Despite most experts’ avowed lack of a political agenda, social media and cable news gave public health a partisan valence that it was never meant to have. And, given that the public-health establishment has been advising against alcohol at least since Benjamin Rush published “An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits on the Human Body and Mind,” in 1784, the effort to curb Americans’ drinking inevitably began to look like a progressive project.
“There’s a kind of risk aversion that you tend to associate with liberal politics,” Edward Slingerland, a philosophy professor at the University of British Columbia and Dartmouth, said, of abstaining from alcohol. In 2021, Slingerland published a history of drinking, appropriately titled “Drunk.” The public-health establishment “wants to do everything it can to reduce risk to zero and sees risk reduction as the primary goal, rather than community or enjoying life.”
Arguably, the relationship between progressivism and teetotalism was further cemented during the Biden Administration. In the waning days of Biden’s Presidency, Vivek H. Murthy, then the U.S. Surgeon General, issued a twenty-two-page guidance that described a “causal relationship” between alcohol and seven types of cancer. The guidance called for warning labels on alcohol containers, similar to those on cigarette packs. Conservatives were inherently suspicious of the guidance, given that Murthy was also an advocate of COVID vaccines and gun control. (Murthy declined to comment for this article.) A headline in the National Review proclaimed “Alcohol Warning Labels Are Nanny Statism at Its Worst.” (The magazine’s founder, William F. Buckley, Jr., was fond of white wine with a splash of crème de cassis, an apéritif known as the Kir.)
After spending much of 2025 dismantling the U.S.’s public-health infrastructure, the Trump Administration ushered in Dry January 2026 with new dietary guidelines that eliminated the recommendation that men consume no more than two drinks per day, and that women keep to one. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, issued pithier advice about alcohol: “Don’t have it for breakfast.”
It surprised me, then, that, when I interviewed Oz, earlier this month, he approved of Dry January. He compared the practice to other types of hormetic shock—a low-dose exposure to something toxic or harmful that provides the body with a beneficial jolt—such as taking a cold plunge or fasting intermittently. “It’s taking you out of your comfort zone, if you’ve been drinking a little too much,” he said. “It reboots the system.”
Oz acknowledged that, “on a pure science basis,” the link between alcohol consumption and cancer made by Murthy was “accurate.” He clarified that, although his recommendations differed, they did not amount to an endorsement of drinking. “I would not tell someone to drink to be healthy,” he said.
Oz’s views on alcohol were shaped by a trip to the Italian island of Sardinia, where he watched “little old men” gather every day to drink small glasses of wine, sitting together for hours on end. “You can’t possibly get drunk on this stuff,” he told me. Nor was getting drunk the point. “The fact that it allows you to have a ritual that’s associated with social connection, that’s also going to relieve your stress, that, I think, is part of the benefit.”
Stress is a concept that plenty of people, particularly those on the political left, are familiar with right now. Though it’s tempting to frame Wet January as right-wing-coded, given the Trump Administration’s approach to alcohol guidance, the drumbeat of dispiriting news—Greenland, Minneapolis, take your pick—also has liberals reaching for the bottle right now. Earlier in January, Politico reported that Kaja Kallas, the vice-president of the European Commission, “privately told lawmakers the state of the world meant it might be a ‘good moment’ to start drinking.” Lucy M. McBride, an internist based in Washington, D.C., who writes a newsletter about medicine, told me, over e-mail, “I think the backlash to Dry January is a symptom of people’s general exhaustion (look at the world we live in!).”
McBride has mixed feelings about Dry January. It works for some people, she said, but it can also function as “a month-long hall pass where people avoid examining their actual relationship with alcohol.” She went on, “For many people, a better approach is year-round curiosity about alcohol, turning the focus from willpower testing to consciousness and intentionality about health.” Ideally, Dry January would be a jumping-off point for a conversation with your doctor about alcohol consumption more broadly. But, according to a 2023 study by the National Association of Community Health Centers, more than a hundred million Americans lack a primary-care physician—the kind of approachable practitioner who can go through alcohol’s dangers with a patient. “A lot of people throw up their hands. They just say, ‘Screw it,’ ” McBride told me.
