[toyg]

> pretty much everyone associates puritanism with the right-wing

That "everyone" must be old. The new phenomena are already lampooned in plenty of memes. The boomers aged pretty badly.

> It's not out of a hatred of alcohol that drinking ages exist, it's because alcohol abuse has been proven to ruin lives

If that were the case, alcohol would just be banned outright. The limits are basically virtual anyway, anybody can attest that getting alcohol is trivial once you start to really want it. Just like porn.

A lot of law is effectively performative morality, and no more so than in the area of personal pleasures. Prohibitionism always fails, eventually, because people want to feel.