I think a good analogy, in and out of universe would be how people overelay on the Jedi as a crutch, to take all the responsibility and blame for every mistep and stumble that occurs in the galaxy/story. Even when it's consistently held sturdy despite the wear, or the fact that they where actually tripped on occasion. "They should've fixed this." or "They should've acted." That sort of thing. Even though it's job is to keep them stable, not handle everything. I hope I explained that right?
Hi! I think it’s a good analogy, in that the Jedi were meant to help support the bigger system of support for the population, but that they couldn’t be the whole system. But because of the way SW is structured as a story, they get a ton more prominence than they actually have in universe.
Think of our first interaction between Jedi and someone else in The Phantom Menace:
Or from Star Wars Propaganda:
The Core Worlders became more enamored with the fleeting distractions of fame and fashion, transitory fascinations with sophistication that left little room for messages of faith or tradition that the Jedi exemplified. The lack of representation in the galactic mindshare undoubtedly fixed their future, as dark forces were on the rise that would poison the public sentiment toward the Jedi in the decades to come.
And
Absent from this hero-making were the Jedi Knights. Citizens who witnessed the Jedi in action were understandably in awe of their abilities, but it was the clone trooper who was the public face of the war effort.
Because the story shows the Jedi at the center of the amount of screen time and how they were wrapped up in the action of the story, we get the idea that the Jedi were the government and when they don’t act like it, fandom tends to treat them like they were corrupt, stagnant, and just not doing anything about the corruption.
But they are a small fraction of the Republic and they were balancing that against being an entire culture of their own at the same time. Most of the citizens in the galaxy probably never even saw a Jedi in person!
They weren’t the police--that’s what people like Tan Divo were:
They weren’t the army, they were part of it, because they were drafted into service, but the clones were the army:
The Jedi were a group of peacekeepers, they were sent on specific missions for negotiation on behalf of the Republic (they themselves only had what power the Republic granted to them, if the Republic backed out of something, the Jedi couldn’t make them change their minds, they had little more influence than most citizens--we see Yoda just trying to get information from Palpatine in season 6 and is completely denied and he basically says, “That went about as well as it usually does.” showing that the Jedi really held very little sway.
So, the idea that the Jedi could have fixed this or that, especially when they were already being dragged further and further away from their autonomy, while they were in the middle of a war that they were dying in, that they were one of the crutches that the system used to help prop itself up to help people, not the whole of the system itself, gets lost because we spend so much more time watching the Jedi.
The Jedi get about a hundred episodes of TCW and the lion’s share of the prequels movies. The Senate probably gets maybe a dozen. Tan Divo gets, what? Two episodes?
It’s easy to forget that the Jedi aren’t actually running these government programs that are there to help people or in charge of the bigger direction of the war, because we’re watching them for so many more minutes than the other parts of the Republic.
But when you look at the actual structure of the Republic and the politics and who actually does have influence and power, it tells a much different story.
