Ross Douthat and Patrick Deneen have interesting takes on the significance of Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" as it relates to the current over-reaching in the credit markets. In a couple of post I've written, I've argued that this movie is a fairy tale that depicts an archetypal conflict between the left and right wings of capitalism in America. A left-wing capitalist like George Baily is by no stretch of the imagination a socialist, but he is focused on using capital to improve the lives of working people and in shoring up the middle class. The right-wing capitalist Potter is an old-school Puritan, now morphed into a Tory whose primary interest is in maintaining his elite prerogatives and so therefore in keeping working and middle class folk under his thumb.
Douthat points to the ambiguity at the heart of the Capra vision: Did it promote the American Dream or an American nightmare? Was it at the heart of creating a broader middle class of homeowners or was it at the heart of the suburban sprawl and the prodigal mentality that lusts after McMansions and Hummers? Can you have one side of the dream without the other?
It's an interesting question. But my preliminary answer would be that America is the place where people are free to be as self-indulgently bad or virtuous, wise or stupid, as they choose. The only rule is that we don't hurt anyone. Otherwise anything goes. There are remarkably few restraints because of the remarkably anomic character of our consumer-driven mainstream culture. The typical conservative differs from the typical liberal in feeling a vestigial shame about breaking traditional sexual taboos, but it's not felt strongly enough to lessen the frequency that they break them. Americans who self-identify as conservative are no better and arguably worse in many respects when it comes to the various vices connected to self-indulgence. Self-restraint is hardly ever a practiced conservative virtue in the economic sphere. It's never a Republican one.
Our ideas about the good life have created a broad consumerist cultural mentality that is ridiculously superficial, disconnected, and impoverished. Conservatives, whatever their pretensions, don't have anything vital to offer that actually models the good life for our time. Liberals are so soul poor now that they don't even know what they have lost. Conservatives feel the loss more than liberals, but that doesn't mean they haven't lost it. We're all in the wasteland, and while I, like the conservatives, feel acutely the loss, I see moaning and groaning about it as conservatives are wont to do a waste of energy.
Conservatives are like exiles who long for the day when they can return home. But their situation is really like the exile who if he finally found his way home would find that it was no longer there, that it had been conquered by the enemy or laid waste by a flood. It's gone, and we all have to deal with it. The culture is what it is. We are who we are. It's gone, but it's ok. Grace abounds. We mustI try to look at it as an advantage: Unlike the the ancient Israelites and later the Egyptian Desert Fathers who fled into the desert to recover their deepest identity and sense of purpose, we have no need to flee because the wasteland has come to us. Our job is to learn how to live in it and find ways to turn it gradually into a garden.
My inclination is to look at the excesses of the postwar period as aberrant--and this aberration, what I described the other day as the combined result of delusion and good luck, has been a huge mistake from which we must learn. I don't want to facilely dismiss Deneen's argument, but it's not Capra's fault or the fault of New Deal style politicians--it's hard to imagine how things could have played out differently. But now the question is whether the constraints that will inevitably come with our running out of luck will force us to learn the right lessons or find some other collective delusion to which we'll hitch our wagons.
People will always choose delusion if something substantive and life-giving isn't offered to them instead. That's where the cultural challenge lies. The people who know better now have nothing really to offer except their critiques. The destruction of traditional wisdom and disciplines creates an unprecedented situation in which we have enormous latitude to stumble and to get up again. We have now a peculiar kind of freedom, and the only wisdom broadly available to us is that which comes from learning from our mistakes; and in learning from our mistakes my hope is that we will stumble toward what it means to be good.
Peter Maurin famously said that he wanted to work for a society in which it was easier for people to be good, and property ownership was a part of insuring a basic level of human dignity. It's a very American idea. Owning a modest home and some savings was for Maurin something that should be within the reach of every American. He and Capra weren't far apart in that regard. But if in the struggle between Bailey and Potter, Bailey won, his victory was Pyrrhic. The Potters of the world figured out that it was not in their self-interest to fight Bailey's humane idea about liberalizing credit, so they coopted it to serve their own ends, and in doing so distorted and ruined it. It was inevitable, I suppose. But our allowing that to happen is the mistake the current crisis is bringing into focus and there's still a chance that we might learn the right lessons from it.