To rebuild their movement and society, and to rebuild a viable culture, conservatives must embrace the conservative populism championed by two men: filmmaker Frank Capra and scholar Willmoore Kendall. Pursuing this path will be challenging, for populism has become a bogeyman for the powers that be.
Last December, my wife and I motored a couple hours north in our old Lincoln. We were meeting family members to see an iconic film. After two years of Covid shutdown, the historic Coleman Theatre in Miami, Oklahoma was again screening Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Every seat was full. Our granddaughter was seeing her first movie in an actual theater. No masks were in sight. Somehow, our new son-in-law had never seen the film. In the end, the night was a joy for all. Everyone came home full of Christmas spirit. Savoring the moment, I decided not to wreck the mood with professor talk.
But sitting in this venue to see this film got me to thinking. Finished in 1929, the Coleman provides a grand example of twenties glitter. George Coleman, local zinc baron, had it built. The theater’s facade is Spanish Mission with terra cotta gargoyles. The Louis XV interior includes opera boxes, a massive chandelier, a mahogany staircase, gilded trim, and silk panels. But the glamorous theatre was tilting toward anachronism within months of opening. With talkies replacing silent films, its pipe organ was out of date even while being installed. Moreover, the Coleman fronted US Route 66. As hard times drowned the country’s capitalist roar, jobless Okies soon pushed off to California, flooding the famous “mother road.”
A decade-an-a-half later, It’s A Wonderful Life was even less in sync with its time. Released in 1946, Capra’s film, now regarded as a masterpiece, flopped. Triumphant over the Axis, the United States was feeling its oats. With the economy transitioning toward a peace-time boom, Americans were ready to turn the page on the Depression and the New Deal. Globalism and capitalism were in, small towns and community values were out. The movie’s status as a classic only began in a burst of 1980s nostalgia when shown on TV. When it first appeared, the red scare reached out to touch the film, with FBI accusations that Capra, a lifelong Republican, was a bank-hating communist.
Though out of step in their own day, movie house and movie have survived into our time. Such exemplars of beauty and truth are conditioned by time but not contained by it. Nine decades after its construction, the theater’s gilded sparkle had lifted my family’s spirits after years of weary quarantine. It’s a Wonderful Life cheered us up while while illuminating a poetic vision of true conservatism.
The film shows two views of the world—one idyllic, the other hideous. Bedford Falls stands for the real world. It’s not Eden. Peter Bailey dies young, leaving George to rescue the family business. When Mr. Gower’s son expires from influenza, the distraught druggist slaps George viciously. Uncle Billy has a drinking problem. George contemplates suicide. But town dwellers have a sense of duty to one another. George saves his brother from drowning and prevents Mr. Gower from poisoning a client. George and wife Mary give each other love and children. Bert and Ernie, the local police officers, work harmoniously with the community. Bedford Falls residents live under the benign but distant influence of the almighty. God, a galactic light with a deep voice, sends George a messenger. This messenger, the angel Clarence, shows George the many good things he has achieved. George sees that he has helped make Bedford Falls a good place to live.
In the end, it’s not God and Clarence, at least not them alone, who rescue George. Rather, fellow townsmen twice come to George’s aid when crisis arises. During a bank run, they leave their money in the Building and Loan, allowing it to survive. Then Uncle Billy loses a big chunk of cash. The villainous Henry Potter steals it, threatening George with bankruptcy and prison. Bedford Falls residents again rally around and replace the funds. Two ingredients—God and an upright people—come together to allow Capra’s protagonist to succeed.
Pottersville, named after bank magnate Henry Potter, shows Bedford Falls as if George hadn’t been born. It’s a neon hellhole. No children. Residents rent. Slum lords own the houses. Instead of family restaurants serving wine and pasta, Pottersville has gin joints with blaring music. Brutal bouncers guard proletarians getting drunk. Mary’s a mousy Karen. The historic home she restored with George has been bulldozed. Strip bars line the streets. Bert and Ernie are bad cops. Townsmen worship Mammon and fend for themselves. No transcendent source provides counsel or solace. Capra’s film thus suggests that a decent society requires both belief in a higher power and fraternal concern for our fellows.
Coming out of the Coleman, many thoughts rattled my brain. I was warmed with holiday cheer, yes, but was also sad, thinking that America is now Pottersville. The community togetherness, thriving family life, and relative sobriety evident in the mid-twentieth century (and idealized in the film) have mightily diminished, if not disappeared. America’s small towns are not thriving. Miami is struggling. The city’s industry has fled. Its population has declined for decades. Boarded-up storefronts line downtown streets in small municipalities throughout the region.
These struggles aren’t all about money or physical well-being. Per capita income in the USA has quadrupled since Capra’s heyday. Life expectancy is up. Women and minorities have more freedom and greater professional opportunities. We’ve got air conditioning, safer cars, more restaurants, and technology ad infinitum. Yet something is badly wrong. The US murder rate is forty-one percent higher than in 1950. In 1946 out-of-wedlock births were 3.8 % of all births in the country. Now they’re 40%. STD rates are at an all time high. Annual deaths from suicide, alcohol, and drugs have increased 300 percent in the last quarter century. Americans are incarcerated at a rate three times higher than in 1950. Income inequality has reached Gilded Age levels, three times higher than in 1946. Just twenty-one percent of Americans, an all-time low, think their kids’ quality of life will be better than their own.
Pondering this situation, it struck me that It’s a Wonderful Life expressed artistically something similar to what political theorist Willmoore Kendall, a younger contemporary of Capra, expressed analytically. Kendall’s ideas have occupied my mind these last several years while writing his biography. Kendall had lived in Miami as a youth about the same time the Coleman went up. As far as I know, Capra and Kendall never met. It’s unlikely Kendall was a big fan of Capra’s pictures. Like many in his generation, his taste ran toward the hard-boiled. He loved The Lost Weekend and The Postman Always Rings Twice, which had successful film runs in 1945 and 1946.
Yet the themes of Capra’s movies—four of which appear on the American Film Institute’s list of top hundred inspirational films—overlap Kendall’s political theory. The same two key elements (God and Man together) which appeared in It’s A Wonderful Life undergirded Kendall’s views. For him the fundamental feature of American political success was a virtuous people talking things through. In 1964, for example, Kendall praised the school board of North Brookfield, Massachusetts for defying the Supreme Court to maintain prayer in public schools. It was not up to faraway, unelected elites to makes such decisions for a community. Rather, on their small piece of planet earth, keeping an eye toward divine precepts, the people should work out with one another the sort of society they wanted to have.
Another commonality between Capra’s movies and Kendall’s theory was distrust of experts and bureaucrats. Kendall claimed that a “Great Bureaucracy”— consisting of federal bureaucrats, national news media, elite academics, and corporate managers—dominated American political decision-making. In combination this group choked off debate and endangered democracy. Kendall argued that such elites, despite certain specialized knowledge, had no greater political wisdom than did ordinary citizens.
At least three of these groups—the media, the academy, and corporate leaders—also drew Capra’s fire. Media ruthlessness and corporate corruption are major themes in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Academics also look bad in the former film. In its culminating scene, Longfellow Deeds, urged on by a crowd of poor farmers, cross-examines an arrogant psychiatrist who just declared him insane. To the crowd’s delight, Deeds makes the scientist appear foolish, keeps his inheritance, and avoids the asylum. In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, small-town papers are benevolent, owner-operated, and serve the public. Big corporate papers toady to lobbyists and censor the truth. Capra’s antagonists aren’t only powerful and rich, they’re evil. Henry Potter is a sneering Social Darwinist. Jim Taylor in Mr. Smith uses theft, slander, and blackmail to retain power. Lawyer John Cedar cooks the books to cheat Mr. Deeds.
Neither Capra nor Kendall condemned elites as such. Rather they condemned corrupt elites. George Bailey, Longfellow Deeds, and Jefferson Smith are each men of talent from fairly prosperous circumstances. But all care about their neighbors. They risk everything to do the right thing. Kendall also knew the people needed leaders. But good leaders must serve the people’s interest before their own. They were to guide by precept and example. They were not to browbeat underlings or humiliate opponents. Kendall and Capra believed the American people were virtuous at heart. If well-informed, they would choose good leaders.
Capra and Kendall each demonstrated great respect for Congress. In Mr. Smith,newly-appointed US Senator Jefferson Smith is enraptured at the sight of the Capitol Building. After opposing his state’s political machine, however, he faces false charges of corruption and expulsion from the Senate. Launching a filibuster, Smith convinces colleagues of his innocence by appealing to their consciences. Deliberation prevails over corruption. To Kendall, Congress was the most democratic part of the American government. By negotiating together, its members discovered the “deliberate sense” of the American people. Unlike the executive, Congress was unlikely to take hasty, ill-considered action. Its acts generally reflected deliberate consensus, not imposition by bare majority. Only Congress, Kendall believed, could check the metastasizing power of the Great Bureaucracy to ensure the people’s will was done.
Both men called themselves conservatives. Both prioritized community and democracy. To them individualism and personal freedom were great goods, but they were goods which grew out of a well-ordered, democratic society. Both men suggested that society suffers grave harm when the collective right of the people to rule themselves is subverted. The best word for this democracy-focused, anti-elitist conservatism is populism. That’s not new for Capra. Scholars have written for years about populist motifs in his movies. Kendall also was a populist, defending majority rule against all comers. In fact, some consensus has developed that Kendall is the single most important theorist of conservative populism.
To rebuild their movement and their society, conservatives must embrace the conservative populism championed by these men. Pursuing this path will be challenging, for populism has become a bogeyman for the powers that be. Both neo-liberals and neo-conservatives despise populists for opposing their globalist agenda. Fortunately, much of the public is now alert to the self-righteous bossiness of those in power. Success beckons for conservatives willing to work with the people. Kendall and Capra both understood the American people as wiser and more trustworthy, more grounded and more conservative, than their wannabe masters. In 1961 Kendall’s famous protege, William F. Buckley, Jr., said that he “would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard.” In this quip Buckley was channeling his mentor. But its sentiment for Kendall was not simply amusing. He concurred with its literal meaning.
In 1790, Edmund Burke told French revolutionaries: “You began ill by despising everything that belonged to you.” Faced with crisis, French radicals tried to create a new world from scratch. Instead, said Burke, they should have sought “wisdom beyond the vulgar practice of the hour,” from nobler periods in their country’s past. Following Burke, Americans need to embrace what belongs to us. And what belongs to us is representative democracy designed to carry out the people’s will. When the Founders referenced the people, they did use scare quotes. The first word in the Constitution is the collective word, WE, as in “we the people.” The same word starts the most famous phrase in the Declaration, as in “WE hold these truths.” The three authors of The Federalist adopted the pseudonym Publius, cognate to the Latin word for people. Abraham Lincoln concluded the Gettysburg Address by praising men who died to preserve government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
For its 2023 meeting, the Academy of Philosophy and Letters proclaimed that in the United States, “every level in every sector of government and society has failed in its basic tasks. The institutions of politics, religion, economy, and society are all in crisis.” Reading these words, my mind leapt to a speech by Minnesota Populist Ignatius Donnelly. In 1892 he proclaimed that:
We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and the bench. The people are demoralized; the newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, the fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few; and the possessors of those fortunes despise the republic and endanger liberty.
Spoken to the delegates of the newly-formed Peoples’ Party, these words echo the views of disenchanted Americans today. The Omaha Platform, adopted by that convention, proclaimed that its aims were:
identical with the purposes of the National Constitution; to form a more perfect union and establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.
The Populists saw their work as a return to the first principles of the Republic. Yet power-brokers from the time pictured them as deranged radicals. They used voter fraud, race-baiting, and murder to crush the Populist threat. By 1898 the People’s Party had collapsed. Not long afterward, however, the United States adopted many of the Party’s proposed reforms, including a graduated income tax, the secret ballot, direct election of Senators, and the eight-hour day.
Deciding whether nineteenth-century populists were conservatives is difficult. Populism was a genuinely grassroots phenomenon. Its chief advocates—including Charles W. Macune, Mary Elizabeth Lease, and Sockless Jerry Simpson—rose up from the agrarian masses and returned to humble circumstances after the movement failed. By regulating capitalism they sought to protect their family farms and small businesses from monopolistic corporations. Contra Ronald Reagan, the Populists mostly believed that government wasn’t the problem but the solution. To fight poverty and oppression, the Omaha Platform argued that “the power of government—in other words, of the people—should be expanded.” Battling the railroads and the trusts, the Populists did not fully grasp how big business and big government might collude to threaten the rights of the people. They couldn’t have imagined today’s federal budget, 260 times larger in inflation-adjusted dollars than in their day or a national debt exceeding thirty trillion.
The Populists conceived their struggle as upholding democracy against plutocracy. They saw the hypocrisy of politicians who preached laissez-faire while scooping out big bucks to big business. The Populists believed huge corporations endangered majority rule. The Omaha Platform thus opposed “any subsidy or national aid to any private corporation for any purpose.” The Populists supported such voting reforms as initiative and referendum to weaken political machines built on bribery. The focus on defending democracy was more important than details of their specific reforms. The “democratic promise” of populism, according to historian Lawrence Goodwyn, is its chief legacy. Mining this vein, contemporary conservatives can draw inspiration from the Populists.
Conservative populists today are participants in an age-old conflict. As per Aristotle, it is the struggle between the many and the grasping few, between democracy and oligarchy. In his 1911 book Political Parties, European sociologist Robert Michels tried to improve Aristotle. He postulated an “iron law of oligarchy.” This theory maintained that democratic institutions always succumb to elite domination. As organizations grow more complex, the need for expertise increases. An elite of bureaucrats always ends up dominating the organization and making the key decisions. Representative democracies are particularly vulnerable to such takeover, as “representatives” come to dominate “the represented.”
The American founding can be read as a refutation of the iron law. Republic or monarchy?—an enquirer asked Franklin in 1787. “A republic, if you can keep it,” he famously replied. The purpose of the United States government, as understood by the Founders, was to promote the “happiness” of the nation. The means to this end appears in the preamble to the Constitution: to maintain balance among the six social goods of union, justice, domestic tranquility, defense, the general welfare, and liberty. The American people are to retain control in this quest. According to Federalist 14, the people would be “mutual guardians of their mutual happiness.” It is up to the people themselves to keep their republic. Conservatives take pride in the Constitution partly because it is their own heritage. Even more important is that the Constitution provides a true guide to good governance, a way to promote lasting happiness among ourselves and to avoid rule by a self-interested elite.
For Willmoore Kendall Congress was the key to democracy. With powers of the purse, impeachment, and jurisdiction stripping, it comprised the sovereign center of the American government. Congress represented the American people in all its variety. Americans, Kendall knew, were residents and citizens of particular places. All lived in communities of distinct social classes structured by local conditions. Their representatives met in Congress to decide the best course for the country. Well-known by locals, these persons represented the best and brightest of their locales. As Federalist 57 put it, localities would select persons “distinguished by their abilities and virtues.” These representatives were democratized aristocrats, the “best men” of their particular places. Through elections they remained subject to the people. Thus, the Constitution created the mixed polity praised by Aristotle. Congress, thought Kendall, combined the best elements of democracy and aristocracy (Aristotle’s virtuous elite). For Kendall, House Speaker Carl Albert, his former roommate at Oxford, embodied this aspect of his theory. As an ideal type, so did Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Let’s say there’s a people somewhere which feels much comradery among themselves. Their government treats them fairly. Crime’s low and riots few. Its military is strong. Most folks are prosperous. Government doesn’t micromanage their lives. Such a land would be happy and stable, its citizens living the good life. This was the land Capra, Kendall, and the nineteenth-century populists believed the USA should strive to be. Of course, American society never achieved such bliss. The United States has experienced its share of violence and injustice. But the ideal of a self-governing regime promoting the happiness of citizens through the six preambular principles remains attractive. Even if unrealized, the precepts remain enshrined as the nation’s statement of purpose.
To rebuild a viable culture, conservatives must recognize the communal aspects of their battle. When the Founders used the plural “WE” in 1776 and 1787, they understood the country’s struggle to be a collective endeavor. When considering political questions these days, however, Americans often put individual rights first, which can be destructive of community. If I perceive that someone is violating my rights, I’m going to be angry. It will be difficult for us to engage in political discussion. We may come to hate one another, maybe come to blows or have a shootout. On the other hand, if we see ourselves as members of a shared democratic community, we can have a dialogue and attempt to reach consensus, or perhaps simply agree to disagree. Rights talk often preempts such debate. Preempting debate in turn preempts democracy. And preempting democracy prevents the conservative, common-sense wisdom of the people, channeled through elected legislators, from prevailing in politics. After that comes chaos and national disintegration.
Both sides in the abortion debate, for example, seek the moral high ground by using rights talk, aka the right to life and the right to choose. If either is correct, then society, the people, must stand back completely, must never violate something so sacred as a right. Abortion must be banned entirely or never restricted in any way. Yet, given a fair reading, the Constitution is silent on this issue. In our system of representative democracy, abortion therefore remains a legitimate question for the people. If you’re pro-life, as I am, the solution is to get your state legislature, or Congress, to pass laws restricting abortion. Oklahoma, my home state, has passed such restrictions. Vice-versa, if you’re pro-choice. Either way, the people decide. Individuals who don’t like the result may try to overturn it through legislation or constitutional amendment. Pro-life persons who quail at this argument might remember that abortion became legal throughout the USA as an act of judicial fiat which suppressed an ongoing democratic debate. In 1973, Roe v. Wade overturned the strong anti-abortion laws in place in most states. Same-sex marriage followed a similar path. In 2015, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote, declared it a right after referendums in more than thirty states had prohibited it.
Conservatives today, then, need to shift away from expanding individual rights and toward protecting the ability of the democratic majority, within existing constitutional restraints, to govern as it sees fit. To resist tyranny and oligarchy—to give the lie to the iron law—requires concerted action. The Founders, with their democratic WE, understood this principle. Capra and Kendall also understood it. Human beings aren’t lone wolves. We are social and political creatures by nature, inescapably tied up with other human beings.
I have three specific suggestions, partly tongue-in-check, for populist-style laws to help our country rebuild the collective good. None require a constitutional amendment. First up is the “Protecting Democracy from the Democrats Act.” This law will achieve a key goal of the Omaha Platform: “a free ballot and a fair count.” Election security is fundamental to democracy. If voters don’t trust that their votes are counted honestly, faith in the system evaporates. Americans have tolerated election fraud much too long (and not just recently). This act would impose national standards for voter identification in federal elections, requiring the Real ID mandated for airplane travel. Like airport security, elections officials can “check for the star.” Elections will require physical ballots which can be checked for accuracy if electoral challenges arise and which must be preserved long-term in physical form. Specific details are less important than that something is done to ensure that American elections are free, fair, and perceived to be so. We don’t need a Caesar. But, as a democracy, our elections, like Caesar’s wife, must be above suspicion.
Next up is the “Having a Country Without Building a Wall Act.” Again this law will address a concern raised by the nineteenth-century Populists. The Omaha Platform favored restricting immigration so that the “pauper and criminal classes of the world” wouldn’t crowd out American “wage-earners.” If passed, the proposed law would solve the current illegal immigration problem. Mitt Romney, hardly a populist, hit on the solution during his presidential campaign of 2012. Namely, the new law will make E-Verify mandatory nationwide. Employers will instantly know if prospective employees can work legally. Undocumented workers who can’t find jobs will, as Romney argued, “self-deport.” Politicians who claim to oppose illegal immigration but oppose mandatory E-Verify will be exposed as dishonest or unserious. The disgrace of immigration laws which no one enforces will end.
And to defang the Great Bureaucracy, there will be the “Drain the Swamp to Irrigate a Thirsty Nation Act.” This law will relocate most federal offices. The Department of Transportation will move to Elko, Nevada, the Department of Agriculture to Council Bluffs, Iowa, the Department of Education to Jackson, Mississippi, and so forth. Modern technology will facilitate work from these places. Impoverished pockets of the heartland will benefit from new construction and good jobs. Federal employment will cement local loyalty to the US government based on self-interest. Bureaucrats will live among the heartland masses. Some may become conservative populists. A few departments such as State and Defense will remain in Washington. Vacated buildings will become public housing, benefiting the District’s homeless population.
These laws will show the country that the people matter, that they don’t have to live in Pottersville forever. Citizens will know that conservatives are putting the American people first. Americans will again see that democracy is beautiful.
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The featured image is “Dinner for Threshers” (1934) by Grant Wood, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.