8 highlights
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The anti-alcohol campaign had some beneficial public health consequences: Crime fell and life expectancy rose. But the campaign was a political and economic disaster.
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Like in Russia, it is difficult to wean many states away from the political economy of alcohol. It lubricates not just the state coffers but whole political machines.
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But one of the paradoxes of liberalism is this. In order for liberal freedoms to flourish, society requires more self-restraint and judgment, not less. The state should not interfere with any freedom of expression. But freedom of expression will not survive, or be rendered relatively meaningless, if social norms that flourish under this freedom simply use freedom as a cover for hate or subordinating others.
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As every real liberal has always understood, defining the limits of state power is the intellectually easy part for liberalism. The harder part is to ask how we fashion subjects who understand both freedom and moderation. Both depend on each other.
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Most of my non-drinking friends who have returned from abroad agree that it was far easier to navigate sociability in the United States, than it is in a city like Delhi, where drinking has more or less become a marker of progressivism, or non-drinking of reaction.
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Alcohol in many elite contexts is not about exercising individual choice. Alcohol has almost become an ideology, with a messianism of its own kind
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On the one hand, we rightly valorise consent, choice and agency. On the other hand, there is very little worry about the forms of dependence on alcohol that, in crucial moments, take away our ability to exercise or recognise consent, exercise good choice or act like an agent.
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Good liberals need to defend freedom of choice. But if we really care for freedom, we also need to question our own addiction to the cultural and political economy of alcohol, and find intelligent pathways around a complex problem.