It’s a Wonderful Life

A Postliberal Masterpiece

James Stewart in the “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

George Bailey is “a good guy.” Talented, trustworthy, special, according to his father, he was simply “born older.” Rarely thinking about himself, it is apparent from very early on that George is wise and capable well beyond his years. He is, in short, an Able Man.

The conceit of It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra’s still wildly popular Christmas fantasy drama film of 1946, in which George Bailey is the much-loved protagonist, will be familiar to many. On the verge of suicide when eight thousand dollars goes missing on Christmas Eve at the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan, the family business of which George is Executive Secretary, God answers the prayers of George’s townsfolk and sends a Guardian Angel to earth to help him. 

Not unlike Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—the novella on which Philip Van Doren Stern’s short story The Greatest Gift, the inspiration for Capra’s script, is loosely based—George is given a “great gift”: the chance to see what the world would be like without him. 

A world without George in it, it soon transpires, isn’t a pleasant place, not at least for the residents of Bedford Falls, the town where the Bailey’s have practised their ethical banking for generations. 

The tight-knit organic community, built around embodied relationships of trust, respect, and reciprocity, has gone. In its place is a hedonist’s paradise, in equal parts brutal, inequitable, and spiritually vacuous. The story of a George Bailey-free world is, in other words, a story of moral decline. Bedford Falls, now renamed Pottersville after the avaricious local businessman Henry Potter, who repeatedly tries to undermine the Bailey’s, has become a hellish, individualist’s utopia precisely because George Bailey has not been born. 

In 1840, the Scottish essayist and satirist, Thomas Carlyle, delivered six lectures on the topic of Great Men and their place in history, published later under the title On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. In his first lecture, Carlyle confidently announced—enraging feminist and Marxisant historians ever since—that the history of what has been accomplished in the world “is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.” 

George Bailey, when we first meet him, is an aspiring Hero. Handsome and charismatic, he wants “to do something big and something important.” It is, however, a vulgar Carlyleanism that he adopts. 

“You want the moon?” he asks his future wife when courting her, betraying an aimless Promethean spirit. “Just say the word and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down.” 

“I wanna do what I wanna do,” he later tells her, shaking, with tears in his eyes. Marriage, commitment, and responsibility are not for him. When Potter cynically proclaims that “George Bailey is not a common, ordinary yokel” in an effort to break up the Bailey business, George does not disagree. 

As the political philosopher Patrick Deneen has ably pointed out, George Bailey is not unambiguously commendable. He is vain and his ambition—the embodiment of the American Dream—is potentially destructive. 

Still, Potter, a man without friends, loyalties, or family, is the unmistakable villain in Capra’s carefully crafted film. Interested only in profit and self-aggrandisement, he keeps a bust of Napoleon in his office. In George Bailey’s home, by contrast, hangs a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. 

While Napoleon reinstated slavery and declared himself Emperor, Lincoln abolished slavery and proclaimed the necessity of “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Which is to say, Bailey may be flawed, harbouring juvenile hopes and feeling discontented by his sense of unfulfilled potential, but he is ultimately a good man with good values, as the community that depends on him for equitable finance knows perfectly well. 

What Lincoln had, like a quite different Great Man in history, namely Oliver Cromwell, was conviction. Napoleon, by comparison, was, on Carlyle’s view, a decidedly second-rate Hero. “An element of blameable ambition shows itself, from the first, in this man,” Carlyle argued, getting “the victory over him at last,” and involving “him and his work in ruin.”

Nonetheless, Napoleon, like Cromwell, his moral superior, was a “son of Order,” as all Great Men are. They do not inject anarchy into stable, cohesive societies, like Henry Potter does, or wants to do. In It’s a Wonderful Life George Bailey becomes a great man, if not a Great Man, not by playing out in practice Potter’s adulterated Napoleonism—an already seriously corrupted creed—but by following in the footsteps of his father. 

When George shows off as a boy at work, talking about becoming an explorer and acquiring harems and multiple wives, in the background a sign reads: “Ask Dad, he knows.” 

A paradigmatic gentleman, Mr Bailey does indeed know exactly the sort of person George ought to become. Potter “is sick in his mind and sick in his soul,” he explains one night at dinner because he is amoral and greedy, putting material acquisition and pride above justice, modesty, and rootedness. George ought to take an altogether quite different road in life.

Through his own quiet example of what it means to lead a virtuous life, Mr Bailey inspires respect, and his sons are duly obedient. 

When Mr Bailey tells George’s brother not to drink gin at a ball, he ungrudgingly complies; and when Potter attacks Mr Bailey after his death George unhesitatingly defends him: “People were human beings to him,” he stutters in rage, “but to you, a warped frustrated old man, they’re cattle.”

George Bailey is seduced by the appeal of what we in Britain would now call meritocracy. As a child and a young man, he wants to make a million dollars and a significant impact on the world through “building things,” airfields, skyscrapers, bridges. At the same time, he knows what true wealth looks like. Despite barely keeping the family business solvent, his father “died a much richer man than you’ll ever be,” he tells Potter, echoing the sentiments of another Victorian moralist, John Ruskin. 

For Ruskin, the richest person is the one who, having achieved self-mastery, “has also the widest helpful influence, both personal and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.” By the end of Capra’s film, George is “the richest man in town.” Throughout, notwithstanding the frustration it causes him, he subordinates self-interest to duty to his family and community. 

“A wise person,” wrote the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, “is one who attaches the most importance to those hierarchies in which he occupies a high position.” Guided by his Guardian Angel around the unedifying George Bailyless world of Pottersville, Bailey finally attains knowledge of his condition. He is a successful, important man, who has touched the lives of many. That’s why, at the film’s crescendo, the community steps in him to save the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan from going bankrupt. 

Teeming in folk wisdom and respect for tradition, It’s a Wonderful Life is far too Chestertonian – or Christian should I say? – to take Carlyle, the British answer to Nietzsche, seriously. Yet the film preserves a large place for the role of the individual in history. The self-regarding individual of liberalism is an entirely fictitious creature, it teaches us. The consequences of our actions are far-reaching and we ought to behave accordingly, especially if our talents are such as to make us peculiarly Able.

The good news is that this, the practice of virtue, is what makes our lives meaningful and, ultimately, happy. Appalled by the decline of civilisation in his small patch of America, Bailey appeals to his Guardian Angel to return him to Bedford Falls: “I want to live again,” he shouts. No longer concerned that, economically, he is worth more dead than alive, Bailey has grasped in full the Ruskinian injunction that “There is no wealth but life.” He has a family, and friends, and people who depend on him. Bedford Falls, he discovers, is his home, an object, with all its imperfections, worthy of veneration, not contempt.

The commentariat has tied itself in knots trying to ascertain what kind of politics the film espouses; communist, conservative, and liberal, as well as more interesting and precise hybrid terms like New Deal Liberalism, have all been bandied about. Perhaps there was no accurate word for it until recently, but we certainly have one now: postliberal. 

It’s a Wonderful Life is a postliberal masterpiece. Far from looking to the state to solve social problems such as housing, a community of individuals, led by a fallible but virtuous person, succeeds in helping itself. At the film’s core are values of love, home, work, duty, and hope. 

Enrich yourself and watch it this Christmas.