Summary

Rapid cultural transformations are achieving a centuries-old reformist goal: the eradication of alcohol from American life. This transformation increasingly is Republican-coded — surprising, given that the party has in recent years been identified with personal freedom, over and against the dour safety-ism of the pandemic Left.

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 doesnt 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 dont 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 dont 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.

Across the board, alcohol consumption is declining — men, women, white, nonwhite, rich, poor. Biohackers like Bryan Johns

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