It took dumb American conservatives from the illiterate ignorant peasant backwoods of the 1920s to think they could "clean up" America and return it to God by banning alcohol. Humans have been making and drinking alcohol for some 10,000 years, and the dumb MAGA ancestors of a century ago thought they'd re-invent the wheel.
They always try to reinvent the wheel because they think they're special while all other peoples and civilizations before them were "primitive". Now these neanderthal obnoxious idiots think they're special because their colonization of north America was one giant act of God-mandated heroism, when in fact it was one of the most abysmal episodes of human history, stained with mass killings, racism, genocide and extermination.
And here we are again, another generation of inbred white mongrels - MAGA morons - is trying to outsmart tens of thousands of years of human history with their 200-years of inbreeding in the swamps of Alabama and Louisiana and in the desolate mountains of Appalachia. They call it "Manifest Destiny".
They, who want to deregulate for the purpose of stealing, want to regulate our lives by banning all kinds of stuff.
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Opinion - MAGA: America’s new prohibitionists
Maxwell G. Burkey, opinion contributor
Mon, September 1, 2025
Opinion - MAGA: America’s new prohibitionists
As Americans gather for Labor Day celebrations, there’s reason to recall an era of our history when offering cheers at the barbeque was barred to American workers. While the second Trump administration has generated copious comparisons to the McCarthy era of American politics, there is a different historical period that should nurture our political consciousness: Prohibitionism.
For many Americans, Prohibition recalls a fleeting national embarrassment, an anachronism from which there is little to glean. Remembered as a quixotic aberration, the banning of the sale of alcohol by force of constitutional amendment, from 1920 to 1933, might strike one as having little to offer our history of the present. After all, who in America is getting fired up about eradicating the evil of booze? Isn’t cracking a cold one during the game on Sunday nearly a national ritual?
Well, they aren’t coming for your liquor cabinet exactly, but MAGA is America’s new Prohibitionists.
Prohibitionism was the largest and most successful reactionary culture war in American politics. It triumphed not via extra-legal and constitutionally dubious mechanisms like loyalty oaths, executive decrees and blacklists, but through populist politics that stirred moral panic, mobilizing large swaths of Americans to invert their relationship to political authority.
Today’s MAGA movement seeks an inversion in national self-understanding akin to that proffered by Prohibition, offering a vision of American democracy in which the moral cleanliness of culture — not democratic pluralism or self-realization — is our central commitment. Your drink may be safe, but MAGA mirrors the Prohibitionist distaste for liberal democracy.
Prohibitionists fretted about the degeneracy of city life in a rapidly urbanizing early 20th century America. U.S. cities were seedbeds of all sorts of sin, fueled by a demonic matrix of saloons. In associating urbanism with decay, Prohibitionists relied on a familiar moral geography: The heartland is home to hardworking, God-fearing Americans, overlooked by corrupt big-city politicians.
Writing in the 1950s, the historian Richard Hofstadter understood Prohibition as a “rural-evangelical virus” that had run its course. But MAGA’s disdain for urban life is evidence of a new strain. While the association of agrarian life with virtue is as old as the Republic, Trump’s incessant harangues of American cities as “cesspools” and “hellholes” owes much to Prohibition — the first mass upswelling to cast the metropolis as America’s infernal underbelly.
It wasn’t only sophisticated urbanites, leisurely imbibing over cosmopolitan conversation, that raised the hackles of Prohibitionists. As with MAGA, all the rhetoric about the decadence of cities was a red herring — the real target of Prohibitionist animus was working-class immigrants flocking to American cities in the 1910s, nudging Prohibition to a critical mass of resentment.
The most draconian law enforcement efforts of the era took aim at immigrant watering holes. Much as rebellion served as pretense for the Trump administration’s deployment of the military to Los Angeles to punish immigrant communities, the wickedness of alcohol served those purposes for Prohibitionists. Both movements packaged their nativism in appeals to security and safety.
Like MAGA, Prohibition made for fantastical politics, difficult to disentangle from conspiracy theories. Prohibitionists exploited public health concerns to foment a racial mythos. Before the Constitution was amended, Prohibition had already vaulted to victory in the old Confederacy, beginning with Georgia in 1907. Prohibition’s catalyst in the South was a racist trope of African American men as insatiable sexual predators under the influence. The racial anxiety underpinning Prohibition was so pervasive that the president of Harvard went so far as to claim that alcoholism threatened the survival of the white race. MAGA ideology is likewise envenomed by a frenzied morass of falsehoods such as the Great Replacement Theory and antisemitism.
The evangelists of Prohibition readily conflated the depravities of alcohol and sex — both flowed from the same carnal tap, demanding a policy of abstinence to facilitate national redemption. Temperance advocates opposed early efforts to expand access to birth control and sex education, and the vanguard of the movement, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, played a decisive role in the passage of the Mann Act in 1910, a federal statute used to prosecute interracial and extramarital sex.
MAGA likewise succeeded in rescinding federally protected reproductive rights, placing constitutional rights to birth control, same-sex marriage, consensual sexual activity and self-determination of medical treatment on shaky ground. Transgender people have been excised from military service, imputed an undisciplined lifestyle. And MAGA has its pitchforks set on quashing other proclaimed perversions by erasing gay and transgender people from school curricula, abolishing no-fault divorce, criminalizing pornography and banning books on sexuality.
The politics of mass paternalism that Prohibitionists pioneered and MAGA inherited is anathema to liberal democracy, but it cannot be wholly defeated by the liberals’ favorite recourse — court rooms and constitutional procedures. The problem is not merely a MAGA Supreme Court enamored with maximizing executive power.
The more vexing dilemma is that constitutional democracies require civil society underpinnings to sustain themselves. An overreliance on political institutions risks neglecting social action in the civil sphere capable of cultivating the liberal sensibilities presupposed by those institutions. America’s foremost theorist of democracy, John Dewey, wrote, “A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a form of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.”
Prohibition was defeated not because it ran afoul of a constitutional precept; rather, Prohibition fell because it attacked associations that Americans held dear. There was dissonance between the political regime of Prohibition and the social experience of American democracy.
Everyday citizens enhanced that dissonance, creating a counterculture of speakeasies, bringing Americans of all backgrounds — immigrants, African Americans, women — together to drink, dance and play jazz. The pluralism that Prohibitionists aimed to avert was already in bloom.
And laborers reclaimed the prerogatives of leisure and frivolity, turning the Prohibitionists’ favored caricature of immigrant workers as drunkards and sloths on its head by taking pause from the workbench to march boisterously through city streets with signs that read, “WE WANT BEER.”
Prohibitionists feared big city bacchanalia, and that is precisely what a coalition of immigrant workers gave them in 1933 when FDR signed legislation legalizing the sale of beer.
The reasons to wish to live in a liberal democracy exceed well-crafted constitutional arguments. As we make those arguments, we also need to remind Americans why they should care. The answers anti-Prohibitionists offered a century ago remain relevant: the joy of self-rule in our associations, and the experience of revelry with others.
As you raise your glass this Labor Day, offer a libation for liberal democracy.
Maxwell G. Burkey, Ph.D., is assistant professor of political science at Kean University.
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