Why the politics of Star Wars still matters (part 6): “Aren’t you a little short for a Stormtrooper?”

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).

As noted in the previous post, Star Wars came from a specific generational perspective, but pulled off the near-miraculous trick of immediate and massive popular appeal across age groups and political viewpoints, in part because most people missed its politics and just enjoyed (or dismissed) it as a special effects space opera joyride (which it also is).

Not everyone, though. Once upon a time, the right claimed the light side of the Force for themselves. Echoing some critics on the academic left, in this reading A New Hope heralded a cultural shift that preceded the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Ronald Reagan a year later. Here was a morality tale of individuals standing up against a suffocating statist bureaucracy, and at its worst, a Stalinist war machine. Star Wars was regarded as reasserting ‘traditional values’ in an America that was becoming increasingly secular and relativistic. And Cold War warrior Reagan liked to employ simple Star Wars-like analogies, including describing the Soviet Union as an evil empire.

But over time, some conservatives have come to embrace the Empire. Since Star Wars can be used as a mirror to our own times, we might want to listen to them when they tell us who they are.

This really started to happen around the time of the Star Wars prequels, as the anti-authoritarian – but more importantly anti-corporate – politics of Lucas’s story became unavoidable and the Empire apologists revealed themselves. In 2002 for example, as Attack of the Clones hit theatres, Jonathan Last made “The Case for the Empire” in the conservative Weekly Standard. Apparently, “The deep lesson of ‘Star Wars’ is that the Empire is good.” Sure, Palpatine is a dictator, but a “relatively benign one.” Last then added: “...like Pinochet.”

Now, you can certainly put some of this kind of thing down to trolling the libs, but this wasn’t the first (or last) time the right has expressed support for General Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 military coup in Chile against a democratically elected government, and with it the oppression, torture and murder of political opponents. What they’re really defending is the neoliberal economic experiment inflicted on the country’s citizens, which produced widespread poverty and suffering.

There are plenty of other examples of the right’s flirtation with Empire. To cite just one, Donald Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon declared that: “Darkness is good... Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when [liberal critics] get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”

Whether by design or not, the Star Wars sequel films reflect today’s resurgent authoritarianism. J. J. Abrams, the director of The Force Awakens (and later, The Rise of Skywalker), said the concept for the First Order (the new Empire) “came out of conversations about what would have happened if the Nazis all went to Argentina but then started working together again.” Which come to think of it, kind of echoes Bannon’s plan to unite national populist conservative political movements around the world. (It turns out in The Rise of Skywalker that the new Empire is effectively the Same Old Empire, which rather reinforces Abrams’ ‘Nazis’ point.)

It’s against this real-world background that the politics of Star Wars are now much more prominent. Parts of the internet have taken against the series, urging moviegoers to #DumpStarWars because of its perceived social justice warriorship and demanding that its owners Make Star Wars Great Again (of course, it’s possible to dislike the sequels for entirely valid reasons). But perhaps what really annoys some people is that new Star Wars reflects their own journey towards the dark side.

In the sequels, the Vader cosplaying Kylo Ren is not so much seduced into the Sith as dives into the dark side in order to act out his power fantasies. No wonder the alt-right doesn’t like the new Star Wars (but then again, what did they think the previous films were about?) Ren captures their adolescent attention-seeking shock tactics perfectly. Han Solo is right when says to Ren that “[Snoke]’s only using you for your power.” Depressed, alienated, sometimes desperate young men (it is young men, typically) are being led toward fascism by facile father figures.

This is exemplified best in the prequel films, in the story of Anakin Skywalker. George Lucas is often accused of being a bad writer, but as Cass Sunstein noticed about the prequel films:

“[They] boldly don’t do as the standard movie of this kind does, focus on individuals... [I]t’s about institutions. And they have something to say about both how people go bad... especially about a little boy who loses his mother and then his loved one... And it’s the threat of loss that gets to him... And there’s something very similar that happens with the Republic. So, the institutional failure of a squabbling legislature leading to interest in a strong paternal leader – that’s mirrored in the democratic process as it is in the individual life.”

As a result of our faltering republics, we face the grave danger of more young people turning to the dark side. Star Wars has its share of characters struggling to find their identities. They’re experiencing a tumultuous galactic civil war after all, so it’s not surprising they manifest all sorts of psychological conditions. How they cope is one of the reasons the saga is compelling to so many people, especially because our rebel heroes (and we hope, ourselves) still find ways to display courage, compassion and hope. Others, however, succumb to the Sith.

In Attack of the Clones, Anakin suggests that the Galactic Senate should be made to resolve its differences by “Someone wise.” Padmé responds, “That sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship to me.” “Well, if it works...,” Anakin counters. Later, Anakin’s personal fear of loss and lack of control leaves him prey to Palpatine’s perfidious plot to plunge the galaxy into chaos and conflict.

Reviewing the film, Michael Sragow suggests that, “[A]ll along, Lucas intended to create a series that would demonstrate the seductiveness of fascism to boys like Anakin, who are disgusted with the compromises of a weak, degraded democracy, as well as depict the formation of a totalitarian style.” As Sragow notes, Anakin’s rebellion takes reactionary form: he chafes at lectures from naive do-gooders and is drawn instead toward a worldly-wise counsellor who seems to offer him a solution to his pain and confusion…

As Hannah Arendt suggested in The Origins of Totalitarianism, fascism is everywhere rooted in dehumanization, first the loss of dignity we feel ourselves by being left behind by capitalism, then our dehumanization of others in reaction. The preconditions for domination are individual isolation and loneliness. Indeed, Arendt called totalitarianism a kind of organized loneliness.

Rather than allowing more young people to slip into the waiting arms of empire, we need to provide them with a different grand narrative, one that gives their lives meaning and purpose, and most importantly, a new, positive commonality – something I’ll discuss in a later post.

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