Few Christmas movies inspire as many hot takes each year as It’s a Wonderful Life. The 1946 Frank Capra classic is a cinematic “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” for people who want to impose their novel political framework on an old film.
There are obvious, if not wholly intended, pro-life themes to any creative work that explores the terrible things that might happen to subsequent generations if any given person is never born in the first place. People argue about whether Mary Bailey, rather than her long-suffering husband George, is really the hero or whether she might have been better off as the spinster librarian instead of becoming the, well, wonderful wife. What does Clarence the angel know, anyway?
There have been plenty of attempts to reclaim the motion picture for socialism. The occasional, presumably self-deprecating, free-marketeer likes to float Mr. Potter being a better businessman than the Baileys, if not the unsung hero of the timeless holiday hit. And while the economy cannot run on sentimentality divorced from basic arithmetic, the angels give us a glimpse of what untrammeled Pottersville looks like, and it is neither very pretty nor probably particularly sustainable.
As we enter 2026, every political faction under the sun could likely benefit from the film’s message of gratitude, friendship, self-denial, and authentic community, in contrast with the identity-based “communities” we imagine for ourselves, which become especially easy to conjure in an age of atomism, alienation, and social media.
And there is a pleasantly warm take to be had that It’s a Wonderful Life has a lot to say about some current debates going on within conservatism and about the cultural contradictions of the American Right since the days of Jimmy Stewart’s friend Ronald Reagan. (No, none of this could possibly be intentional, since the film was written in the early years of postwar liberalism when no one currently shrieking at each other on the internet was alive, though Donald Trump was a few months old when it was released.)
The plot unwittingly pits Wilhelm Röpke’s humanistic, “Third Way” capitalism (John Zmirak’s early 2000s book is a good primer) against Ayn Rand’s more cutthroat version or, even worse, a caricature of the latter. Decades later, progressives took to calling Reagan’s two terms in the White House the “Decade of Greed,” and some self-styled conservatives adopted the phrase as a compliment and not (entirely) ironically hailed Gordon Gekko of Wall Street as a hero.
If the conservative realignment means anything (and the jury is still very much out on that question), it is the recognition that millions voted for Reagan hoping to preserve or even create Bedford Falls and in too many cases got Pottersville instead. And it was the prosperity of that era that was undone in no small part by debt and overconsumption rather than some imagined excess of personal generosity.
But the moral of the film wasn’t socialism, universal basic income, or the idea of a distant capital helping the local community Build Back Better, with the exception of the Keynesian benefits that flowed to Sam Wainwright’s plastics business from World War II. Even the Baileys’ building and loan association needed to stay in business as a private entity. Instead, it revolved around widely distributed private property, the dignity of work, deferred gratification, and a reasonable amount of self-sacrifice.
George Bailey constantly puts others’ needs ahead of his own and puts his own dreams on hold for the sake of the community. Despite possessing these virtues—and perhaps because he possessed them—he isn’t portrayed as a saint or superhero. In fact, he spends much of the film grumbling, throwing temper tantrums, and acting like a jerk. (Though even at his lowest moment, the angels knew he would abandon his life insurance–motivated suicide attempt in order to save someone else from drowning.)
Then again, maybe the whole story means that the American working class needs God and real community more than it should yearn for government or political saviors, even if some of the folks auditioning for the job have mastered the art of cinematic storytelling themselves.
Politicizing your holiday favorites in order to write a column in the waning days of December? Bah, humbug. Are there no workhouses?
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