14

By Any Means Necessary: Tyranny, Democracy, Republic, and Empire

KEVIN S. DECKER

 

 

 

 

Palpatine—the weasel-like Senator from Naboo, the rapidly wrinkling Supreme Chancellor, and ultimately the cackling, loathsome Emperor—is reviled universally by fans as the epitome of evil. Still, you’ve got to give him credit for his political savvy. After all, Palpatine’s career is a textbook case in how the unceasing desire for power can change something like democracy, or rule by the many, into a tyrannical dictatorship. Using the constant threat posed by the Dark Side of the Force, the Sith—Palpatine and his protegé, Darth Vader—use the hyper-technological Imperial military to keep iron-fisted, monochromatic control over the galaxy. How different this vision is from the diverse and colorful, if conflicted, Old Republic of the prequel trilogy!

This same kind of political one-hundred-eighty degree turn has occurred in human history, too. Politicians, political scientists and theorists over many centuries have grappled with how this could have happened, in most cases in order to prevent it from happening again. But the story of the road to tyranny isn’t just of historical interest, even though democracy and tyranny date back to ancient Greece. It also embroils us in heady debates of today about the source of political authority, whether the needed expertise of politicians is a good trade-off against the possibility of their corruption, and how much power can safely be concentrated in the hands of a few.

These arguments often boil down to the question of who rules versus who should rule. This isn’t an easy question, because it presumes that we’ve settled on what kind of government is best—democracy, republic, aristocracy, or some other? Also, it presumes that we know whether rulers need some virtue or expertise in order to rule, or could everyone simply rule themselves? Political life in the Star Wars galaxy provides us a jumping off point in approaching these central questions of political philosophy.

Galactic Politics for Dummies

Despite their lukewarm reception by the fans, Episodes I-III in the Star Wars saga tell us the most about the political forces that fundamentally drive its episodic stories and overall narrative. With the blockbuster episodes made in the late 1970s and 1980s, there wasn’t much to say. The Cold War-style political message of Star Wars at that time was fairly simple: big, evil empires that rely on soulless technology and dominating control over their populations are bad, and rebellion against such empires is justified. By contrast, Episodes I-III deliver a more complex message about the human failings and weaknesses that help to undermine a huge, declining federation of civilizations.

To answer the question of how a democratic form of government could slide into empire, we have to define a few terms and make a few guesses about the nature of the Republic. In our galaxy, the word “republic” originates from the Latin res publica, the realm of public life outside of private affairs. The term’s meaning is roughly equivalent to what we would call the “commonwealth” or “common good.” Palpatine’s government may be a republic in this simple sense alone: it recognizes and works for the common good. In Attack of the Clones, Anakin voices an idea of what a good republic ought to do. “We need a system where the politicians sit down and discuss the problem, agree to what’s in the best interest of all the people, and then do it,” he says to Padmé.

But some might argue that “republicanism” means more than just recognition of the common good. Government should be built on the idea that the freedom of its citizens is essential, they say, but their freedom depends on their taking part in government. Their participation includes protecting themselves from the arbitrary influence of others.¹³⁰ Such protection can be secured in lots of different ways, perhaps most importantly through justifiable restrictions on the power of both government and certain collective interests like corporations and special-interest groups. However the republican tradition in political thought also stresses that citizens must be active participants in political life according to moral or civic duty. Rather than simply defining what republics have been historically, this way of thinking has moral importance—it makes a statement about how political life contributes to the good life, and what we ought to do to achieve it.

“The problem,” writes Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century, “is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.”¹³¹ Rousseau poses the thorny question of how to balance the group needs that we all share and that can’t be served without collective action with the dignity and autonomy (or self-rule) of the individual.

The Republic also seems to have certain features of a democracy. Democracies need two ideals as essential ingredients of their laws and institutions: self-government and equality. Since every inhabitant of Naboo, Coruscant, Dantooine, Kashyyk and all the others can’t be expected to vote on every issue before the Senate, they interpret “self-government” the same way we do in America—in terms of a representative democracy. This is the preferred option for any large, heavily populated democracy for obvious reasons. There have been direct democracies, though, in which individual citizens do vote on everything. We can’t conclude that simply because the Republic seems to be a democracy, every planetary system within it is also ruled by the people. Naboo, for example, democratically elects its queen, but it’s implied in The Phantom Menace that the Gungans haven’t had a say in the larger political affairs of the planet for some time.

So, is the Republic founded on the ideal of equality as well? By this we can’t suggest that in a democracy everyone is born equal in terms of their talents, capacities, social or economic status. Obviously the set of our natural endowments is virtually unique to each individual. Instead, equality in a democracy usually means equal rights, equal opportunity, and equal standing under the law. Civil rights laws, welfare systems, public education, and trial by a jury of one’s peers have all been used to promote this kind of equality. But in the Star Wars galaxy, it’s clear that this kind of equality isn’t treated as a universal standard. Certain societies, such as the Jedi Order, seem to function based on hierarchical, not democratic principles. There are planets like Tatooine where slavery is not only legal, but also the basis of the economy; but as Shmi Skywalker points out, Tatooine isn’t part of the Republic. And there’s also the controversial issue of whether droids are persons, have rights, and thus deserve to be treated equally with “organics.”¹³² These are all reminders that in reality democracy has both an ideal meaning and a real landscape, as the examples of the civil rights and women’s voting movements of the twentieth century show. In both cases, only moral arguments and public protests enlarged our conception of what equality meant, even as large numbers of citizens held that opportunities ought to be restricted to white men.

Let’s assume that the Republic is a democratic republic in more than name only. How do we get from that to the tyranny of the Empire? Aristotle provides us with a suitable definition for tyranny: it’s the “arbitrary power of an individual which is responsible to no one, and governs all alike, whether equals or betters, with a view to its own advantage, not to that of its subjects, and therefore against their will.”¹³³ So the idea of a ruler who acts in blatant defiance of the laws, or perhaps in the absence of laws, is central to the definition of tyranny. Ancient Greek tyrants and Roman dictators were often voted into power by means of the laws they later defied, in order to respond to an external challenge to their state, like imminent invasion, or in some cases because of internal threats, such as civil war.

In his own route to tyranny, Palpatine and his alter ego, Darth Sidious, have taken a path like the one expressed in the lyrics of an old German song: “against democrats, only soldiers help.” The Sith Lord’s alliance with the Trade Federation and his commissioning of the Kaminoan clone army through the Jedi Sifo-Dyas both paved the way for the Clone Wars ten years later. Lust for power, not high ideals, is Palpatine’s primary motivation. Palpatine wants to transform the Republic to obtain power, and he realizes that the only way to establish power over such a large, diverse group of peoples is through the use of military might. One snag: the mainly pacifist Senate won’t allow such an army to be mustered, even when they find out that they have the Kamino clones at their disposal. Palpatine can’t let this stand in his way, but fortunately his long-term scheming has paved the way for a solution. In Revenge of the Sith, we finally see his plan revealed in its awful magnitude, and its keystone is the power of the clone army to destroy most of the Jedi, allow Palpatine to dissolve the Senate, and suppress any opposition to his declaring himself Emperor. Why did the Senate vote in favor of giving Palpatine dictatorial authority, thus allowing him to harness the power he would eventually use to crush them? The answer is a familiar and simple one: fear.

Fear as an Ally

“Fear is my ally,” hisses Darth Maul in the exciting ad campaign that led up to the much-anticipated release of The Phantom Menace. Maul’s sentiment is echoed by Grand Moff Tarkin, who in A New Hope says that the finished Death Star will have a deterrent effect against rebellion, since “fear will keep the local systems in line.” Both agree about the political value of fear with Palpatine, who is positively Machiavellian in his scheming toward the Empire, in the way he later controls his domain, and even while he taunts Luke to use his fear and anger as a means to bring him over to the Dark Side. In this, he is the paradigm of “the Prince,” the unscrupulous ruler envisioned by Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), a Renaissance political thinker who advised Italy’s Borgia and Medici families. Machiavelli famously declared that if a prince has the choice between being loved and being feared by his subjects, he ought to choose fear. Ever the realist, Machiavelli held that this is because “love is held by a chain of obligation which, men being selfish, is broken whenever it serves their purpose; but fear is maintained by a dread of punishment which never fails.”¹³⁴

Machiavelli amends this statement, though, by saying that a good ruler ought to avoid those things that inspire hatred rather than fear, such as taking the property or wife of a subject. Today, we can hear echoes of Machiavelli’s dictum when our leaders convince us to elect them or support their initiatives, not by offering us good reasons, but by playing on our emotions and sympathies. This tactic is held by many to be anti-democratic as it both disrespects and clouds our ability to make informed, rational decisions. Real democracy is based on our ability to make good decisions, since democratic political authority issues from the will of the people. We’re rightly suspicious of such Machiavellian tendencies in our own leaders as a result.

Machiavelli’s suggestion that clever politicians balance the happiness of citizens with uncertainty about their security has a very old pedigree. A prime example is found in ancient Athens, some fifty years before the advent of direct democracy there in 508 B.C.E. At the time, the Athenians were divided into three regional factions. The leaders of all three vied for political power, not to institute equality between citizens, but so that the classes they represented would gain by certain changes. Into this powder keg stepped the legendary Greek legislator Solon, held by later Greeks as “the greatest of statesman and the wisest of men” who had already saved Athens from civil war in 594 B.C.E.

Attempting to broker a settlement, Solon was suspicious of the attitude of Pisistratus, the leader of the disaffected working class, who “had an affable and engaging manner, was a great friend of the poor, and behaved with generosity even to his enemies.”¹³⁵ This fooled many Athenians, but not Solon. Pisistratus cemented his place in the people’s hearts by wounding himself, then driving a chariot into the Athenian marketplace to denounce an assassination attempt by his enemies to his followers. Like the anonymous, red-robed guards that constantly accompany Palpatine, bodyguards were granted to Pisistratus, who used them to seize the Acropolis and establish himself as a tyrant, a single ruler who consults the laws only when it suits him. His position, effectively similar to the old Greek kings of the Iliad and Odyssey, passed to his two sons before the tyranny was ended. Solon, although allowed to live under the tyranny, was powerless to challenge the power of the Pisistratids.

In the later Roman political tradition, special powers and single-person rule made up the role of the dictator, which did not have the same negative meaning then as it does now. Dictators were often figures with military power—Julius Caesar for example—and were appointed indirectly by the Roman senate for specific purposes like commanding an army, holding elections, or suppressing sedition. Dictators were to resign their title and powers as soon as their task was completed and the emergency was over. But Caesar, whose appointment to the unheard-of position of dictator perpetuus perhaps gave us the first hint of the modern meaning of the word, used his powers to effectively destroy the Roman Republic and establish a hereditary Empire. Palpatine would have been proud.

Was George Lucas unconsciously thinking of his ancient history class in high school when he penned Palpatine’s speech accepting radical “emergency powers” in order to combat the political Separatists lead by Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones? There, the future Emperor declares gravely:

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. And as my first act with this new authority, I will create a Grand Army of the Republic to counter the increasing threats of the Separatists.

The “reluctant” acceptance of the power he has been secretly hoping for, his noble words in defense of popular rule, and his solemn promise to lay down power when it’s no longer needed would not have sounded inappropriate coming from Pisistratus or Julius Caesar. So the irony in this important scene, both in this sense and given what happens in Revenge of the Sith, is palpable (excuse the pun). It’s an essential part of the tragedy of the prequel trilogy, however, that fear exposes the clay feet of the Republic’s stone giant.

Palpatine’s gambit puts a new spin on Machiavelli. Palpatine realizes that an adversarial relationship between himself and the rest of the Republic won’t go his way: sometimes it’s better to be loved than feared. But fear can still be his ally as long as he’s poised, shoulder-to-shoulder with senators and citizens, against some external force. Long before the events of The Phantom Menace, Palpatine must have struggled with the same question as Pisistratus did: “How can a threat be manufactured that will unite the people behind me, and lead to their granting me special powers and a military force?” Palpatine’s scheming is all the more in-sidious because, through the Neimoidian Trade Federation, Count Dooku, and their allies, he manufactures the threat. But modern democracies in our world have faced real threats to their existence, both external (like war and terrorism) and internal (like crime and political corruption).

After Obi-Wan reports in from Geonosis about the genuine threat represented by the Separatists, a senator from Malastare loyal to Palpatine claims, “The time for debate [about the Military Creation Act] is over. Now we need that clone army.” Since the Senate won’t use the clones pre-emptively, the “hawks” among them decide that the threat justifies granting Palpatine emergency powers, an act that is the beginning of the end for democracy in the Republic. Like these fictional senators, we need to ask ourselves the difficult questions, “What measures can be justly taken to defend a democracy in troubled times?” and “Is democracy undermined if undemocratic measures are taken in its defense?” These are questions as relevant and controversial today as they were a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Power in the Hands of the Virtuous Few

There’s an important scene in Attack of the Clones that contrasts two major answers to these questions we just posed about the defense of democracy:

ANAKIN: I don’t think the system works. We need a system where the politicians sit down and discuss the problem, agree to what’s in the best interest of all the people, and then do it.

PADMÉ: That’s exactly what we do. The problem is that people don’t always agree.

ANAKIN: Then they should be made to.

PADMÉ: By whom? Who’s going to make them?

ANAKIN: Someone …

PADMÉ: You?

ANAKIN: No, not me.

PADMÉ: But someone . . . ?

ANAKIN: (nods) Someone wise.

PADMÉ: I don’t know. Sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship to me.

ANAKIN: (after a long pause) Well, if it works . . . ?

Anakin’s thoughts reflect Palpatine’s distrust of the politics of the Republic, which were expressed more subtly in The Phantom Menace over the Senate’s handling of the Naboo trade embargo. By this point, Anakin seems clearly under Palpatine’s charismatic influence, if not of the Dark Side itself. Anakin voices the view of his mentor that the bureaucratic aspects of a democratic republic hinder it when swift action is needed. Because of this, the Republic may be unable to handle internal or external challenges unless it leans on the leadership of its best, wisest, and most virtuous citizens. Padmé seems to recoil at his “great man” solution to political dissent, perhaps by maintaining that democracy has the resources necessary to survive. Their debate is reflected in the confrontation between the very different ideas of two recent political philosophers, Leo Strauss (1899-1973) and John Dewey (1859-1952). Both of them were concerned with the problems and prospects of a kind of democracy we haven’t really looked at yet: modern liberal democracy. But Strauss and Dewey understood the term “liberal” in very different ways.

Strauss thinks that political thinkers of the past, particularly Plato and Aristotle, provide timeless questions about the good life and the just state that today’s political philosophers should still be concerned about. But, he would say, modern politics has somehow gotten off the right track, taking its cues from mediocre mass culture, mob democracy, and moral relativism (the belief that no moral view is inherently superior to any other). It’s true that these seem to be characteristics of modern culture, but Strauss calls our attention to the ideals that animate the “philosopher-king” of Plato’s Republic and the contemplative sage of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Both figures are beacons of virtue and wisdom as well as natural leaders. Their search for absolute and ultimate truth in political life, as in all other areas, has been abandoned for the most part, he thinks. So his sense of “liberal” attempts to recapture what was at the heart of Platonic and Aristotelian political thought: it expresses our inner impulse toward human excellence as being the end of all our efforts. Strauss says:

The liberal man on the highest level esteems most highly the mind and its excellence and is aware of the fact that man at his best is autonomous or not subject to any authority, while in every other respect he is subject to authority which, in order to deserve respect, or to be truly authority, must be a reflection through a dimming medium of what is simply the highest.¹³⁶

Strauss’s way of thinking treats democracy as a “universal aristocracy” in which all are free to find their proper purpose and place in society, but society itself is structured by the insight that our wisest leaders have into what is essential, most real, or “the highest” in human nature.

John Dewey, called in his time “America’s philosopher,” would agree with Strauss’s key idea that an ideal democracy is a universal aristocracy. But much depends on whether we put the stress on “universal” or “aristocracy,” Dewey argues. For him, the “liberal” in liberal democracy means faith “that every human being as an individual may be the best for some particular purpose and hence be the most fitted to rule, to lead, in that specific respect.”¹³⁷ He also stresses that we should see democracy as merely a way in which those with the greatest political expertise find their way into power. Democracy is more than a kind of political system involving voting and majority rule. It’s a way of living that extends farther than politics, one that demands that individuals have the greatest freedom—in terms of equality of opportunity—to continue to grow as individuals and express their individuality. Democracy in this sense is a struggle: it requires our commitment to continually criticize and revise educational, political, and other means for providing opportunities for individuals. Sometimes these commitments may get in the way of traditional beliefs and values, and cause conflicts. But, Dewey says, it is also the best path for the attainment of excellence by a democratic citizenry as a whole. But Dewey’s view of excellence is not like Strauss’s because it is not solely dependent upon our accepting the wisdom of great and virtuous leaders. Instead, he says that democracy involves “faith in the capacity of the intelligence of the common man to respond with commonsense to the free play of facts and ideas which are secured by effective guarantees of free inquiry, free assembly and free communication.”¹³⁸

Anakin, particularly in his admiration for Palpatine and other “great men” and by his distrust of popular participation in democracy, holds a view comparable to Strauss’s. For both of them, greater concentration of power in the hands of a few is justified by the natural ability of those few to lead and their virtues in assessing, judging, and responding to difficult and complex situations. To Strauss, these are “the wise,” and Anakin sees wisdom and virtue not so much in Obi-Wan or the Jedi Council, but in figures like Palpatine who promise both the power and the license to correct injustices quickly and immediately. But the common person is apparently not fit to rule herself according to Strauss or Anakin, and the Straussian statesman is empowered to utilize many means, including deception, the stirring of patriotism, and manufactured threats in order to keep power.¹³⁹

Padmé may represent a view closer to Dewey’s. Although she agrees with Anakin in part when she claims in frustration in The Phantom Menace that the Republic is broken, she seems to have changed her mind in Attack of the Clones when she agrees with Queen Jamilla of Naboo’s assertion that “the day we stop believing democracy can work is the day we lose it.” By opposing the Senate’s Military Creation Act from the beginning, Padmé may have seized on a version of Dewey’s central idea that democratic ends can be reached only by democratic means. Measures that threaten or clearly violate the republican and democratic principles we looked at earlier may create the façade of democracy, but they line the foundation of the democratic house with coercion, deception, and the establishment of aristocracies of all kinds—of wealth, of influence, or even those of higher education and virtue as Strauss suggests. Democracies can and should still value virtue and ability, but they should also put their trust in healthy checks and balances on the abuse of power, all at the reasonable cost of lessening the efficiency of democratic leadership. Of course, it’s this loss of efficiency that future strong leaders like Anakin Skywalker deplore. When Palpatine seizes ultimate power, Anakin wins, but at the cost of his own soul. For the rest of the denizens of the Republic, the importance of balancing security and democratic principles is a lesson learned the hard way.

Palpatine’s Legacy

Palpatine’s rise from democratically-elected Supreme Chancellor to Emperor is a gripping, if ultimately tragic tale of how democracy may be destroyed from within by its own weakness when security is pursued by non-democratic means. It also exposes a flaw in the Straussian thinking of even well-meaning people like Anakin: “Who watches the watchers?” Strauss’s virtuous statesmen don’t ultimately answer to the common person but to a higher truth to which only the statesmen are privileged to. What checks are put on their obtaining power and who is to say that they are virtuous in their efforts?—only other members of “the wise.”

The bitter truth raised here may stem from the fact that we have become more cynically distrustful of centralized authority, but there is also a deeper point to be made. Virtue is good, we agree, but our vision of human excellence today is much more diverse and plural than it was with Strauss’s beloved Greeks. There are many goods worth pursuing, and perhaps some conflict with one another: the democratic challenge for now is to explore how to balance or reconcile these conflicts in order to maximize virtue, not concentrate it in figures of authority. As Senator, Supreme Chancellor, and ultimately Emperor, Palpatine’s example throws light on the path from democracy to empire, a path paved with fear and insecurity, the illusory endpoint of which is freedom and peace. In some ways, it may seem unsatisfactory to say that democracy is an “unfinished project” in which we all still have a part to play. In the end, however, admitting this might be the best guard against our own Palpatines, present and future.¹⁴⁰