It only took a brief aside between a right-wing pundit and a sitting governor to reveal the newest, weirdest front in America’s long simmering “war on alcohol.” The comment generated scant coverage from mainstream media outlets and went largely unremarked upon by the nation’s pundits. But when, on a podcast last March, the late Charlie Kirk told California’s Gavin Newsom that he no longer drank, you could almost hear the record scratch.
“You don’t [drink]?” said the governor, who co-owns multiple wineries. Kirk responded that he used to.
“That’s interesting. What happened? A couple years ago, you stopped?” asked the governor.
“I just wanted to be more successful,” replied the Republican operative.
“I love that,” Newsom said.
For decades, executives of America’s “beverage-alcohol industry”—as the centi-billion-dollar agglomeration of brewers, winemakers, distillers, and distributors prefers to be known—have worked themselves into a lather over a “neo-Prohibition” simmering within the World Health Organization and the national health agencies it advises. A legion of killjoy scientists, nanny-state bureaucrats, and do-gooder religious zealots, they have warned, are conspiring in the public health ether to once again ignobly foist the noble experiment upon the American drinking public. There are kernels of truth in the industry’s campfire tales, as there usually are, but not when it comes to laws or regulations. Since the Trump administration retook control over the federal public health establishment, it has cleared the road of serious regulatory threats to the industry from liberal institutions. Paradoxically, this victory has coincided with a curious cultural loss for Big Booze. Like never before, the upper echelons of America’s contemporary right wing—traditional allies in the fight against odious concepts like “science” and “society”—not just are abstaining from but are speaking out against alcohol. And it’s not a problem lobbying can fix.
In August 2025, Gallup released the results of its annual “Consumption Habits” survey, finding that just 54 percent of Americans said they drank alcohol. It was the lowest proportion in the nearly 90-year history of the poll, and it caused a fresh wave of consternation in Big Booze boardrooms already distraught over reports of “sober-curious” Zoomers and the power of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic to curb cravings for alcohol. From the survey’s cross-tabs came an even more shocking result: Gallup recorded “a sharp drop in reported drinking among Republicans (falling 19 points, to 46%) but not Democrats (holding fairly steady at 61%).” The news had the makings of a bizarre reversal for an industry that has woven brands like Jack Daniel’s and Coors Light so tightly into the fabric of white, pastoral Americana favored by the GOP. As the Financial Times declared in a headline at the time: “Republicans: America’s Teetotalers.” Could it really be?
Many of the right’s most revered figures are dry. Donald Trump is the most prominent teetotaler in the Republican universe. Tucker Carlson is a recovering alcoholic who’s been off the sauce since 2002 and favors the mind-expanding buzz of Zyn nicotine pouches. Joe Rogan, the Pied Piper of protein-addled Cybertruck owners, quit drinking in 2025. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former heroin addict, is known to abstain; conservative propagandist Dennis Prager has spoken at length about his son’s sobriety; Elon Musk reportedly favors ketamine to cocktails.
Yet none of these MAGA-lebrities have leveraged their sway over the red-hatted base to build momentum for a neo-Prohibition. Trump himself has marketed vodka in the past, and his son Eric owns a winery in Virginia. A political movement against booze, this ain’t—not yet, at least. Critiques from more outspoken opponents like YouTube Svengali Jordan Peterson and fitness/misogyny enthusiast Andrew Tate suggest that downstream of individual health choices, rejecting alcohol currently serves more of a symbolic function—a performance of in-group values more than an abstinence call to arms. These broadsides against booze draw from some common principles. Alcohol is unhealthy, decadent, unproductive, and, above all, not masculine. The strains of logic—and some of it is strained—have reinforced one another over time. Alcohol culture is “woke,” alt-right influencer Mike Cernovich tweeted in 2023. “Boozing means participating in cultural rot.” Two years later, and even more succinctly, Clavicular, the rising right-adjacent influencer, declared alcohol a “looksmin,” antithetical to the goal of some Gen Z males to “looksmax” or be as conventionally attractive as possible.
This factional dogma is not always coherent with itself, let alone with American history. “It’s a strange view of masculinity,” said Lisa Jacobson, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of the 2024 book Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey after Prohibition. “Traditionally, the measure or the test of masculinity was, ‘Can you hold your liquor?’” In the run-up to Prohibition proper, she said, the Drys took aim at this (literally toxic) masculinity by framing alcohol as a destructive vice that was wrecking homes and robbing the economy of productive labor.
The history of the repeal of Prohibition offers a clue to the origins of this modern tension, albeit a grim one. “Anti-Prohibitionists were very much about connecting alcohol to pluralism, to a kind of cosmopolitan secularism, to [...] a new vision of sociability in which men and women drank together,” Jacobson said. During World War II, alcohol was promoted by both the industry and the federal government by tightly linking it to “the values we are fighting to defend [...] that separate us from the fascist enemy,” she continued, intoning a hypothetical newsreel line. “We are fighting for a vision of the world that’s a little bit more inclusive.” In this paradigm, twenty-first-century right-wing antipathy toward alcohol looks less like an amalgam of legitimate health concerns, optimization hokum, and anti-corporate populism, and more like a rejection of small-l liberal society as such.
In his 2022 dissertation, the researcher Ben Elley studied how users of 4chan’s infamous /pol/ message board (“pol” is short for “politically incorrect”) “took the iron pill”—that is, radicalized themselves into a fitness-oriented fascism reminiscent of Benito Mussolini’s “New Man.”
“Following in the footsteps of the original fascists, the far-right on 4chan use politics to motivate self-improvement, and in so doing transform that self-improvement into a form of political action,” Elley wrote in a 2021 paper. In this heavily ironized, fully anonymized context, anodyne advice about workouts, nutrition, and self-discipline was traded freely as both ends unto themselves, and a means to save the nation—by force—from liberals’ depraved self-indulgence.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we were seeing the ‘iron pill’ in the far right early on, and now we’re seeing something sort of similar coming out of right-wing influencers,” he said. “Which [group] is actually leading the other? It’s a little bit hard to say, but I think they’re probably influencing each other.”
Still, that is all mostly happening on the margins—the larger story is more complicated than that buzzy Gallup poll suggests. Data-literate industry insiders have groused about Gallup’s methodology on this survey, noting that the sample size is small (around 1,000 people) and includes respondents 18 years old and up. “We know from other data sources that underage drinking has plunged, so some portion of this may be continued declines in 18-20 drinking,” Bart Watson, the former chief economist and current president of the Brewers Association, the country’s largest craft-brewing trade group, noted at the time. Crucially, Gallup’s poll is based on how much respondents say they drink, rather than how much they actually do. If you’ve ever lied to your physician about how many beers you typically have per week, you can see how that might pose load-bearing issues for surveys about national drinking habits.
Moreover, the jaw-dropping swing in Republican swigging came from the cross-tabs of Gallup’s poll, further whittling away the number of respondents into the hundreds. “It’s just a minuscule amount of people to make any insights about anything other than top-line public health concerns,” said Bourcard Nesin, senior beverage analyst at the Dutch agribusiness lender Rabobank, in a recent phone interview. No comprehensive behavioral study on drinking rates as related to party affiliation has been conducted in over a decade, but a cursory review of available sales and voter-demographic data that Nesin performed for The New Republic indicates no Republican tilt toward temperance. The opposite, in fact: “States that voted Republican are actually seeing better beer consumption than not,” he said. On balance, he added, conservatives “may be drinking less, but they’re not drinking less than Democrats are drinking less.”
There’s no evidence that rank-and-file Republican voters are heeding the call of mass abstinence, and many mainline GOP figures back booze as a matter of personal preference and political expedience. “If they want us to drink two beers a week, frankly they can kiss my ass,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas declared in 2023, gripping a longneck of Shiner Bock and trying to stoke outrage about unsubstantiated rumors that the Biden administration was preparing to reduce the recommended intake for American adults. But as Kirk’s teetotaling testimony demonstrated, the call is certainly being made by leaders on the right, some more prescriptively than others.
It’s easy, and perhaps tempting, then to view anti-alcohol activism with MAGA characteristics as coincidence, crankery, or both. It certainly has had no measurable effect on federal policymaking around alcohol. In fact, a year into the Trump administration, policy is heading in the other direction.
The booze industry may have had some sense that the fix was in when Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Oprah acolyte-turned-administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, stepped up to the dais on January 7 to announce the federal government’s new guidelines on drinking. In June 2025, Reuters had reported that RFK Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services was planning to eliminate Uncle Sam’s recommended limits on drinks-per-day for men and women in the 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, or DGAs; a few months later, Vox broke the news that HHS had effectively spiked a study strengthening the known linkage between alcohol and some forms of cancer. But Oz—who is a real doctor, despite playing one on TV—delivered a bigger gift to the business than even beverage-alcohol insiders had expected. “Alcohol is a social lubricant that brings people together,” he said, delivering a well-worn trade talking point. “In the best-case scenario, I don’t think you should drink alcohol, but it does allow people an excuse to bond and socialize, and there’s probably nothing healthier than having a good time with friends in a safe way.”
For the first time in the 46-year history of the DGAs, the document includes no per-day recommendation whatsoever. It was a huge victory for the industry, Nesin said, just the latest of many. “We’ve seen consistent reduction in tax burden for the industry in terms of ready-to-drink cocktails, and there is a very strong lobby for the alcohol industry in government,” he said. “Regardless of whether or not people in government are individually drinking ... that has in no way influenced the policy.”
Elley, well-versed in deciphering the mixed messaging of the right from his 4chan forays, offers a synthesis. “I wouldn’t expect [prominent right-wing teetotalers] to be that serious about the idea of actually wanting to enforce Prohibition, because alcohol serves all their purposes just by being there and being something they can say they don’t drink,” said Elley.
Call it sobriety as a signifier: an expedient way to broadcast self-discipline, business acumen, masculinity, and transgression to fellow travelers in MAGA-land. It’s a form of power-projection over louche libs that requires no ideological updates, intraparty knife fights, or tedious bureaucratic administration. Best of all?
No hangovers.
