One minor but arresting fact of U.S. history is the huge amount of alcohol the average American consumed in 1830: 7.1 undiluted gallons a year, the equivalent of four shots of 80-proof whiskey every day. Assuming some children wimped out after the first drink, this statistic suggests that large numbers of Jacksonian-era adults were rolling eight belts deep seven days a week, with all the attendant implications for social and political life. Imagine what it was like resolving a buggy accident, let alone conducting a presidential election.

Much has been said about Americans’ supposed national virtues—the mercantile ambition, the Protestant work ethic, the rugged individualism—and the particular character they lend the United States, but comparatively little has been said about national vices. Give your 19th-century plowman a dozen hard ciders, though, and see whether that plays a more significant role in his evening than his urge to pull himself up by his bootstraps. Just as personal vices can shape the course of an individual life, so too can national vices influence our collective experience, maybe as much as our virtues—or possibly even more. And those vices are changing.

Compared with our forebears, Americans barely drink now: a mere 2.5 gallons per capita in 2022. The more striking change, though, is that in a Gallup poll released in August, only 54 percent of respondents said the