Why do the political commentators I follow presume that mass political mobilization would lead to a 21st century New Deal and not 21st century Prohibition?

As I’ve skimmed my social feeds for early takes on what lessons to draw from the outcome of the 2024 presidential election there is a particular strain of commentary that has left me with the question found in the title to this post: why do political commentators in my feeds think mass mobilization will lead to a new Progressive era and not be defined by similar predilections of Prohibition social reformers?

This commentary is best encapsulated in a post that was released after Trump’s first victory in 2016:

I think both of these leave out an even more important fact about American politics. That is, that there is enormous slack in the political system. Put differently, it is that most people are unmobilized.

There just isn’t any evidence to suggest that there is a political participation gene that you either have or lack. There’s no reason to think that people cannot be mobilized. But there is plenty of reason to believe that elites often prefer to act without such mobilization, or to ensure that it is deployed in very selective and circumscribed ways.

The article referenced here starts by arguing that the culture war theory of polarizing worldviews/values and the money-in-politics/Citizens United related commentary are dangerously disempowering, because they imply that individuals have little agency or ability to change momentum implied in those social theories. I am somewhat convinced by the essay that cultural values polarization or money in politics are not the only drivers or explainers for how we ended up in our current U.S. political moment, but this sort of commentary is always tinged with a sort of pollyann-ish assertion that if we could just get “the people” organized, through both individual outreach to neighbors and systemically through institutional movement (like unionization efforts) it would lead to a wave of reform that favors Progressive or leftist social projects.

I’d welcome a robust rebuttal to my skeptical question–I acknowledge that I have not a depth of knowledge of progressive era history in the U.S. to reach a definitive conclusion. But I just see buried behind the “get the people organized” argument an assumption that once their organized they are going to favor your (meaning leftist) priorities. That’s where my inclusion of Prohibition enters this reflection. All that social reformer energy from the progressive era may have buoyed the interests of labor, but that energy was also unleashed in a negatively consequential way by the Anti Saloon League. Why not presume a similar potential outcome today?