I’ll admit that Frank Capra made a handful of wonderful movies. He certainly painted a nice picture of American community life that is far more reassuring than anything that Ayn Rand ever wrote. So, I am inclined to agree with Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson that the Republican Party can use more Franz Capra and less Ayn Rand. But, what they could really use are some role models who haven’t been dead for twenty or thirty years. It’s even worse than that. Ayn Rand published her last novel, Atlas Shrugged, fifty-six years ago. Franz Capra’s last significant movie, A Hole in the Head, was released fifty-four years ago. Both, by the way, were made available to the public during the Eisenhower administration, prior to the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act or the women’s liberation movement or the Stonewall Riots.
I love a good Normal Rockwell painting, too, but those paintings were aspirational and idealistic. Let’s not forget that Mr. Smith went to Washington and discovered a den of corruption, or that George Bailey was almost driven to suicide by an unscrupulous banker before an angel visited him and made him realize that the world would truly be horrible if he had never lived to prevent bankers from having more control of our society.
Jimmy Stewart was a wonderful actor, but his most iconic Capra characters were fighting against a western developer’s dam-building graft scheme and a greedy, unethical banker.
I don’t think Mike Lee or Michael Gerson got the message.