“Prohibition,” a three-part miniseries that airs starting tonight on PBS and comes out on DVD and Blu-Ray this week, has many lessons to teach us about such antiquated, 1920s-era ideas as federal overreach, unfunded mandates to states, runaway taxation, a belief that great political leaders can accelerate human progress, crony capitalism, and of course the dire need of Washington to take steps to improve the lot of the poor and the children.

In other words, “Prohibition” is, to an almost mischievous extent, an investigative report about 2011…

The many flaws in progressivism — the top-down, big-government, high-taxation model that seeks controls for benevolent reasons yet invariably falls prey to corruption — are as blatant today as they are in Burns and Novick’s film. Even the evangelist movement that underlay the temperance /abstinence movement has persisted virtually unchanged — except now the literal evangelists are sad and comical figures with no influence on anybody except their marginalized congregations. In the 21st century, the real action, the influential leaders with immense followings whose numbers include the most powerful members of the media, are in eco-vangelism.