Let’s say you coup a galactic empire. An evil one, even. You explode their planet-wrecking space battleship, the explosion wipes out their top leadership and one of their major battle fleets.
Does that mean that the previous government has no ontological inertia (as the trope goes), simply vanishes? Everyone on every garrisoned planet rises up in rebellion, and all the generals are overthrown?
The central government, maybe. Evil governance, unless very carefully applied, will tend to select for backstabbing. A dozen admirals in control of fleets capable of leveling the surfaces of entire planets are on the loose, and they have Space Cruisers to refuel and soldiers to feed. We’re about to see a whole new meaning to “Galactic Civil War,” far more widespread and far more deadly than the last.
Slaying the Galactic Emperor doesn’t mean you get a new, enduring Republic. It means you get a chance to try.
One of the main objections to the new Star Wars sequels is that it makes the whole thing seem redundant - each generation sees an evil empire rise, destroys it, and makes, apparently, zero progress towards keeping it down. But the generational cycle of galactic empire should take much longer, even if long-term political figurative-ecology pressures cause someone to make another attempt. It’s plausible that they might buy another hundred or maybe even thousand years.
There was room, here, for a story about building a Republic, or a story set in a world where a Republic was being built. Not a story about settlers, although perhaps there might be settlers or space habitats in it, because it isn’t a story about America, but a project in which people are still working out the rules, and all the old knowledge of the past Republic is new again, where exactly the path that will be taken is not yet known.
Liberalism, practiced in its most powerful form, takes courage. In the same vein that development is not just a process of adding capital, but an aggregate of choices made by individuals, it requires placing some trust in others when you don’t yet know if it will be reciprocated.
Imagine it. A dozen evil armies, all armed with overwhelming force and all the oversized Star Cruisers you could like. Republic citizens on worlds uncertain if this Republic is going to last. Militia scrambling to build and staff enough starships to protect the few worlds of the new Republic. Former Imperial loyalists split between the various would-be emperors, forced to question their allegiances. Factions played off against each other. The future of the galaxy opening up, exciting yet dangerous. A new consensus emerging, bound by the choices the characters made throughout the trilogy, not all of them good?
Can you feel the mythic power it might have had?
Is there any filmmaker still bold and daring enough to make that Star Wars? Does that kind of energy still exist in America?
