Star Wars and the Unraveling of American Politics — Part II
The standard view that the political bent of the Star Wars prequels is one of their primary flaws now stands in need of serious revision. In their depiction of the collapse of the Galactic Republic’s governing institutions and the underlying loss of faith and confidence in the Republic itself, the prequels reflect the political mood of post-millennial America as few other films this century have.
There is something else behind all this
“Everything is going as planned.” Palpatine has achieved what he has striven towards for so long. He can finally bring his scheme for galactic domination to fruition. He has pulled string after string until the Republic and the Jedi have become completely tangled in them. All that’s left is to strangle them both.
From the earliest days of the Republic to our own, conspiracy theory has been a peculiar American obsession, a lingering mania in our political psyche. The Star Wars prequels place this mania front and center, a plot within the plot. While Darth Sidious weaves his web behind the scenes, his alter ego Palpatine spins his in public.
Two of the most important events in Palpatine’s rise occur because he is able to manipulate others without seeming to. In The Phantom Menace he advises Amidala that her best option for ending the blockade of Naboo “would be to push for the election of a stronger supreme chancellor,” one whose authority has not been sapped by “baseless accusations of corruption” and who can therefore control the bureaucrats and deliver justice. Amidala recoils at the recommendation that she call for a vote of no confidence, but when Chancellor Valorum proves as impotent as advertised, she places her people’s needs over loyalty to her “strongest supporter” and moves the vote.
In Attack of the Clones it is the hapless Jar-Jar Binks who Palpatine maneuvers into aiding him. Despite the discovery of the Separatists’ gathering on Geonosis, the Senate remains opposed to sanctioning the clone army Obi-Wan has discovered on Kamino unless the Republic is attacked. The way out of this impasse, an aide to Palpatine declares, is for the Senate to grant Palpatine emergency powers which he can then use to approve the creation of an army. “But what Senator,” Palpatine wonders ruefully, would have the courage to propose such a radical amendment?” “If only — Senator Amidala were here,” the aide answers, whereupon the two exchange knowing looks and the camera cuts to Jar-Jar, who in Amidala’s absence (she is on Naboo hiding from assassins) is fulfilling her duties. Jar-Jar looks like a Gungan about to become an opee sea killer’s lunch, but he screws up his courage and in a subsequent scene introduces the motion to give Palpatine the emergency powers that will consolidate his hold on power. His plan is nearly complete. It only took two thousand years to culminate. All the time Sidious lurked in the shadows, waiting to put the final stages of the Sith order’s grand design into motion. At last the Sith may reveal themselves to the Jedi. At last they may have revenge.
Revenge was the name of the game. Palpatine’s ascent was the ultimate inside job. Rather than conquer power from the outside, he worked the system until all power came to him. Everything he did was done to bring the Sith plan for revenge closer to fruition. The whole thing was a Sith conspiracy. The events of The Phantom Menace occur because Darth Sidious instigates a blockade of Naboo in order to foment a crisis which will bring down the government, thereby allowing him to engineer his own election to the chancellorship in the guise of Senator Palpatine. Once in power he continues his secret support of the factions that will eventually become the Separatist movement, while simultaneously — and equally secretly — instigating the creation of the clone force that will eventually become the Republic’s army. Having put the pieces into place, he foments a crisis that will culminate in a war which will allow him to assume total power in the Republic, which he will then use to smash the Separatists — of whom, of course, he is the puppet master. Sidious is the Separatists, Sidious is the Republic. He plays both sides against each other, or rather, he plays against himself. (Revenge of the Sith begins with Palpatine being kidnapped — by himself!) All so that ultimately he can destroy both the Republic and the Separatists and become the unquestioned ruler of the galaxy.
It is a plan that is appalling and breathtaking in its complexity, deviousness, and audacity. There is enough there to keep the tin-foil-hat brigade awake at night for years. Everything we see in the prequels, from the first frame of The Phantom Menace to the last frame of Revenge of the Sith, is the result of a millennia-old Sith plot to conquer the galaxy and destroy the Jedi, not necessarily in that order. The proposition seems absurd, but there it is: the Star Wars prequels — conspiracy theory writ large as galactic morality play.
One can understand bureaucracy becoming entrenched and bloated, politicians becoming corrupt and out of touch, governments becoming empty husks. But where were the Jedi in all this? They were the guardians of peace and justice. Defending the galaxy from the Sith was their reason for being. Yet they let a Sith Lord with whom they interacted daily destroy the Republic before their eyes and wipe most of them out to boot. One may be forgiven for thinking the Jedi in the last days of the Republic were useless. Through the Jedi, we see just how parlous the condition of the Republic truly was. For in many ways, the Jedi were the biggest problem of all.
No one can kill a Jedi
Midway through The Phantom Menace we learn that just like the Republic, the Jedi too are no longer what they once were. This realization dawns in the scene in which the Jedi Council debriefs Qui-Gon Jinn about his mission to Naboo. Qui-Gon is certain that the attacker he escaped on Tatooine was a Sith. Master Ki-Adi Mundi dismisses this prospect out of hand as “[i]mpossible,” for “the Sith have been extinct for a millennium.” Nor “could they have returned without us knowing,” interjects Master Mace Windu. Confronted by evidence that their mortal enemies have returned, the Jedi Council blithely discount it on the grounds that they knew nothing about it, so it cannot be true. The Jedi, it seems, have grown as out of touch as everyone else on Coruscant. Only Yoda sounds a note of caution, reminding his brethren that the dark side is hard to see.
As becomes clear throughout the prequels, the Jedi’s vision has narrowed. Their arrogance and complacency have done the opposite. This is a central theme in Attack of the Clones. Unable to locate a planet’s location in the Jedi Archive, Obi-Wan asks the archivist for assistance. When he suggests that the archives may be incomplete, she bristles. “If an item does not appear in our records, it does not exist.” Again, if the Jedi know nothing about it, it must not be so. The Jedi of the prequels embody the “intellectual rigidity” that Francis Fukuyama identifies in his recent book as a primary cause of the decay he argues has taken root in the American political system. They present a textbook example of the failure of elites described by Chris Hayes and others.
Even when the truth stares the Jedi in the face they have a hard time believing it. Held captive on Geonosis in Attack of the Clones, Obi-Wan is interrogated by Count Dooku, leader of the Separatists — and secretly Darth Tyranus, Sidious’ new apprentice after the demise of Darth Maul in the previous film. “What if I told you,” Dooku asks, “that the Republic was now under the control of the Dark Lord of the Sith?” Obi-Wan’s response is predictable: “No, that’s not possible. The Jedi would be aware of it.” When Dooku points out the obvious — that “the dark side of the Force has clouded their vision” — and adds that hundreds of senators now answer to Darth Sidious, Obi-Wan remains incredulous. Again, what the Jedi cannot see cannot exist. Obi-Wan’s fear, expressed early in the film, that Anakin’s abilities have made him arrogant, is well-founded. What worries Yoda is that he is hardly an isolated case. The malady has become “more and more common among Jedi. Too sure of themselves they are. Even the older, more experienced ones.”
Institutions can rot from within for a long time before anyone notices. Often it requires the presence of an outsider to reveal just how deep the putrefaction reaches. For the Jedi (and the Republic) this outsider arrives in the form of a slave boy from a desert planet who, having suffered from the system when he was not part of it, has no love for it now that he is part of it. Despite his professed admiration for Palpatine and Amidala, Anakin Skywalker has no more faith in politicians than Obi-Wan does. In Attack of the Clones Amidala asks Anakin how he would fix the political system, for which he has just voiced considerable disgust. The politicians should sit down and agree on what’s best and then do it, he answers. That is just what we do, Amidala protests, but sometimes people disagree. He will have none of that: if people do not agree, they should be made to, preferably by someone wise. Told this sounds like dictatorship, Anakin does not deny it. “Well, if it works.”
Buried in his teasing of the woman he loves is the attitude, which he expresses in so many words, that her life of public service has been a waste of time. Anakin cannot comprehend that she would devote herself to a system which is so obviously broken it can no longer fulfill even its most basic obligations. But Anakin is not giving up on the system. He cannot give up what has never been his own. Amidala is invested in the system, she is committed to making it work. Anakin has no such loyalty; he has never belonged to the system, and it has never belonged to him. Insouciantly extolling the virtues of revolution, Anakin resembles a familiar figure: the sophomore who reads Marx and thinks he has pulled the sword from the philosopher’s stone. Most do no harm, but some turn into Lenin. Or Darth Vader.
Anakin is surely the greatest of the Jedi’s many failures in the prequels, perhaps the greatest failure in their history. They should have given him that sense of belonging and investment, but instead they only alienate him. Wary of him from the outset because he is older when he comes to them and because he may be the Chosen One of prophecy, the Jedi never come to terms with his presence in their midst.
Hence they make mistake after mistake in their tutelage of him. The Jedi apparently do little to accommodate him or adjust his training given his unusual circumstances. Moreover, they repeatedly push him into situations that they know they know better than to put him in. Early in Attack of the Clones, Obi-Wan warns Anakin that his obvious feelings for Padmé (as Amidala is known to those closest to her) could imperil his commitment to the Jedi Order. Yet when Anakin is assigned later in the film to escort Padmé back to Naboo to protect her from assassins, Obi-Wan raises no objection. It apparently does not occur to him — or to any of the other members of the Jedi Council — that it may not be a very good idea to put Anakin in close proximity to the woman he has admitted he has thought of every day for the last ten years. As if determined to compound their error, in Revenge of the Sith the Jedi allow Anakin to join the Council as Palpatine’s liaison so that they can in turn ask him to spy on the chancellor for them. Obi-Wan expresses serious reservations about Anakin’s close association with Palpatine. But again, they do not cause him to object to a scheme that would bring them closer than ever. What could possibly go wrong? Their inflexibility, their Jedi way or the spaceway attitude, induces the Council to make several epically bad decisions, none more fatal than this one that would allow Palpatine to exploit to the fullest his knowledge that Anakin’s apostasy from basic Jedi teachings makes him a perfect Judas.
The Jedi have lost the ability, as one non-Jedi character puts it in Clones, to distinguish between knowledge and wisdom. So blinkered are they that they do not even know that a clone army has been ordered on their behalf, and apparently at the behest of one of their own. Nor, of course, do they have any idea that the very leader of the Republic they are pledged to serve is a Sith, the embodiment of all they stand against. “Our ability to use the Force has diminished,” Mace Windu laments in Clones. The Jedi are blind, and in more ways than one.
Far from being the guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy, the Jedi ultimately are destroyed because they become the opposite: warriors using their powers in defense of a corrupt, increasingly oppressive regime. “We’re keepers of the peace, not soldiers,” Mace Windu warns Chancellor Palpatine at the start of Attack of the Clones. At the end of the movie, though, soldiers is just what they become as they take command of the clone army. They have fallen a long way since Qui-Gon’s admonition to the queen in The Phantom Menace that “I can only protect you, I can’t fight a war for you.” So far have they fallen that in Revenge of the Sith they begin discussing openly whether or not to remove Chancellor Palpatine from office if he refuses to relinquish his emergency powers, thereby fulfilling Palpatine’s prediction that they would plot against him. Sworn to uphold the Republic, the Jedi fall at the moment they become convinced that saving the Republic means overthrowing it.
Ultimately, the Jedi do realize what is going on. But as in any tragedy, such clarity arrives only once one’s doom has been sealed. Yoda, coming to terms with the “magnitude of his defeat” after Sidious bests him in lightsaber combat at the conclusion of Revenge of the Sith, sees only one path before him: “Into exile I must go. Failed I have.” His failure is total, the scale of the wreckage at his feet immense. The Republic, the Jedi Order, vast swathes of the galaxy — all reduced to smoldering ruins. The institutions it held up having collapsed, the Jedi Order also tumbles into dust. In the end, it too proved to be just another decadent, crumbling pillar of a decadent, crumbling establishment.
The courts take even longer to decide things than the Senate
The establishment is collapsing all around, fostering an acute crisis of confidence and trust in the galaxy’s political and economic institutions and the elites who run them. The leadership class has lost confidence in itself, as is obvious from the declarations made by various characters that the system no longer works, senators have become corrupt, the bureaucrats are in charge, and so forth. Those committed to guarding the system no longer believe in it either, as indicated by Obi-Wan’s cynicism, Anakin’s inchoate preference for dictatorship, and the “political idealist” Count Dooku’s abandonment of the Jedi Order and Republic. If the Jedi no longer have faith in the institutions they serve, why should anyone else? Hundreds of star systems can find no answer to that question and rally to Dooku’s banner, unaware of his true motives.
Trust has also evaporated. The Jedi do not trust Palpatine, and he does not trust them. No one trusts the Senate. Obi-Wan does not quite trust Anakin, and Anakin does not quite trust Obi-Wan, who he feels has been holding him back. The Jedi certainly don’t trust Anakin. In Revenge of the Sith, after informing Mace Windu that he has just discovered that Palpatine is the Sith Lord they have been seeking, Anakin requests to come along on the mission to arrest him. Windu refuses, stating that he senses too much confusion in Anakin’s mind to let him come. “If what you’ve told me is true, you will have gained my trust,” he tells Anakin, the clear implication being the he does not already have it. When Anakin tells Padmé earlier in the movie that Obi-Wan and the Council don’t trust him, he’s not wrong. Nor does he trust them. Not unreasonably, considering that the Jedi only accept his presence on the Council so they can use him as a spy. Not least, Anakin doesn’t trust himself, lamenting right before he turns to the dark side that “I’m not the Jedi I should be.” It is only fitting, therefore, that the prequel trilogy culminates in a cascade of betrayals: Palpatine betrays the Republic, Padmé (inadvertently) betrays Anakin, and Anakin betrays the entire galaxy.
The sense of futility gripping the Republic is captured in the most cynical line of dialogue uttered in all the Star Wars films. Dissatisfied with the prospect of having to dump Chancellor Valorum to resolve the invasion crisis, Queen Amidala asks for alternatives. The only one, answers Senator Palpatine, “is to submit a plea to the courts.” Amidala is aghast. “The courts take even longer to decide things than the Senate.” (The punch line comes early in Attack of the Clones, when we learn that despite four trials Nute Gunray still leads the Trade Federation. Clones occurs ten years later, so clearly Amidala was right.) The Senate is broken, but the courts are even worse. The cynicism of this attitude is breathtaking. No wonder viewers and critics experienced culture shock at the politics of The Phantom Menace. We have gone from new hope to new hopelessness.
That hopelessness is not confined to the galaxy far, far away. Many Americans feel it too. Public trust in the core institutions of American society has eroded sharply in recent years. As Ron Fournier and Sophie Quinton wrote in 2012:
Government, politics, corporations, the media, organized religion, organized labor, banks, businesses, and other mainstays of a healthy society are failing. It’s not just that the institutions are corrupt or broken; those clichés oversimplify an existential problem: With few notable exceptions, the nation’s onetime social pillars are ill-equipped for the 21st century. Most critically, they are failing to adapt quickly enough for a population buffeted by wrenching economic, technological, and demographic change.
The numbers are telling. Between June 2001 and June 2011, according to polling by Gallup, trust in most institutions declined, sometimes precipitously. Faith in the Supreme Court declined 13%, in the presidency 23%, in newspapers 7%, television news 8%, and banks 24%. Apart from the military, which continues to enjoy unrivalled reverence from the American people, most institutions from organized labor to public schools saw at least a modest drop in their approval, and many were already polling well below 50%.
Disaffection with politics has only worsened. In its most recent survey of public trust in government, released just before Thanksgiving, Pew found that only 19% of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing. 22% said they were angry at the government, while 57% were frustrated by it. Just 18% were “content.” According to the right track/wrong track question pollsters routinely ask, a rudimentary measure of whether Americans think the country is headed in the right direction or not, nearly two-thirds of Americans are displeased with the state of the country. It is not just Congress’ approval which is in the doldrums.
Americans have not lost faith only in their government. They have lost faith in themselves. According to the General Social Survey, the proportion of Americans who said most people can be trusted declined from 46% in 1972 to 32% in 2012. An AP-GfK poll released in October of 2013 also found that only a third of Americans trust their fellows. People will not trust institutions run by those they do not trust. This includes the institutions of government. Pew, in the poll just mentioned, found that only 34% of Americans have “a very great deal or a good deal of confidence” in the political wisdom of their compatriots, while 63% have little or none. Trust is vital for a democracy, because it is the basis for accountability, and hence legitimacy. Without trust, citizens have no reason to expect the system will be accountable to them. Trust, as Fukuyama writes, must “be present to make the political system work.”
Loss of faith can be calamitous. “I don’t believe it,” Luke tells Yoda when he pulls Luke’s X-Wing out of the swamp on Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back. “That is why you fail,” Yoda replies, a plaint imbued with the pain and disappointment of memories we could only imagine at the time he uttered it. The Jedi do not believe, and Yoda ends his days a mystical recluse expiating his sins in the middle of a swamp. The Sith believe, and once more they rule the galaxy.
Force always being on the side of the governed because of their superior numbers, the governors have no support but opinion. “It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded.” David Hume first proposed this maxim in his seminal essay “Of the First Principles of Government” (1742). Since then it has become a cornerstone of the modern worldview, though usually we recognize it under the name “consent of the governed.” When the government loses the support of opinion, when the people no longer consent to be governed, it goes ill for both. “We must keep our faith in the Republic,” proclaims Jamillia, Padmé’s successor as Naboo’s queen. “The day we stop believing democracy can work is the day we lose it.” The words are a platitude, the sort of thing one expects to hear from a graduate of Naboo’s Legislative Youth Program. Yet they are no less true for all that. A platitude, but also a prophecy: the moment the Republic ceases to believe in itself, it will cease to exist. The moment arrives — and Padmé, a horrified witness to it, can only note bitterly that it does so “with thunderous applause.” The death toll is catastrophic.
There is no civility, only politics
Star Wars, released in 1977 at a time of economic dislocation and political turmoil, projected a moral vision of a universe defined by absolutes of good and evil. The Phantom Menace, released at a time of tranquility if not clarity, depicts a universe suffused by moral doubt and uncertainty. It is the film of a fin de siècle, one pervaded by a sense of exhaustion, of vital forces running out. It exudes a mood of malaise, unease, drift; of an end of history, to coin a phrase. One could argue that the prequels as a whole compose a narrative of decline and fall.
As for what the phantom menace could be, there is no shortage of candidates for the eponymous threat. Released in the twilight period between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda are the obvious choice. Yet the movie presents any number of others: fear of centralization and the concentration of power in the hand of unelected bureaucrats; the breakdown of democracy as representatives fall further and further out of touch with those who elect them; immense corporate titans whose overweening economic might and political influence seem beyond the capacity of the authorities to restrain; loss of confidence in the institutions of civil society and government. All these forces contributed to the demise of the Galactic Republic, and all are forces whose impact on our Republic many are convinced shall be just as pernicious.
Most worrisome perhaps is that now “[t]here is no civility, only politics.” Where once there existed a desire to do the right thing for the Republic, there is today only self-seeking and double-dealing as various groups pursue the greatest advantage and do not hesitate to use any means to attain it, including subverting the political process to secure their aims and destroy their opponents. Such politicization is the price society pays for no longer being able to distinguish means from ends. Politics is a means. When it fractures and becomes an end, encroaching on and absorbing more and more of what was distinct and apart from it, it threatens the very possibility of society. For society exists in the space from which politics has been expelled. In we must go. What is in there is only what we take with us. When we take politics, we have taken a step on the path to the dark side. The first or the last? Always in motion is the future.
When Obi-Wan begins sermonizing about the morals of senators in Attack of the Clones, Anakin grouses that he is in no mood for “another lecture. At least not on the economics of politics.” It is a sentiment many viewers, baffled by the political intrigue in the prequels, still share. Understanding their political message, though, is crucial to understanding them.
In 1999, The Phantom Menace’s moment had yet to arrive. But as I have argued in this essay, in many ways it has been arriving ever since. The mood of profound malaise and uncertainty it captured, far from improving, seems only to have deepened in the decade and a half since its release. From the scope of executive power and gridlock in Congress, to the loss of trust in our most important institutions and fear of a corporate overclass, The Phantom Menace and its successors foreshadowed the emergence (or renewal) of several issues which presently loom over the political landscape. Their Force-vision of the future resonating more strongly than ever, the Star Wars prequels remain films of and for our times.
