tl;dr: Nixon and the Vietnam war apparently got Lucas thinking about the possible mechanisms by which the bureaucracy could be circumvented by power-hungry individuals.

Not to say that bureaucracy in itself is a good or bad thing per se, but that fascists like to complain about how inefficient and powerless they are so long as they are bound by their rules, and that during a crisis, it is foreseeable that a democracy could be subverted by a charismatic leader who promises to rise above the bureaucracy in order to restore order and prosperity.

Listen to the words of Biggs again,



and in the context of both Palpatine and Tarkin's derision toward the "bureaucracy", are we not to infer that the Empire, in nationalizing systems previously subject to the rules and regulations enacted by the Senate, ought to be seen as an illegitimate and unwelcome power grab by some wacky religious guy in a flamboyant costume, whereas the supposedly stiffing bureaucracy was in fact a bulwark of autonomy against such authoritarian agents?

Okay but in that specific scene, Palpatine is manipulating Amidala (successfully) by truthfully or not making her believe that Valorum was corrupt or hobbled by the alleged bureaucracy.

All I'm saying is, Lucas seems to think that fascists come to power by *****ing about how inefficient bureaucrats are, and how they should be disposed of. And given Lucas' liberal political views, it's not hard to see the contrast with conservative ideology, which has a much dimmer view of bureaucracies, and instead favors a strong executive branch, plus an economy where corporations are free to advance their own interests relatively unhindered by unnecessary rules and regulations.

The conservative case against the Galactic Senate, by Jonathan V. Last (2002):



Full article: https://www.weeklystandard.com/jonathan-v-last/the-case-for-the-empire

Basically it doesn’t matter whether you agree with him or not, George Lucas considered the faschy power grabby small government Republicans the enemy of democracy, and if that offends you it’s really between you and Lucas, not the people who are bringing your attention to something that Lucas has clearly and repeatedly articulated in interviews.

Count Dooku is the founder of the Tea Party (Ron Paul)

Why would anyone want corporations hindered by unnecessary rules and regulations?

Conservative ideology doesn't favor a strong executive branch, it favors a government that is restrains itself to its defined scope.

The clear and obvious political danger point shown in the prequel trilogy is ceding authority from one branch of government to another.

If you listen to Mark Levin's radio show, a recurring rant of his is that the founders intended for vastly greater power of the executive branch (and vastly decreased power of the judicial branch).

What branch of government is Darth Vader a part of?

Anybody who has worked for a large one.

How does this enter into this? I'm discussing what's actually in the films, not Lucas' mind. Besides, I'm trying to stay mostly on the topic of Star Wars politics, rather than cram a bunch of real world politics into this thread.

Do we have some idea of what the Jedi Order was supposed to represent and what Lucas thought about them?

Lucas was never all that subtle, TBH. Just look at the transcript from TPM I posted, and take out words like "galactic" and you'll think you're watching C-SPAN.

Corporations are just stupid awful dude. They’re wasteful and unethical, their structure MAKES people wasteful and unethical. You need external rules to constrain corporations because they will not constrain themselves.

I’ll never understand why the same people who claim to love democracy and limited government are on board with these unaccountable dictatorship run bureaucrat choked monopoly corporations. It’s ****ing dumb and if any of you ever worked for one of them you’d about face into socialism in 5 minutes the same way I did.

No it's not. Stop pretending you know much of anything about him.



Yeah, I'm sure employees want the government to unnecessarily hinder their employer.

For someone that is so smart you are awfully dense from time to time. I specifically said unnecessary rules and regulations, which is what Jones said. He defined them as unnecessary, not me, and I oppose unnecessary rules, regulations, laws, etc.

But point well taken. The best parts of the original trilogy probably had very little to do with Lucas at all, with a greater share of the credits going to the likes of Ralph McQuarrie, John Williams, Lawrence Kasdan, Irvin Kershner, and not the least Lucas' then-wife Marcia, who saved ANH in the edit (probably also cutting out that overtly political, long and boring scene with Luke and Biggs I posted here).

Yeah, a lot of them do. Corporations are bad. You think the people who work for big corporations don’t look around and see the **** that goes on? You think they’re worried about regulations putting their 50k employee company out of business? please.

Goldman sachs executives begged congress to regulate them after the financial crisis. They didn’t. This **** happens all the time.

I have better things to do than listen to him these days, but when I tuned in about a decade ago he was constantly talking about how the founders intended for the executive branch to have wide autonomy in carrying out its duties.

Less controversial is his hobby horse of bashing the "activist judges" who "legislate from the bench", seeing that the man has written an entire book about this.

Republican’s never met a necessary one.

Actually, I take this back. I guess he was saying that it was Congress that had lost power to the executive branch over the years.

That said, he mostly ranted about it during a Democratic administration (Obama). Go figure.

Edit: I'm listening to an old clip now. He's saying we need a constitutional amendment to stop the totalitarian left from controlling us all through unnecessary rules and regulations made by the bureaucracy.

I think the rub is that what's ultimately unnecessary in one scenario becomes clearly necessary in the big picture to avoid a greater catastrophe. You know, like 2008.

By US/Delaware law directors and officers are legally liable for making decisions in good faith to maximize profitability. Leaving money on the table to do a moral or popular thing is a non-starter because they’ll get sued by an activist shareholder, and if not, then the activist shareholder will get sued for not suing, and so-on. These companies are also rich enough that they basically never have to fire or lay off anybody, and only do so if the victim is sufficiently unpopular or if their entire organization can be outsourced or offshored. Individual managers have more power and prestige the more people report to them, and internal incentives are based on stock price rather than real market performance which is trivially easy to manipulate.

The reality is that corporations are exactly the same as the government bureaucracy that conservatives complain about, stacked with dead weight, choked by do-nothing appointees. And just like the government bureaucracy, the only way to fix the problem is through an act of elected representatives.

I can sympathize with your feelings, Jon. Waste, fraud, and abuse is more than a catchphrase when it comes to business as usual in government. From military to local, just horrid. If anyone that had ever supported increased funding for virtually anything had ever experienced it they'd about face into conservatism in 5 minutes like I did.

So what you are saying is: you'd wholly support a government that would successfully prevent the waste, fraud and abuse of corporations, if only it were possible to do so without perpetuating the greater evil of perpetuating such waste, fraud, and abuse themselves in the process (and on a much larger scale)?

If so, perhaps what you ought to do is look outside the United States, and try to find examples of more efficient bureaucracies, and try to emulate their success by changing our own ideas according. (Or vote for the fascist)

Also, I find it rather curious how much conservatives rant about how wasteful governments are, while at the same time supporting such grotesque military spending, which is probably the greatest waste of all. In fact I'd say it rather undermines their credibility.

So basically you think corporations are awesome because the only waste and incompetence you’ve experienced is at your own government job. Great.

Actually, I haven't really stated any beliefs about corporations. I think there's a lot of regulation that can be reduced but I also think there's a lot of legislative favoritism that can be abolished. It's not really an issue I'm passionate about.

Have you ever wished a corporation would behave differently than it did on some occasion, only for want of being compelled to by a law that doesn't yet exist? And if so, under what circumstances would you consider such a law ethical?

I imagine you are going to be pretty tightly constrained in your answer if you adhere to very strict interpretations of what the scope of the federal government ought to be.

(I think somebody should make a list of all the nice things that were made possible by what conservatives would have us believe is an overly broad interpretation of the commerce clause.)

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Reverend Jones for immediately swooping in and turning this potentially fun topic into a Star Wars themed extension of the Trump thread.
Let's just cut and paste it in there.

You are very welcome.

Actually, please don't merge them, because I'm way too dumb to care about what's being discussed in the other one.

It would be less ambiguous if a good character had any sense of direction in the films. Now that i think on it, many of the "good guys" in the sequels seem to do good things because they're good things. They lack, though, any reasons why they're good. There's this kind of nebulous "we think this is space fascism and its bad" but other than being the negation of the First Order they don't seem to offer their own thing. Probably why Kylo Ren is more compelling, because at least he has beliefs. Even if it's just about making himself more powerful.

Let's forget about politics for a moment and get this thread back on track. According to Wikipedia, "[Jonathan] Last is [...] known for creating the Star Wars meme that the Galactic Empire was really a force for good."

[quote=Jonathan V. Last]
The Case for the Empire
May 15, 2002 at 11:00 PM

STAR WARS RETURNS today with its fifth installment, Attack of the Clones. There will be talk of the Force and the Dark Side and the epic morality of George Lucas's series. But the truth is that from the beginning, Lucas confused the good guys with the bad. The deep lesson of Star Wars is that the Empire is good.

It's a difficult leap to make--embracing Darth Vader and the Emperor over the plucky and attractive Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia--but a careful examination of the facts, sorted apart from Lucas's off-the-shelf moral cues, makes a quite convincing case.

First, an aside: For the sake of this discussion, I've considered only the history gleaned from the actual Star Wars films, not the Expanded Universe. If you know what the Expanded Universe is and want to argue that no discussion of Star Wars can be complete without considering material outside the canon, that's fine. However, it's always been my view that the comic books and novels largely serve to clean up Lucas's narrative and philosophical messes. Therefore, discussions of intrinsic intent must necessarily revolve around the movies alone. You may disagree, but please don't e-mail me about it.

If you don't know what the Expanded Universe is, well, uh, neither do I.

I. The Problems with the Galactic Republic

At the beginning of the Star Wars saga, the known universe is governed by the Galactic Republic. The Republic is controlled by a Senate, which is, in turn, run by an elected chancellor who's in charge of procedure, but has little real power.

Scores of thousands of planets are represented in the Galactic Senate, and as we first encounter it, it is sclerotic and ineffectual. The Republic has grown over many millennia to the point where there are so many factions and disparate interests, that it is simply too big to be governable. Even the Republic's staunchest supporters recognize this failing: In The Phantom Menace, Queen Amidala admits, "It is clear to me now that the Republic no longer functions." In Attack of the Clones, young Anakin Skywalker observes that it simply "doesn't work."

The Senate moves so slowly that it is powerless to stop aggression between member states. In The Phantom Menace a supra-planetary alliance, the Trade Federation (think of it as OPEC to the Galactic Republic's United Nations), invades a planet and all the Senate can agree to do is call for an investigation.

Like the United Nations, the Republic has no armed forces of its own, but instead relies on a group of warriors, the Jedi knights, to "keep the peace." The Jedi, while autonomous, often work in tandem with the Senate, trying to smooth over quarrels and avoid conflicts. But the Jedi number only in the thousands--they cannot protect everyone.

What's more, it's not clear that they should be "protecting" anyone. The Jedi are Lucas's great heroes, full of Zen wisdom and righteous power. They encourage people to "use the Force"--the mystical energy which is the source of their power--but the truth, revealed in The Phantom Menace, is that the Force isn't available to the rabble. The Force comes from midi-chlorians, tiny symbiotic organisms in people's blood, like mitochondria. The Force, it turns out, is an inherited, genetic trait. If you don't have the blood, you don't get the Force. Which makes the Jedi not a democratic militia, but a royalist Swiss guard.

And an arrogant royalist Swiss guard, at that. With one or two notable exceptions, the Jedi we meet in Star Wars are full of themselves. They ignore the counsel of others (often with terrible consequences), and seem honestly to believe that they are at the center of the universe. When the chief Jedi record-keeper is asked in Attack of the Clones about a planet she has never heard of, she replies that if it's not in the Jedi archives, it doesn't exist. (The planet in question does exist, again, with terrible consequences.)

In Attack of the Clones, a mysterious figure, Count Dooku, leads a separatist movement of planets that want to secede from the Republic. Dooku promises these confederates smaller government, unlimited free trade, and an "absolute commitment to capitalism." Dooku's motives are suspect--it's not clear whether or not he believes in these causes. However, there's no reason to doubt the motives of the other separatists--they seem genuinely to want to make a fresh start with a government that isn't bloated and dysfunctional.

The Republic, of course, is eager to quash these separatists, but they never make a compelling case--or any case, for that matter--as to why, if they are such a freedom-loving regime, these planets should not be allowed to check out of the Republic and take control of their own destinies.

II. The Empire

We do not yet know the exact how's and why's, but we do know this: At some point between the end of Episode II and the beginning of Episode IV, the Republic is replaced by an Empire. The first hint comes in Attack of the Clones, when the Senate's Chancellor Palpatine is granted emergency powers to deal with the separatists. It spoils very little to tell you that Palpatine eventually becomes the Emperor. For a time, he keeps the Senate in place, functioning as a rubber-stamp, much like the Roman imperial senate, but a few minutes into Episode IV, we are informed that the he has dissolved the Senate, and that "the last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away."

Lucas wants the Empire to stand for evil, so he tells us that the Emperor and Darth Vader have gone over to the Dark Side and dresses them in black.

But look closer. 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." At one point he laments that "the bureaucrats are in charge now."

Palpatine believes that the political order must be manipulated to produce peace and stability. When he mutters, "There is no civility, there is only politics," we see that at heart, he's an esoteric Straussian.

Make no mistake, as emperor, Palpatine is a dictator--but a relatively benign one, like Pinochet. It's a dictatorship people can do business with. They collect taxes and patrol the skies. They try to stop organized crime (in the form of the smuggling rings run by the Hutts). The Empire has virtually no effect on the daily life of the average, law-abiding citizen.

Also, unlike the divine-right Jedi, the Empire is a meritocracy. The Empire runs academies throughout the galaxy (Han Solo begins his career at an Imperial academy), and those who show promise are promoted, often rapidly. In The Empire Strikes Back Captain Piett is quickly promoted to admiral when his predecessor falls down on the job.

And while it's a small point, the Empire's manners and decorum speak well of it. When Darth Vader is forced to employ bounty hunters to track down Han Solo, he refuses to address them by name. Even Boba Fett, the greatest of all trackers, is referred to icily as "bounty hunter." And yet Fett understands the protocol. When he captures Solo, he calls him "Captain Solo." (Whether this is in deference to Han's former rank in the Imperial starfleet, or simply because Han owns and pilots his own ship, we don't know. I suspect it's the former.)

But the most compelling evidence that the Empire isn't evil comes in The Empire Strikes Back when Darth Vader is battling Luke Skywalker. After an exhausting fight, Vader is poised to finish Luke off, but he stays his hand. He tries to convert Luke to the Dark Side with this simple plea: "There is no escape. Don't make me destroy you. . . . Join me, and I will complete your training. With our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy." It is here we find the real controlling impulse for the Dark Side and the Empire. The Empire doesn't want slaves or destruction or "evil." It wants order.

None of which is to say that the Empire isn't sometimes brutal. In Episode IV, Imperial stormtroopers kill Luke's aunt and uncle and Grand Moff Tarkin orders the destruction of an entire planet, Alderaan. But viewed in context, these acts are less brutal than they initially appear. Poor Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen reach a grisly end, but only after they aid the rebellion by hiding Luke and harboring two fugitive droids. They aren't given due process, but they are traitors.

The destruction of Alderaan is often cited as ipso facto proof of the Empire's "evilness" because it seems like mass murder--planeticide, even. As Tarkin prepares to fire the Death Star, Princess Leia implores him to spare the planet, saying, "Alderaan is peaceful. We have no weapons." Her plea is important, if true.

But the audience has no reason to believe that Leia is telling the truth. In Episode IV, every bit of information she gives the Empire is willfully untrue. In the opening, she tells Darth Vader that she is on a diplomatic mission of mercy, when in fact she is on a spy mission, trying to deliver schematics of the Death Star to the Rebel Alliance. When asked where the Alliance is headquartered, she lies again.

Leia's lies are perfectly defensible--she thinks she's serving the greater good--but they make her wholly unreliable on the question of whether or not Alderaan really is peaceful and defenseless. If anything, since Leia is a high-ranking member of the rebellion and the princess of Alderaan, it would be reasonable to suspect that Alderaan is a front for Rebel activity or at least home to many more spies and insurgents like Leia.

Whatever the case, the important thing to recognize is that the Empire is not committing random acts of terror. It is engaged in a fight for the survival of its regime against a violent group of rebels who are committed to its destruction.

III. After the Rebellion

As we all know from the final Star Wars installment, Return of the Jedi, the rebellion is eventually successful. The Emperor is assassinated, Darth Vader abdicates his post and dies, the central governing apparatus of the Empire is destroyed in a spectacular space battle, and the rebels rejoice with their small, annoying Ewok friends. But what happens next?

(There is a raft of literature on this point, but, as I said at the beginning, I'm going to ignore it because it doesn't speak to Lucas's original intent.)

In Episode IV, after Grand Moff Tarkin announces that the Imperial Senate has been abolished, he's asked how the Emperor can possibly hope to keep control of the galaxy. "The regional governors now have direct control over territories," he says. "Fear will keep the local systems in line."

So under Imperial rule, a large group of regional potentates, each with access to a sizable army and star destroyers, runs local affairs. These governors owe their fealty to the Emperor. And once the Emperor is dead, the galaxy will be plunged into chaos.

In all of the time we spend observing the Rebel Alliance, we never hear of their governing strategy or their plans for a post-Imperial universe. All we see are plots and fighting. Their victory over the Empire doesn't liberate the galaxy--it turns the galaxy into Somalia writ large: dominated by local warlords who are answerable to no one.

Which makes the rebels--Lucas's heroes--an unimpressive crew of anarchic royals who wreck the galaxy so that Princess Leia can have her tiara back.

I'll take the Empire.
[/quote]

The last few paragraphs about the galaxy plunging into chaos following The Return of the Jedi makes me wonder what justification Disney had for making The Force Awakens such a conventional Star Wars movie. In some ways I guess it feels like anarchy, but in other ways the Empire seems just as strong as it ever was, as if Disney felt the need to cling to old SW tropes out of fear that the new movie would be too different.

Actually, in some ways Kylo Ren's gang of imperial forces feels a lot like the Remnant of Jedi Outcast (which I also thought was lame).

Interestingly, maybe only George Lucas could have been so bold as to make a Star Wars movie without imperial stormtroopers (whereas Disney and Raven couldn't help themselves).

Well, I guess the battledroids played the same role, but at least they looked different.

Oh I see. So basically Iraq or Afghanistan?

Are you saying that ISIS is like the First Order?