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Notes -
As far as I know, prohibition measures in the US, enacted on state level many years, even decades before 1920 in multiple cases, were a long-term indirect consequence of the massive culling of men in the Civil War. A lopsided operational sex ratio (yeah, I just found this phrase on Wikipedia) that favors men inevitably leads to an overall loosening of social norms concerning men’s behavior, which in turn invites backlash on the part of the church lady demographic. This isn’t surprising. Gorbachov’s anti-alcohol campaign in the USSR was driven by the same fundamental considerations, presumably. (According to the 1959 Soviet census, the male-to-female sex ratio among the 35-50-yrs-old cohort was a whopping 4:7. )
I’m wondering if similar social forces are at play in South Africa now.
Though the wider point is a great one, it's not really applicable to SA. The prohibitions were just covid measures - they're seen in retrospect as weird/funny, and there's no appetite to bring them back. More generally, SA politics is not very grassroots, things like that are largely determined in smoke-filled rooms by party elites rather than by social coalitions.
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