The following is an excerpt from the Kristol Clear newsletter. Sign up for the weekly newsletter here.
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2016 ended on a high note for me: I made my triennial visit (that is, once every three years, not three times a year) to an actual movie theater to see a movie. Reserved seats, reclining chairs—who knew life at suburban multiplexes had gotten so luxurious! America already is great!
In any case, I went—along with the rest of America—to see Rogue One. I’d seen the original Star Wars almost 40 years ago in Cambridge, happy at the time to avoid working on my dissertation. This time I wasn’t really avoiding any work—I’d been told the president-elect didn’t need me that afternoon for one of our top-secret consultations. So I just went for pleasure. But I also went in the hope that I might find some support for the semi-crackpot pro-Empire line I’d been semi-facetiously pushing for years (without, needless to say, having even seen all the movies, let alone read one-one-thousandth of the literature about them).
Suffice it to say that Rogue One provided enough support (I don’t need much) for the esoteric pro-Empire interpretation of the Star Wars saga to allow me to stick to my view, which I intend to continue to defend in office chit-chat and on Twitter for weeks if not months to come. If you actually do have any interest in all of this, I want to recommend the piece that started it all (which I think is the most widely read TWS piece ever), Jonathan Last’s 2002 “Case for the Empire.” Jonathan argues there that viewing the facts of the Star Wars universe, and looking at the surface moral filter of the movies with some skepticism or irony, shows that the Rebels are anarchists and that the Empire, for all its faults, was actually a force for stability and good.
Over the years, Jonathan tells me, others expanded on this argument. Twitter’s Comfortably Smug demonstrated that the arc of Luke Skywalker can be easily be viewed as that of a young man being pulled into a world of religious radicalism, and eventually jihad. Sonny Bunch argued, convincingly, that the destruction of Alderaan—which is the linchpin of the case against the Empire—was at least as justified as the bombing of Hiroshima. And then, in a coup de grace for the pro-Rebel forces, Jonathan noted that in the Star Wars universe, droids are sentient beings used as slaves by the Rebellion, that both the Rebellion and the Old Republic explicitly condone chattel slavery, and the Empire seems to treat droids as free men.
And just like that, it appears, the case for the Empire went from being a fringe movement to the accepted view of sophisticated Star Wars fans. And not just conservatives. Matthew Gertz is the research director at the liberal non-profit Media Matters. I came across this tweet of his after I’d seen Rogue One: “I’m not sure how one can watch Rogue One and get around that it basically proves the entire The-Empire-is-good thesis.” QED.
By the way, Jonathan and Sonny (and Vic Matus) discuss the question of how to judge the Empire in this episode of their Substandard podcast, and they talk in depth (perhaps more depth than normal people would need) about Rogue One in their most recent episode.
Speaking of podcasts, after you’ve finished with the Substandard and some of our other TWS podcasts (here are links to some of the most recent ones), you might want to take a listen to, or watch, the new conversation with Jonah Goldberg on Conversations with Bill Kristol. We filmed this talk shortly after the election. In it Jonah and I discuss Donald Trump and how conservatives might think about their task during Trump’s presidency. We also reflect on the state of liberalism and conservatism today, and consider some trends in the broader culture—e.g., political correctness, the rise of social media, celebrity politicians—and how they might affect the conservative movement in 2017 and beyond. I’ll immodestly say that I think this podcast, plus the previous one with Harvey Mansfield, provide a pretty good basis for beginning to think about the Trump phenomenon.
(By the way, the great thing about the Conversations is that they don’t go away. They’re all available here, and I think you’ll find a pretty good percentage of them interesting if you didn’t catch them the first time around. I should add that the conversations are also available as audio podcasts on iTunes and Stitcher.) Of course, the Trump candidacy and victory will soon yield to the Trump presidency. That will be interesting and important, and what Trump does as president will be decisive, not what he’s said or tweeted so far. It’s going to be a fascinating four years, and we at TWS are really looking forward to providing multi-faceted coverage and analysis, in real time, of this interesting moment in American politics and, indeed, in American—even in world—history.
