The Unconvincing Semi-Socialism of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’

The Unconvincing Semi-Socialism of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’

The Unconvincing Semi-Socialism of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’

Many small towns are “backward” in a likable way, but I have never seen one so Norman-Rockwellish.

Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky
Pocket
Email

This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, here.

Excerpted from the February 15, 1947 Issue

It’s a Wonderful Life is a movie about a local boy who stays local, doesn’t make good, and becomes so unhappy that he wishes he had never been born. An angel named Clarence shows him what his family, friends, and town would have been like if he hadn’t been.

One important function of good art or entertainment is to unite and illuminate the heart and the mind, to cause each to learn from, and to enhance, the experience of the other. Bad art and entertainment misinform and disunite them. Much too often this movie appeals to the heart at the expense of the mind; at other times it urgently demands of the heart that it treat with contempt the mind’s efforts to keep its integrity; at still other times the heart is simply used, on the mind, as a truncheon. I mistrust any work which tries to persuade me—or rather, which assumes that I assume—that there is so much good in nearly all the worst of us that all it needs is a proper chance and example, to take complete control. I mistrust even more deeply the assumption, so comfortably stylish these days, that whether people turn out well or ill depends overwhelmingly on outside circumstances and scarcely if at all on their own moral intelligence and courage.

At its best, which is usually inextricable with its worst, this movie is a very taking sermon about the feasibility of a kind of Christian semi-socialism, a society founded on affection, kindliness, and trust. Its chief mistake or sin—an enormous one—is its refusal to face the fact that evil is intrinsic in each individual. It interests me, by the way, that in representing a twentieth-century American town Frank Capra idealizes so much that seems essentially nineteenth-century. Many small towns are “backward” in that likable way, but I have never seen one so Norman-Rockwellish as all that. Capra’s villainous capitalist is a hundred per cent Charles Dickens. His New Capitalist is a blithe, tough, harmless fellow, and cables the hero a huge check, when it is most needed, purely out of the goodness of his heart. Like Stewart, he is obviously the salt of the earth. Some day I hope to meet him.

James Agee (1909–1955) was The Nation’s film critic from 1942 to 1948. “In my opinion,” W.H. Auden wrote of Agee in a letter to the editor, “his column is the most remarkable regular event in American journalism today.” 

Be part of 160 years of confronting power 


Every day,
The Nation exposes the administration’s unchecked and reckless abuses of power through clear-eyed, uncompromising independent journalism—the kind of journalism that holds the powerful to account and helps build alternatives to the world we live in now. 

We have just the right people to confront this moment. Speaking on Democracy Now!, Nation DC Bureau chief Chris Lehmann translated the complex terms of the budget bill into the plain truth, describing it as “the single largest upward redistribution of wealth effectuated by any piece of legislation in our history.” In the pages of the June print issue and on The Nation Podcast, Jacob Silverman dove deep into how crypto has captured American campaign finance, revealing that it was the top donor in the 2024 elections as an industry and won nearly every race it supported.

This is all in addition to The Nation’s exceptional coverage of matters of war and peace, the courts, reproductive justice, climate, immigration, healthcare, and much more.

Our 160-year history of sounding the alarm on presidential overreach and the persecution of dissent has prepared us for this moment. 2025 marks a new chapter in this history, and we need you to be part of it.

We’re aiming to raise $20,000 during our June Fundraising Campaign to fund our change-making reporting and analysis. Stand for bold, independent journalism and donate to support The Nation today.

Onward, 

Katrina vanden Heuvel 
Publisher, The Nation

Ad Policy
x