Why the politics of Star Wars still matters (part 2): “The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us”

This is a series of posts drawing on my forthcoming book Welcome to the Rebellion: A New Hope in Radical Politics (published in June 2020 by Zero Books).

The first post in this series discussed the importance in politics of owning rebel stories. This post discusses what happens when authoritarians manipulate popular discontent for their own ends.

To a number of critics at the time and to many ever since, rather than being political, Star Wars (A New Hope) provided a fantastical distraction from politics. By the mid-1970s, Americans had recently learnt that their government was a cancerous conspiracy (Watergate) and that, against the country’s self-image, they were hated imperialists (the Vietnam War). Despite President Gerald Ford pardoning the corrupt Richard Nixon and declaring that “Our long national nightmare is over,” many Americans thought they recognized the foul stench of a rotting republic all around them.

And so, a spectacular space opera must have seemed like some much-needed light relief. But really, Star Wars was deeply political from the beginning, and very much reflected its times. It’s a fable rooted in the 1960s American new left, a warning about creeping authoritarianism, and a beacon of new hope to rebels everywhere.

George Lucas acknowledges that he wrote Star Wars because he thought that society was in need of myths, but not as a distraction from what was going on. Star Wars is contemporary folklore about the rise and defeat of fascism (and rise again, as the sequel films – the ones made under Disney – dramatize).

Conservative commentators have tended to grasp what Lucas was up to far more readily than those on the left. For example, Arthur Chrenkoff has warned conservatives that Star Wars has long been a radical left ‘fantasy’:

“[T]he... evil Empire is [the] United States, and the heroes, the good guys that we, the viewers, are meant to root for, are the communist guerrillas... [T]he American Empire was a quasi-fascistic, semi-dictatorial, highly aggressive and militaristic polity in the grip of “the military-industrial complex” and “the power elites”, suppressing dissent and subjugating minorities at home, while continuously invading poor Third World countries to crush their national aspirations in the interests of the American corporations and the American war machine.”

Well, indeed.

George Lucas’s political perspective was influenced from the 1960s new left, which rejected the anti-democratic nature of ‘old left’ bureaucratic Marxist-Communist parties as well as contemporary capitalism and conventional centre-left politics (I’m not suggesting that Lucas was a new leftist, rather he was a liberal guy living in tumultuous times). The new left was anti-imperialist and emphasized grassroots democracy. In the US, the movement was most associated with anti-war college-campus protests, including Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and the Free Speech Movement. The latter started during the 1964-1965 academic year on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley (Lucas attended USC Film School in the early 1960s and re-enrolled as a graduate student from 1967-1968. He claimed of his time at university, “I was angry at the time, getting involved in all the causes”).

A New Hope throws us into the midst of the galactic civil war. But let’s go back earlier in the chronological story (as told later in terms of the films), to how the Empire came to be. The Star Wars prequels have been derided by many critics and fans, though they’ve undergone a re-evaluation of late. But their most important contribution is to dramatize, however shakily, that the Empire didn’t arise outside of the Republic but grew within it. As Lucas has explained:

“When I first started making [A New Hope], it was during the Vietnam War, and it was during a period when Nixon was going for a third term – or trying to get the Constitution changed to go for a third term – and it got me to thinking about how democracies turn into dictatorships. Not how they’re taken over where there’s a coup or anything like that, but how the democracy turns itself over to a tyrant.”

The political story of the prequels is how the Sith manufacture a crisis and seize on the desire of a frustrated public for strong leadership to master the chaos. Chancellor Palpatine is granted emergency powers that open the door to militarization, repression including the liquidation of the Jedi, and the establishment of dictatorship.

As Anne Lancashire notes, the prequels emphasize the corrupting influence of militarism on democracy, a major new left theme. In Attack of the Clones, war is depicted as a tool supported by profit-seeking big business, the means by which manipulative leaders achieve power by exploiting fear and greed.

And underlying all this – not prominent enough in the films but it’s there – is rampant inequality. While the Galactic Republic afforded political representation to hundreds of worlds and star systems for the first time, much inequality and exploitation remained, particularly of the outlying Outer Rim territories compared to the central Core Worlds (including the Republic’s capital of Coruscant). In our world, as in the saga, these inequalities set in train the events leading to authoritarianism.

As Nader Elhefnawy describes it:

“Here we have a vast republic in which Big Business in its greed is trampling on everything and everyone, unrestrained by the government, which has had its courts and its legislators corrupted... Meanwhile, the most backward forms of exploitation and oppression continue to flourish – or perhaps, even resurge – at the margins (like slavery on Tatooine), and the whole system appears increasingly decrepit. Naturally the mess creates openings for reviving violent, irrational, reactionary elements (the Sith) that present themselves as partners to an economic elite determined not to compromise with the rest of society.”

George Lucas was once asked what one thing he hoped fans understood about his most famous story. He replied, “I only hope that those who have seen Star Wars recognize the Emperor when they see him.” But it’s also a warning about how real injustice provides an opportunity for authoritarians. When Palpatine is still a senator, he says, “The Republic is not what it once was. The Senate is full of greedy, squabbling delegates. There is no interest in the common good.” His promise is to make the Republic great again, to drain the swamp of the Galactic Senate, and serve the interests of the galaxy’s citizens. But that’s not his real agenda.

As we later learn, he’s secretly engineered the blockade of the planet Naboo, part of his plot to seize power. The planet’s (elected) Queen Amidala pleads in front of the Senate for help. When she is rejected, she calls for a vote of no confidence in Chancellor Velorum, leaving the way clear for Palpatine to replace him. As Amidala later regrets, “So this is how liberty dies ...with thunderous applause.”

We have been warned – by history, and, it turns out, by our most popular piece of modern folklore.

In the next post, we’ll examine how empire threatens not only democracy, but our very existence.

Welcome to the Rebellion: A New Hope in Radical Politics, will be published in June 2020 by Zero Books. You can pre-order your copy now at:

US: Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Books-A-Million, Indiebound

UK: Amazon.co.uk, Zero Books, Waterstones, Foyles, Blackwells

Rest of the world: Chapters/Indigo, Booktopia, Book Depository, Goodreads

A FREE preview of the introduction to the book is available on Amazon.