Dry Drunk Nation

We’ve had 18 years of dry drunks in the White House. We need real sobriety.

This article first appeared in The New Republic.

Hunter Biden is back, seven years drug-free, and spoiling for social media fights. He’s won kudos for his (only slightly creaky) clapbacks to his haters. “Hunter went from smoking crack to smoking MAGAs,” observed one fan last week.

Last seen advising his father to defy common sense by staying in the 2024 presidential race, Hunter is today owning his crackhead days and flexing his recovery from addiction. He’s even launched a kind of secular ministry with the hope, he says, of “giving people the space to talk about what they’re going through” and helping them see “the incredible promises they can receive if they stay the course” of recovery.

What’s novel about this coming-out is not that Biden, who has been through the wringer, now abstains from alcohol and drugs. Teetotaling in public life is extremely common. Instead, the surprise is that he’s expressing a moral ideal we haven’t seen in U.S. politics in a long, long time: a form of sobriety that is much more rigorous than mere abstinence from drugs and alcohol.

Alcoholics Anonymous, which Biden has participated in, sees sobriety as a kind of sacred condition, one contingent on much more than a person’s blood alcohol content. Sobriety requires a daily commitment to a set of moral and spiritual precepts, including honesty, humility, accountability, solidarity, and service.