The Tea Party Was Alive and Well 100 years ago

Ken Burn's Prohibition was rerun over the past two weeks and I watched it more completely this time.  I was struck by the similarity between the Prohibitionists and the Tea Party today.  Both were/are dominated by religious rural white people who believe in the moral superiority of their position to what the people on the other side believe.

Prohibition failed for several big reasons which include exceptions were made for religious reasons allowing Catholics and Jews to have wine made and economic reasons, farmers had to be allowed to utilize their excess apples to made hard cider.  Also, alcoholic products were allowed to be deemed as medicinal.  Domestic production to satisfy this legal demand was allowed.  Also, the U.S. is not an island excluded from the influence of what other countries allow and what the free market system will do to create a profit.  Alcohol was manufactured in other countries and smuggled into the U.S.

But this overlap of legal and illegal led to a dominance in many places of the power of the illegal profits and what was involved in the maintenance of that cash flow.  Gang warfare and the Mob grew in stature as a direct result of this.

The consequences of all this were varied, but not least of all, the wealth and power of these gangs/Mob almost certainly led to their dominance of various unions and the importation of drugs, which fostered both domestic demand and foreign production, with all the commiserate problems for lawful society in the countries where illegal drugs are produced today.

There is also a book out now on Prohibition and the book review today credits the author with identifying two critical result of Prohibition.  The 1st is how the enforcers of the Volstead Act targeted immigrant and black communities at a time when those communities were growing in number at a faster rate than the "Dry" communities were.  And that enforcement was both selective, fed corruption in the policing, and in some parts of the country a tool of racists policy enforcement.  The 2nd is how the actual law enforcement led to birth of big government.  Federal police powers grew, wire tapping was developed, jail construction was expanded and directly fed the belief that the Federal Government could develop solutions for other problems of society, such as poverty, protecting labor, and controlling racism.  The 3rd result was that the complete horror of crime, corruption, uneven enforcement, and loss of tax revenue from sin taxes generated widespread support for ending Prohibition.

What are the lessons for today?  Well, it is too soon to know how the Tea Party will play out, what success they will have in the 2016 election and which policies they might further implement that inflame widespread tolerance of newly illegal things.  But we can see the lessons in some states legalizing pot, while other states do not.  We have already seen the consequences of uneven health insurance while requiring hospitals to provide health services to the uninsured and now the uneven application of the solution.  And one can only wonder what the country will look like if there is an actual effort to find and deport 11 million undocumented immigrants.

What Prohibition should teach everyone is that if a policy over reaches and there is widespread disagreement with a policy, there will be political turmoil, reactions to that turmoil, and consequences of that turmoil.

That is why policies that are implemented are best if there is support for those policies in both political parties and those solutions to problems implemented uniformly by both political parties, recognizing that at the state level regional differences will result in certain differences being tolerated.