Falling Cheers in America

A spectre is haunting America — the spectre of abstinence!

No, I’m not railing about a lack of whoopee, although a U.S. of Eh! that isn’t tumbling in the hay is a problem. (Maybe all that adolescent anxiety so fretted about would lighten if hormonally angsty sophomores would let nature take its libidinal course in the rear of a relative’s rusted hatchback.)

In a country founded by uptight Puritans, bouts of vice-shame periodically arise. Abolition; prohibition; blue laws; curtailing public smoking; affirmative action—all have been the result of American repentance. These interdictions were enforced by democratically enacted legislation. But what of this new forswearing, that has nothing to do with bills or regulations?

The nominative-dystopian firm Monitoring the Future reports that youthful drinking has hit an unprecedented bottom. The abstentia-dive is a shock to anyone over the age of 30 who watered down their stepmom’s tequila bottle. Back in the hairy 70s, over 90 percent of high school seniors admitted to taking a swallow or two of fun suds. Last year? Less than half of matriculating students copped to the occasional imbibing. Should this trend continue apace, Carrie Nation will break from Hell to take the nation’s reins, unresisted.

Sunny-side columnist Arthur Brooks is glum about the lack of teenage tippling. But his concern is more abstract. He writes, “the new finding also indicates a trend that is distinctly less cheery: an unwillingness to take risks associated with adult behaviors.”

Risk-taking, Brooks avers, doesn’t just lead to maturity—steel only forged by fire and the like—but is essential to America’s dynamic success. A generation unwilling to beat its own path won’t vote to maintain chancer capitalism. Softened, weakened, enervated, the plaintive young will settle for easy redistributionism, convinced cushy life is the product of a lone vote.

Brooks may have a point—a finger or two of incisive observation. But there is more fundamentally wrong with a drying cohort.

Economist Christopher Snowden sees the lack of regular soaking as an existential threat. He decries all manner of “sober influencers,” which may sound like it applies to wrinkled Sunday School teachers, but refers to “gym bros and longevity-obsessed billionaires” who shout through jump-cut vertical videos that you’ll never rise above a lumpy-couch existence if you don’t drop booze. Temperance isn’t a plight exclusive to the underage. Gallup reports that only half of Americans routinely get a bun on, the lowest rate in the poll’s recorded history. Kentucky, that great bourbon-pumping well, houses 16 million untapped barrels of devil’s buttermilk. It’s a dark day when Jack Daniels struggles to ply his wares.

The mass unlushing, Snowden suggests, is no less than a foul omen for Western civilization. Citing philosopher Edward Slingerland, he avows modern liberal society was built on a foundation of empties. Liquor “loosens the tongue, emboldens the heart and lightens the soul.” It even inspires normal, workaday men to, after a few draughts with the boys, drop bourgeois inhibition and rise up violently against their tax-happy oppressors. “Rum and whiskey. Cider and beer and porter. Wine and brandy. Punch and syllabub…these drinks helped disparate colonists become Americans,” scholar Brooke Barbier argued in Cocked and Boozy: An Intoxicating History of the American Revolution.

Noble and inspiring it may be to watch a ragged working stiff down copious fathoms of brave juice, pull out his phone, dial up his boss, and let loose a string of expletives so severe that John Winthrop’s grave would crack and crumble, that’s not reason enough to fear America shrugging off the sauce. The dram-drop-off is a deficiency of a first-order good.

Roger Sterling, as always, can’t be topped: “My generation, we drink because it’s good, because it feels better than unbuttoning your collar, because we deserve it. We drink because it’s what men do.” His generation was one and the same of those who bashed the blamed Nazis and showed up the French in dipsomania while doing so. After liberating the cheese-eating surrender monkeys, the ruddy Yanks frigated home to build the modern economy, with the hard-driving nine-to-five, followed by bibulous evening, served chilled in a long-stemmed V glass by your gravid wife.

These men, while no fewer than one enjoyed a nooner, treated potent potables as they should be treated: a reward for a hard day’s toil. Alcohol encouraged the famous Protestant work ethic, promising a pleasant lift after hours of busting pick. When famous fuddler Norman Mailer begged off the highballs, he lamented “[i]t just means there’s nothing to look forward to at the end of the day.”

Non-drinkers are unbearable bores, parched of humor and joviality. Consider the sozzle-scoffers in your workplace. They’re almost certainly shirty tattles who run to H.R. seconds after hearing an off-color joke about F.B.I. crime statistics. Or listen to the Twitter drips warning that bracers have “no single benefit.” Not one? The endorphin rush from the first sip of an ice-cold ale has been one of the biggest benefits to all of mankind throughout history. It sure beats downing a G.N.C. industrial-size canister of S.S.R.I.s.

Steven Bartlett, who, as far as I can tell, is one of those celebrity C.E.O.s who doesn’t produce anything other than make viral speeches about waking up at 4:30 AM to check futures prices in Tokyo, made headlines for decrying a three-day hangover he suffered after downing three glasses of wine. Of course, his sluggardness wasn’t the grape’s error; it was a personal skills issue.

Spirits, like anything quaffed, can have a varying effect on the lapper. But there’s a word reserved for those who, by biological build or temperament, can’t hold their grog. They’re weenies. Whether sipping a sole glass of Pouilly-Fuissé, or downing an Igloo decanter of neon-red rotgut, drinking alcohol is a good and fun thing. End of argument. Cin cin!