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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,........

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