original temperance movement/Prohibition, but I can say that the new temperance movement is made up entirely of Prius-driving, soy-eating, compost-happy folks. The Left.
December 8th, 2008 at 7:57 am
Hm. Are you referring to the War on Drugs, the sort of perpetually enclosing anti-Cigarette Crusade (which have made smokey bars illegal), or the realm of MADD and AA?
The Prohibition Party itself, which splintered in two in 2004 and together received a vote total in the three digits off of a combined three ballot lines in two states — I think may have had some sort of reconciliation with the death of a leader — is best categorized as “conservative”. But then they’re harkening back to the 1920s, so no duh.