Star Wars and the Unraveling of American Politics — Part I
Since the release of The Phantom Menace in 1999, the heavy political content of the Star Wars prequels has been criticized as clumsy, misguided, and irrelevant. This conventional wisdom is ripe for reconsideration, for far from waning into insignificance, the prequels’ political themes today resonate more strongly than ever.
The scene occurs two-thirds of the way through the movie — and all these years later it still induces in some fans a dread and foreboding not unlike those Luke Skywalker felt when he first stepped into the shadow of the Dark Side Cave on Dagobah. Amidala, Queen of Naboo, has traveled to Coruscant, capital of the Republic, to demand that the Galactic Senate compel the Trade Federation to end its blockade of her planet. Before she presents her claim to the galaxy’s legislative body, she meets with Senator Palpatine, Naboo’s representative to the Senate. The experienced Palpatine quickly disabuses his much younger sovereign of any hope she might have of obtaining succor. Whether his explanation is more cynicism or realism, the outcome is the same: Amidala’s quest is futile, her entreaties almost certain to fall on deaf, unobliging ears.
What follows is a long discussion between Amidala and Palpatine about the Republic and its many faults and flaws. Fans who had waited a decade-and-a-half between Star Wars movies and filled their imaginations with visions — of the more civilized age before the fire of the Jedi had gone out of the universe — of the years ago when General Kenobi served Princess Leia’s father in the Clone Wars — of the betrayal of the Jedi by a pupil named Darth Vader who helped the Empire hunt down and destroy them — of Anakin Skywalker as the best star pilot in the galaxy, and a cunning warrior, not more machine now than man — found themselves watching a public affairs program instead. What was this bantha poodoo?
But this was no Jedi mind trick. All of Star Wars, all six movies’ worth, happens, as it turns out, because of that primum mobile of politics, taxes. It says so right there on the screen:
Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.
Hoping to resolve the matter with a blockade of deadly battleships, the greedy Trade Federation has stopped all shipping to the small planet of Naboo.
While the Congress of the Republic endlessly debates this alarming chain of events, the Supreme Chancellor has secretly dispatched two Jedi Knights, the guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy, to settle the conflict . . . .
There it is, in yellow and black: the taxation of trade routes is in dispute, there is a blockade, and Jedi have been dispatched to resolve matters. The negotiations, alas, are short.
A decade and a half later, so too remain critics’ and fans’ patience with The Phantom Menace (1999). I think they’re wrong, but I’m not here to rescue its reputation from the spice mines of Kessel or the Great Pit of Carkoon. I want to talk about those damned taxes. I want to talk about them because in my judgment one of the very things which fans find so objectionable, even obnoxious, about The Phantom Menace (and the prequels generally) is in fact what makes it such an interesting movie. The Phantom Menace lays the foundations of the Star Wars universe and the narrative arc that unfolds over the subsequent five films. That alone would make it a significant film. But it’s also significant for another reason. The Phantom Menace is a trenchant, deeply cynical commentary on American politics.
Admittedly this is an audacious claim, but one I think is amply substantiated by the testimony of the movie itself. To confirm it we simply have to treat The Phantom Menace as any movie is nowadays, when it is standard practice to dissect a film’s political content — real or imagined –and then cast the viscera into the (social) media trough. The political themes of the Star Wars prequels have drawn periodic notice over the years, especially recently as we near the release of The Force Awakens, but it did not see anything like the profusion of commentary that erupted, to pick a more recent example, around The Dark Knight Rises (2012).
Perhaps the prequels were simply too early to have their political content taken at face value. No one walked into the theater expecting the most anticipated movie in history to turn into a disquisition on American politics, and some fans convey the impression that they remain in their seats waiting for the “real” Phantom Menace to be shown for the first time. Be that as it may, the literary scholar Anne Lancashire’s description of Attack of the Clones (2002) — “a mainstream American blockbuster with an intensely political focus” — is no less true of its predecessor and sequel. Had they been released in the last year or three, their political focus would be seen as integral instead of an impurity. The reason for this is that the prequels grapple with issues that loom over the American political landscape, some perennially and some whose advent they presaged. These include the role of corporations in society, congressional dysfunction, fear of untrammeled executive power, the peculiar American obsession with conspiracy theory, and the collapse of faith in our civic and social institutions.
Having failed in her quest to obtain redress on Coruscant, Amidala resolves to return to Naboo and meet the Trade Federation’s force with force of her own. As she bids adieu to Palpatine, she washes her hands of Coruscant and all it represents: “It is clear to me now that the Republic no longer functions.” She means the Galactic Republic, but her words have more than one audience. The prequels tell the tale of a once great state’s decline and collapse at the hands of forces endemic to the very system that made it great in the first place. Which is to say that a main theme of The Phantom Menace and its sequels is the unraveling of American politics.
This is a crisis
This unraveling is taken for granted by numerous commentators across the political spectrum. The liberal journalist Chris Hayes begins his 2012 book Twilight of the Elites with these portentous words: “America feels broken.” Other ominous phrases he drops like officers who failed Darth Vader are “institutional dysfunction,” “extended crisis,” and “deep unease that now grips the nation.” Hayes is one many observers who argue that for the last decade or more the United States has been in the midst of a profound crisis that threatens to undermine its most important political, social, and economic institutions. These institutions, he contends, are beset by corrupt, incompetent leadership whose failures call their legitimacy into question.
The historian Niall Ferguson advances an analogous argument in The Great Degeneration (2012); its subtitle, How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, is a fair summation of its subject. Ferguson posits that the West has reached the “stationary state” described by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776). In this condition, wealthy countries, though they remain rich, see their economies begin to contract while their societies stagnate and ossify. Ferguson identifies four “key components of our civilization,” all of whose constituent institutions, he contends, have begun to erode. These components are democracy, capitalism, the rule of law, and civil society. Part of the process of erosion is the seizure of these institutions by corrupt, self-serving elites who manipulate them for their own ends.
“Repatrimonialization” is the term the political scientist Francis Fukuyama coined to describe the elite cooptation of theoretically neutral state institutions. It is one of the forces he contends encourages the “political decay” which in his view has infected the liberal democracies of the West. These forces have had the greatest impact and been most noticeable in the United States, a consequence of its status as the world’s first and oldest liberal democracy. Unsurprisingly, therefore, America provides many of the examples of political decay he cites in his book Political Order and Political Decay (2014).
Political decay as Fukuyama defines it “has to do specifically with institutional rigidity and capture of the state by elites.” The latter we have already seen in the guise of repatrimonialization. The former manifests as “rules that lead to outcomes that are commonly acknowledged to be bad and yet are regarded as essentially unreformable.” The bastard offspring of this diabolical marriage is a widespread dysfunction that has led the quality of American government to “deteriorat[e] steadily for more than a generation.”
But it is not just government that Americans have lost faith in. According to Hayes, “[w]e are in the midst of a broad and devastating crisis of authority” that extends beyond government to finance and business, the media, and other crucial sectors of society. Hayes boldly proclaims “the near total failure of each pillar institution of our society.” Because of this failure, Americans can no longer assume their leaders are honest or competent. This disillusionment, he states, “is the defining feature of American life at the end of this low, dishonest decade.”
Minerva’s owl flies at dusk. Hayes offered his assessment of the “crisis decade,” as he labels it, after it was over. He, Fukuyama, Ferguson, and other commentators published their autopsies and analyses at a time when the notion that America’s political edifice was crumbling had solidified into conventional wisdom. (One exception is Jonathan Rauch, who diagnosed the “demosclerosis” plaguing Washington as early as the mid-1990s.) They tell a story of collapsing institutions, loss of confidence, declining trust, and disillusionment. This is also the story George Lucas tells in the Star Wars prequels. But he began telling it years before most had any idea it was there to be told.
The oppression of the Trade Federation
In its brief life, the Occupy Movement was notorious for its refusal (or inability) to articulate demands. This lack is a popular explanation for its ignominious failure. Yet it was clear that it had certain inspirations, one of which was a desire to curb corporate influence on America’s economy and political system. Motivating critics — from activists to elected officials — of the supposed corporate domination of our political regime is a fear of what Samir Gibara, former CEO of Goodyear, described as the “transfer of authority from the government to the corporation,” that is, a fear that control has passed from the hands’ of citizens and their elected representatives to unelected bodies with imperatives at best unconcerned and at worst antithetical to the public interest. Corporations today are powerful. Yet however irritated Google may be by French attempts to tax its profits, one cannot imagine Google blockading France in retaliation.
Yet that is just how the Trade Federation responds after the Galactic Senate passes legislation imposing taxes on them. The Trade Federation possesses the political and military might to make itself right. On the political side, it has its own representative in the Senate. When politics fails, blunter instruments are to hand. The Trade Federation commands a massive force of droids, weapons, and ships to enforce its will and maintain its profit margins. For the Federation war is merely the continuation of money-making by other means, as the Naboo learn when it invades their world. However much critics may lament the power of global corporate titans, we are a long way from the situation in the galaxy far, far away, where corporations literally have their own senators and armies.
The misfortune of being devastated by “[t]he oppression of the Trade Federation” is one Naboo eventually shares with countless planets across the galaxy. The Federation’s droid army forms the core of the Separatist military. It is the Separatists, organized into the Confederacy of Independent Systems, whose efforts to secede from the Republic plunge it into civil war at the conclusion of Attack of the Clones. A crucial scene in Clones occurs about midway through when Count Dooku gathers the leading Separatist factions on Geonosis to sign a treaty. What is striking about these factions is that they are not political or territorial in nature. They are all like the Trade Federation, corporate behemoths with the means and will to unite economic with political and military power.
Sitting alongside the Trade Federation at the council table are the Corporate Alliance and the Commerce Guild. The money-men cannot be far behind when groups with such large financial presences gather, and indeed the Intergalactic Banking Clan is on Geonosis too. Filling the other places at the table are the leaders of the Techno Union and the Hyper-Communications Cartel, two large telecom conglomerates. The host Geonosians also occupy a seat. This is just, as their foundries build the droids that swell the ranks of the Separatist military. The Separatist Council is dominated by business concerns that have the clout to buy their way out of the Republic — or shoot their way out if need be.
The Separatist movement is the stuff of the Occupy movement’s nightmares, its leaders a rogues’ gallery of anti-capitalist progressives’ bogeymen. The Confederacy of Independent Systems is the “corporatocracy” foes of corporate influence fear blown up from global to interplanetary scale. The American state, writes Fukuyama, was “repatrimonialized in the second half of the twentieth century.” (Repatrimonialization, as noted earlier, is Fukuyama’s name for the process by which elites regain control of levers of power which they lost as their societies democratized.) In the years before its demise, a similar fate clearly befell the Galactic Republic.
A trade embargo hardly seems like the spark for a galaxy-engulfing civil war. That, though, is exactly the peril facing the Republic a decade after the Naboo crisis. A normally functioning government would have been able to rectify a “trivial” economic conflict without stumbling into a crisis that results in the replacement of its leader. By the time The Phantom Menace begins, however, the Republic is functioning anything but normally. There are many reasons why, as Senator Palpatine informs Queen Amidala, “the Republic is not what it once was.” The most salient is that the Senate, the Republic’s chief representative and law-making body, has become paralyzed.
There is little chance the Senate will act
The Naboo crisis spirals out of control because both parties to it are dissatisfied with the Senate’s actions: the Trade Federation opposed the taxes imposed upon it, while Queen Amidala chooses to fight it out because the Senate is so moribund no useful remedy will come from it. The Trade Federation senator and his allies easily deflect her demand for action by proposing the Senate appoint a commission to ascertain whether Naboo has actually been invaded. Anyone familiar with the maneuvering at the United Nations Security Council surely nods in recognition at this exchange.
The Senate has lost the capacity and will to act. What was once an august body representing the peoples of the galaxy has degenerated into what Palpatine bluntly describes as a conclave of “greedy, squabbling delegates” who evince “no interest in the common good.” Given these circumstances, he tells Amidala, she should prepare to accept the occupation of her planet as “there is little chance the Senate will act on the invasion.” When the Senate does rouse itself from its habitual stupor to confront a crisis it is easily dissuaded. Amidala’s demand for intervention is promptly turned aside. The true architect of the invasion, the Sith Lord Darth Sidious, assures his Trade Federation minions that they have nothing to worry about from that quarter. After the invasion begins, he pledges to keep the Senate so “bogged down in procedures” that it “will have no choice but to accept your control of the system.”
Even those sworn to defend the Republic have become cynical about it. Obi-Wan Kenobi warns Anakin Skywalker in Attack of the Clones to be wary of his feelings for now-Senator Amidala: she is a politician, and politicians are “not to be trusted.” Obi-Wan dismisses Anakin’s rebuttal that she is unlike the other senators (which is true), declaring that in his experience “senators focus only on pleasing those who fund their campaigns, and they are in no means scared of forgetting the niceties of democracy in order to get those funds.” Even the Jedi have become disdainful of those they serve.
The galaxy’s legislature has calcified, become fixated on procedural trivia, is incapable of passing legislation or dealing with pressing issues, and its members have grown out of touch with their constituents while heeding only the needs of their campaign contributors. Such is George Lucas’ portrait of the Galactic Senate. But anyone familiar with American politics will note a family resemblance to our own.
Kicking the Senate on the way out the door has become a ritual for senators who decide to leave. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) melted in 2012 because she had had her fill of the partisan rancor and gamesmanship that now dominated “the greatest deliberative body in history.” Evan Bayh (D-Indiana) offered a similar rationale for declining to stand for re-election in 2010. More recently, Marco Rubio (R-Florida), a leading contender for the GOP presidential nomination, stated that though he didn’t necessarily hate the Senate, he was certainly “frustrated” by it, an admission that drew knowing looks and nods from the D.C. media.
One reason the Senate does nothing, as its members complain, is that it is often “bogged down in procedures.” The procedure blamed most is the filibuster. Use of the filibuster has ballooned in the last decade, as recourse to it on even routine matters has effectively transformed the Senate into a body requiring sixty votes on all business, including deciding whether a vote should be held in the first place. Despite several showdowns over it since the start of the 112th Congress in 2011, the filibuster has survived mostly intact. As for the claim that the Senate does nothing, the impression has some substance to it, though it is perhaps misleading.
Congress cannot be bothered and increasingly neither can voters. Survey after survey has shown the public’s esteem for Congress plummeting towards the dark side. Many polls find it barely staying on the positive side of 10% approval. If it collapses further, pollsters will have to dispatch probe droids to find anyone who approves of Congress. Disaffection is so pervasive that
Gallup found earlier this year that only 10% of Americans had confidence in Congress. Whether this Congress or that one was truly the “worst ever” is a moot point; voters think it sucks as a whole, which is all that matters.
In the galaxy far, far away as under the Constitution, Congress is not the only branch of government. If Congress is hopeless, maybe one of the others can come to the rescue. In our political system any such power vacuum is usually filled by the executive. The same is true of the Star Wars universe. In our Republic, the consequences of this transfer of power are feared more than they are felt. In the Galactic Republic, it was a cure much worse than the disease.
I will make it legal
When Darth Sidious learns that the ambassadors sent to resolve the Naboo crisis are Jedi, he is undeterred. He orders Trade Federation Viceroy Nute Gunray to accelerate the plan and begin landing his troops (and kill the Jedi). When Gunray wonders incredulously if that is legal, Sidious replies brusquely, “I will make it legal!”
Palpatine’s rise from obscure senator representing a provincial backwater to emperor, and the attendant transformation of the Republic into the Empire, provides the main political narrative arc of the prequels. A democratic republic succumbing to dictatorship is an evolution with numerous historical parallels. Three drawn by George Lucas himself are Rome (Julius Caesar), France (Napoleon Bonaparte), and Germany (Adolf Hitler). When Revenge of the Sith was released in 2005 at the height of the Iraq war, critics and journalists pressed Lucas on whether the film really was the thinly veiled commentary on George W. Bush’s presidency they envisioned it to be. Lucas’ response: actually, I wrote the story in the 1970s about Nixon and Vietnam.
A decade later we can recognize claims that Revenge of the Sith predicted America’s impending descent into tyranny as overheated hyperbole. But this is not to say that Palpatine’s ascent does not have less ominous analogues in our recent political history. These analogues relate to a perennial fear in American politics, that of an imperial presidency.
George W. Bush was heavily criticized for his embrace of signing statements, documents in which presidents upon signing a law outline how they intend to execute it. Bush’s signing statements became notorious because to his critics they were not merely expressions of how his administration would construe a law, but avowals of his authority to ignore its provisions, even the whole law, if they conflicted with his understanding of his constitutional duties and obligations. The objective was “to concentrate ever more governmental power into the White House.” Bush and his team, critics feared, aimed at nothing less than a reinvigoration and intensification of the imperial presidency.
Many of Barack Obama’s supporters hoped he would check, perhaps even reverse, Bush’s expansion of executive power. He did nothing of the sort. Far from eschewing the practice, Obama has continued issuing signing statements, albeit not at the pace of his predecessor. Also to their considerable chagrin, he has in several respects accelerated the aggrandizement of presidential power stimulated by the War of Terror. Thus the prison at Guantanamo Bay remains open, the surveillance regime created by the PATRIOT Act endures more or less intact, and Obama uses drone strikes — against targets he designates as terrorists — at a rate much greater than Bush, including against American citizens.
Obama, moreover, has attempted to arrogate to himself a broad panoply of executive powers that collide against the limits of his constitutional authority. Not every observer believes Obama’s stretching of the Constitution will tear it. He has, though, had a more difficult time convincing the judicial branch that if given an inch, he will not always take a mile, as can be seen in recent decisions blocking his use of recess appointments, suspending a proposed EPA rule regulating water bodies, and overturning his attempt to relax the nation’s immigration laws in order to allow some people in the country illegally to remain. The last was a step that Obama repeatedly protested he did not have the constitutional authority to take, until one day he decided he in fact did have the authority.
Maybe one reason he changed his mind is that he discovered the reality that confronts many presidents once they’ve sat in the Oval Office long enough: the presidency, as the Framers designed it, is fairly weak. Hence stretching the boundaries of his constitutional prerogatives (“trampling the Constitution!” his detractors would no doubt scream) may be the only way to get anything done, especially given the fossilized condition of Congress. Another, surely, is that he knows that the power his supporters found dangerous in George Bush’s hands they find much less so in his. This is certainly true, at any rate, of the more feeble-minded among them, who dismiss concerns that Obama might abuse his powers by noting that they trust him not to.
Palpatine’s elevation to the chancellorship owes to the same quality: trust. Palpatine is the prototypical backbencher who rises to power by playing the long game, friend of all yet ally of none. He gets ahead because everyone sees in him what they wish to see. He epitomizes the politician who speaks in bromides lest he offend anyone who might possibly contemplate backing him. He comports himself this way even when talking to his queen, telling Amidala in The Phantom Menace that her best hope is to call for the election of a new Supreme Chancellor, “one who could control the bureaucrats and give us justice.” The first time he sees her after he is nominated for the post he pledges that if elected he will “put an end to corruption,” as though he were making a campaign speech. When in Attack of the Clones Anakin rebuts Obi-Wan’s blanket condemnation of senators by citing Palpatine’s example, Obi-Wan rejoins that “Palpatine is a politician,” one adept “at following the passions and prejudices of” his colleagues. Palpatine no doubt would be pleased to learn Obi-Wan held his political skills in such high regard.
His colleagues certainly do, which is how he is able to gain power, then keep it. Palpatine, Obi-Wan remarks in Revenge of the Sith, “has managed to stay in office long after his term has expired.” “The Senate demanded that he stay longer,” counters Anakin. They did so not least because its members are too lazy and greedy to bother with their functions. Both in the Galactic Republic and ours, the growing unwillingness and inability of members of Congress to meet their obligations is a main factor in the engorgement of executive authority. The Senate’s abdication of its responsibilities benefits one person above all. Throughout his tenure Palpatine constantly cites “the best interests of the Republic” as justification for his steady expansion of power. The Clone Wars accelerate the development of his imperial chancellorship. The Senate reacts to news that the Separatist factions are discussing a treaty by voting him emergency powers. Ever the selfless public servant, Palpatine proclaims his reticence to accept this heavy burden in words reeking of duplicitous insincerity: “It is with great reluctance that I have agreed to this calling. I love democracy. I love the Republic. The power you give me I will lay down when this crisis has abated.” Which will be just after the shaaks come home.
One thing is certain: power is no longer in the hands of the bureaucrats. Most of it now resides in Palpatine’s. When he proclaims in Revenge of the Sith that “I am the Senate,” he means it literally. He has not only absorbed the Senate’s powers, most of its members are under his sway. Palpatine himself, though, is not corrupt. At least, Anakin suggests in Clones, he “doesn’t appear to be corrupt.” Anakin has a point. Palpatine isn’t corrupt, not in any conventional sense. He does not care about personal gain, he has no political agenda to advance. He cannot, for his pursuit of power has from the beginning had only one goal: the utter annihilation of the Republic and the Jedi Order. Palpatine is ready to make his final move. But that is something that must wait for the sequel.
