Pope Leo recently said his favorite movie of all time was It’s a Wonderful Life.
Mine too. I first watched it when I was a kid in the early 1950s. For years, it was shown the week before Christmas. I loved it. Still do.
The pope’s and my favorite movie has a lot to tell us about where America is right now, and the scourge of Donald Trump.
If you don’t already know it, the central conflict in the movie is between Mr. Potter (played by Lionel Barrymore) and George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart).
Potter is a greedy, cruel banker. In his Social Darwinist view of America, people compete with one another for scarce resources. Those who succeed deserve to win because they’ve outrun everyone else in that competitive race.
Potter, in other words, is Trump.
George is the generous, honorable head of Bedford Falls’ building-and-loan company, the one entity standing in the way of Potter’s total domination of the town.
After the death of George’s father, who founded the building-and-loan company, Potter — who sits on the bank’s board — seeks to dissolve it. Potter claims George’s father “was not a businessman. He was a man of high ideals, so-called, but ideals without common sense can ruin a town.” For Potter, common sense is not coddling the “discontented rabble.”
Exactly what Trump would say (think of his cuts to Medicaid, refusal to extend Obamacare subsidies, and withholding of food stamps during the government shutdown).
To George, though, Bedford Falls is a community whose members help each other. He tells Potter that the so-called “rabble … do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community.” George’s father helped them build homes on credit so they could have a decent life.
“People were human beings to him,” George tells Potter, “but to you, they’re cattle.”
When George’s Uncle Billy accidentally loses some bank deposits that fall into Potter’s hands, the banker sees an opportunity to ruin George. (Trump would do precisely the same.)
This brings George to a bridge where he contemplates suicide, thinking his life has been worthless, before a guardian angel counsels him to think about what Bedford Falls would be like if George hadn’t been born — poor, fearful, and completely dependent on Potter. The movie ends when everyone George has helped — virtually the entire town — pitches in to bail out George and his building-and-loan.
It’s a cartoon, of course — both a utopian and a dystopian version of America — but the cartoon poses a choice that’s become all too relevant: Do we join together, or do we let the Potters of America — Trump and his billionaire backers — run and ruin everything?
Since the political rise of Ronald Reagan, Republicans and the moneyed interests have used Potter-like Social Darwinism to justify tax cuts for the wealthy, union-busting, and cutbacks in social safety nets.
Trump is shamelessly finishing what Reagan started.
The goal is to have Americans so angry and suspicious of one another that we don’t look upward to see where all the money and power have gone. That way, we don’t join together — as did the good citizens of Bedford Falls — to stop Potter, er, Trump, and the oligarchs behind him.
What would Republicans and America’s moneyed interests say about It’s a Wonderful Life if it were released today? They’d probably call it socialist, maybe even communist, and it would make them squirm — especially given the eerie similarity between Lionel Barrymore’s Potter and Trump.
When It’s a Wonderful Life was released, the FBI considered it evidence of Communist Party infiltration of the film industry. Either a movie was subversive or it wasn’t, and in the bureau’s broad framing, this one certainly was.
The FBI’s Los Angeles field office, using a report by an ad-hoc group that included Fountainhead author and future Trump pinup girl Ayn Rand, warned that the movie represented “rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a ‘scrooge-type’ so that he would be the most hated man in the picture.” The movie “deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters. This … is a common trick used by Communists.”
The Bureau’s report compared It’s a Wonderful Life to a Soviet film and alleged that Frank Capra, its director, was “associated with left-wing groups” and that the film’s screenwriters, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, were “very close to known Communists.”
This was all rubbish, of course, and a prelude to the witch hunt led by Republican senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who launched a series of highly publicized probes into alleged Communist penetration of Hollywood, the State Department, and even the U.S. Army.
Trump’s probes are into alleged disloyalty to himself, which is akin to McCarthy’s communism in the early 1950s. Loyalty to Trump is now the purity test all elected Republicans must pass.
As director Capra does in his dystopian view of what Bedford Falls would have been had George Bailey never existed, Trump is seeking to rewrite American history as if his brazen attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election never occurred. If he succeeds, we’re all in a dystopian Pottersville.
In announcing the 77 pardons he recently issued to officials who joined him in seeking to steal the 2020 election, Trump called them “victims of political persecution” who were “targeted for defending the Constitution.”
In fact, they were co-conspirators in the worst attack on our system of government since the Civil War.
Trump declared that the pardons “end a grave national injustice.” In fact, the national injustice was that neither Trump nor any of his co-conspirators have yet been convicted of treason.
He declared that his pardons “continue the process of national reconciliation.” In fact, they continue his pursuit of national amnesia.
In Trump’s retelling, January 6 was “a beautiful day full of love and peace.” In fact, it was a day of national disgrace.
Presumably, Lionel Barrymore’s Mr. Potter would have said the same if that was necessary to secure his hold over Pottersville.
I don’t know whether Pope Leo had all this in mind when he called It’s a Wonderful Life his favorite movie of all time. But it’s likely that the pope, who hails from Chicago, knows what Mr. Potter — er, Trump — is doing to America, and indirectly to the world.
- Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
- Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
