In a show of my love for modernity, I have been watching Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which, by the way, in Spanish was marketed as Caballero Sin Espada (swordless knight). Year 1939. I hold steadfast in the idea that, since today’s children are incapable of reading Homer without suffering a stroke, they would at least do well to watch Frank Capra’s filmography and so many other classics injected with timeless and inspiring values worth living and dying for. Older people would be surprised if they gave children that chance. We often deprive them of these things because we think that if they see a screen in black and white, their eye sockets will dry up and their eyeballs roll over the floor like in some horror movie or biblical curse. Actually, no. I have news for you: Children are not as dumb as we are.

I love Jimmy Stewart, and yet the poster that presides over my office is a large one of John Wayne. This has an explanation. Stewart would have a harder time than Wayne with the challenges of the modern world. The Capra-directed Stewart is a character of fascinating purity and sensitivity, though he would have been poisoned, or imprisoned, or worse in today’s politics. He is no angel, no stranger to passions, no stranger to mistakes, but he uses his values and his conscience to immolate himself, if necessary, for a good cause. 

It has always been said that good men cannot work in politics. It’s too dirty. You have to be a smidgen wicked, have a special acridness in your blood, to survive in such a swamp. Stewart’s character in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington lacks that evil — in fact, Capra portrays him as the most-naïve man in the world — but his appearance causes all the evil to bubble up around him with astonishing clarity. 

Some will say that in the film politicians are not portrayed but parodied, and that’s because they do not know any politicians. Some will say — and this is even funnier — that the portrayal of journalists is even more parodied, and I can assure you that in that case, they do not know journalists. 

In political life, to understand many of the things that happen from the outside, you have to take a look inside. And that is what Capra does. He shows us both sides of the office, the two faces of all those corrupt scoundrels. Maybe that makes it easier for us to understand why the judge wants to turn Donald Trump into Harpo Marx, why Democrats are working tirelessly to get Hunter Biden’s stain whitened by the best detergent — I’m not trying to make light of his addictions — before it reaches the dormant president, or why America is still ruled by a guy who comes out to talk to reporters and causes Antony Blinken’s eyes to glaze over like in the most dramatic scene in a Hitchcock movie. I dare say that no one has been as scared stiff as Blinken during those minutes of impromptu dithering from a man whose stay in office is no longer a mistake but an indecency, an inhuman exploitation of an old man who has completely lost his mind, and who deserves at least to have his privacy and private life humanely respected.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington also reminds us that picking up the blonde is always a good choice; that when you’ve had a hard time, the most urgent thing to do is to find a pub where you can have a drink; and that in case the rules are stupid and unfair, you always have the chance to make the makers and supporters of the rules swallow their own medicine — for example, by reading them the entire Constitution, even at the risk of fading away and losing your teeth on the flooring.

During at least half of the film, Jimmy Stewart is, actually, a madman. The same is said of Javier Milei in Argentina, the libertarian who — with a little luck and our prayers —could on Sunday finally defeat Kirchnerism and recover a nation that has been depressed and lifeless for decades. Of Milei it is said that he is a madman because he calls socialists “thieves” and says that tax is theft, and that every action of the state is violent. Of Jimmy Stewart it is said that he was a madman because he pretended to confront the subtly weaponized truth of all the institutionalized corruption in the political class. “I’m sorry, gentlemen,” he says in the film. “I know I’m being disrespectful to this honorable body. A guy like me should never be allowed here in the first place! I hate to stand here and try your patience, but … either I’m dead right or I’m crazy!”

States try, but they don’t succeed. It is individuals, madmen like Stewart and Milei, who can change the world. Those who are able to say, like Jefferson Smith in the movie: “You think I’m licked. You all think I’m licked. Well I’m not licked. And I’m gonna stay right here and fight for this lost cause. Even if this room gets filled with lies like these. And the Taylors and all their armies come marching into this place. Somebody will listen to me.” 

Translated by Joel Dalmau.