Jefferson Smith: liberal or conservative

American

I missed the first few minutes of it on AMC today, and regret never having seen it until now. My take is that while he did not have a set ideology as we classify them today, his reading of the Constitution and the writing on the memorial, and his keen interest in communicating with his constituents despite "spin" would indicate a conservative vs. progressive ideology to me. We could use more like this in the Congress instead of focusing on the (D) or (R) as the only way to do business. I sure saw a lot of parallels between now & then in the movie.

I'm an English fan.

Jefferson Smith, were he a real person in the Senate today, would be a TEA Party man. Where he sat in the film (to the left of the center aisle as you face the well of the Senate) makes him a member of the Democratic Party. But that citizen's committee we saw in the beginning is what a TEA Party, or a "Town Hall," would have looked like back then.

And furthermore, <i>Boys' Stuff</i> is a type of the alternative media. The difference is that today the Jim Taylor equivalent cannot sack the press, steal every copy, or run little kids off the road--yet--the way they did in this film.

His brief, first and last, would be for the Constitution. And I have to wonder whether, after succeeding in staying in the Senate and knocking out the Willett Dam, he would have planted the seed for raising the consciousness of a country, and proceeding against *all other* Willett Dam-style proposals that I'm sure that that "Deficiency Bill" contained.

Frank Capra was a devout Republican and anti-communist in his personal life. I don't think it's particularly relevant to the principles or enjoyment of the film though.

He wasn't really either. He was more of a libertarian-socialist.



A widespread misconception is the idea that the political spectrum is linear, with the extreme-left socialists at one end and the extreme-right fascists at the other. It's better to imagine the political spectrum two-dimensionally, as a square tilted 45 degrees so that it's standing on one of its corners, sort of like a diamond, I suppose.

../\..
./..\.
/....\
\..../
.\../.
..\/..

Anyhow, if you divide it in half, vertically, you can imagine varying degrees of left and right positions. Now, consider the point where the left and right meet at the top as being the best of both worlds -- an absolutely free, almost utopian, society where individual liberty is so valuable that we can live by a shared set of moral laws with virtually no government, but where each individual is compassionate enough to ensure that no one else suffers from a lack of basic human needs, such as food, shelter, and clothing. We can call this libertarian socialism (a la Noam Chomsky). Of course, the complete opposite of that would be the point at which the left and right meet at the bottom, and this position would be characterized by the worst that both sides have to offer -- a tyrannical, statist government whose policies and restrictions provide individuals with not even the most basic liberties, such as free speech and free thought, and where all of our needs are met by enforced regulations dictated by the state in return for a life of service to the government, which is in a perpetual state of war with the purpose of building an empire and maintaining corporate interests. We can call this authoritarian socialism, or fascism.

.....libertarian...
........../\........
........./..\.......
..left./.....\.right
wing\...../.wing
.........\../.......
..........\/........
...authoritarian..

He was a bit of the best of both worlds, so I'd say he's somewhere in the middle, near the top.



"Why do you find it so hard to believe?"
"Why do you find it so easy?"
"It's never BEEN easy!"

The great about this film is that it can work in both ways: the way he talks about "American ideals" and how he says that the project won't cost a thing to the goverment seems very conservative, yet the fact that he is standing against a powerful bussiness man in order to protect the natural beauty of the zone looks more liberal.

I'm a libertarian, my brother is a conservative, and we both love the film.

I find it telling that both sides claim Smith as one of their own in this thread. It is interesting that both sides can admire a man like Smith yet they can't put aside political difference to elect a man like Smith without labeling him as "with us" or "against us".

The poster that mentioned a 2 axis political spectrum was correct, however. Smith was almost certainly a libertarian socialist (which is not a contradiction in terms), not a "liberal" or a "conservative" as defined by modern American politics.

There's a scene of a newspaper headline that says that Smith wants a "government with fewer laws". He also wants the govenrment to be reimbursed for what it spends on the kid's camp by the kids themsleves with whatever small contributions thye can send in. James Stewart was a conservative Republican who was against the new Deal and probably wouldn't have taken the role if it wasn't made clear that Jeff Smith wasn't a political conservative.

regarding the Tea party, if Carl Palladino is an example of the Tea Prty, Jeff Smith, (and Jimmy Stewart) would have had nothing to do with them.