“Those were drinking days, and most men drank hard. So very great is the improvement time has brought about in such habits, that a moderate statement of the quantity of wine and punch which one man would swallow in the course of a night, without any detriment to his reputation as a perfect gentleman, would seem, in these days, a ridiculous exaggeration.”

So wrote Dickens about late 18th-century England, though he also could have been describing the United States for much of its history. Americans were once almost Russian-like in their bottomless appetites for alcohol. During the 1830s, they spent more money on booze than the entire expenditures of the federal government (sounds like a properly ordered society to me!). This national compulsion helped define the American character, yet it also brought about a severe pushback.

That counterpunch came in the form of Prohibition, the ban of all manufactures and sales of alcohol within the United States, which was repealed with the ratification of the 21st Amendment 87 years ago Saturday. Prohibition had actually effectively ended months before, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt had signed into law the Cullen-Harrison Act, which had legalized some low-alcohol beers and wines, and despite the grind of the Great Depression, Americans had partied heartily. Since hooch had been hoosegowed 14 years earlier, the country had been through an economic boom, an economic bust, a loosening of sexual mores, a revolution in the rights of women, a rash of organized crime, and a new contempt for the law among a population that badly wanted to drink. The United States had become a different place, and Prohibition, once viewed as forward-thinking, seemed obsolete.

That isn’t to say that its advocates didn’t have their reasons. America before Prohibition was drowning in booze, which was in turn exacerbating a number of social ills, including domestic abuse. It was no coincidence that the earliest supporters of Prohibition were women—they were trying to save their families from what they viewed as alcohol’s corrupting influence on their husbands. Prohibition was also inextricably linked with low-church Protestant Christianity, which saw the devil in drink and was determined to stamp out sin. It thus pitted two distinctly American traditions against each other: our prairie-fire capacity for self-improvement and our desire to drink freely. And it worked to a point: consumption of alcohol under Prohibition at first came down, though the unreliability of statistics at the time makes it difficult to know by how much.

Yet whatever the initial merits of the Dry cause, they quickly gave way to a hunt for witches. Temperance and Prohibition advocates blamed alcohol for every societal demon and touted its banishment as tantamount to building a new Jerusalem. They instituted temperance classes in public schools that brainwashed students into believing, among other gems, that drinking could cause you to spontaneously combust (this is why we hydrate, people!). They callously dismissed those who died after being poisoned by bad alcohol. They refused any attempt to tweak the Volstead Act, the draconian law that enforced the 18th Amendment, instead demanding ever-harsher crackdowns.

There was nothing remotely conservative about any of this; the Prohibitionists were radical progressive populists to their marrow. And with them stomped in all the excesses that can accompany populism: the reduction of complex problems to panaceas; the application of religious fervor to politics; the belief that man can be perfected by the state; the blindness to unintended consequences; the use of policymaking for a moralizing rush without ever thinking through what comes next; the fundamentalist’s insistence on greater purity when things don’t work out as planned; the casting of the world into black and white. Prohibitionists were vehemently anti-city, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant. Their final push came amid World War I, when Woodrow Wilson was busy stirring up animus against German Americans, who also happened to own most of the big beer companies.

Whatever you think about the right-wing populism of today—and I think there’s plenty to like—Prohibition provides a cautionary tale of a moralizing populism gone hideously wrong. This was a senseless and wicked policy, a fanatically hubristic attempt to snuff out that which man had been enjoying for 9,000 years. Winston Churchill once described it, much too kindly, as “an affront to the whole history of mankind.” Its costs are measured not just in the GDP and the crime rate, but in those things invisible to the dismal scientists: dinners a little less merry, dates a little more inhibited, friendships never struck up, parties lacking a certain panache. To reform America’s saloon culture this way was to dispose of an infested old sofa by burning down the entire neighborhood.

And while we like to think we’ve moved on from Prohibition, this impulse still lurks within us. The world will always have its demented and screeching Carrie Nations, its dogmatic and irony-proofed Wayne Wheelers. The best counter to them is to take a realistic view of man, to remember how difficult he is to fundamentally reshape and how much destruction has been wrought by those who have tried. And then we should raise a drink. To the frustration of the social purifiers and the end to an age of madness.