There are plenty of memorable scenes in Star Wars, but one of the most vivid comes in Revenge of the Sith as viewers watch the fall of the Old Republic.
Chancellor Palpatine, disfigured following his battle with Mace Windu and other Jedi, rises in the Imperial Senate to speak. With the bureaucracy in control and the scattered Jedi crushed following Order 66, the Sith Lord tightens his fist around the galaxy.
“In order to ensure the security and continuing stability, the Republic will be reorganized into the first Galactic Empire, for a safe and secure society,” Palpatine says, raising his arms in crescendo.
As it turns out, the issues of political decadence, crisis-driven power-grabbing, and avarice are just as pervasive in the galaxy far, far away. Since first hitting theaters in 1977, Star Wars has become both a pop culture phenomenon and one of the most iconic franchises in cinema history, with spinoff movies, shows, books, and a global audience of upwards of a billion people. To George Lucas’s admission, Star Wars is, and always has been, a narrative deeply intertwined with political allegory that touches on some of the essential questions that pervade today’s society: What are the dangers of political subversion and despotism? How can fear and conflict be used to consolidate power? How do democracies fail? When is rebellion justified? How do individuals resist systemic evil?
As Star Wars fans celebrate May 4 on Sunday, revisiting the famous auditorium scene where Chancellor Palpatine announces the reorganization of the Galactic Republic into the first Galactic Empire and manipulates thousands of senators through an economists’ lens continues to serve as a poignant reminder of the dangers self-interested political actors using crisis-driven governance to suppress opposition and justify the centralization of power.
“And the Jedi rebellion has been foiled…”
To Palpatine’s credit, he knew never to let a good crisis go to waste – from the trade war on Naboo to the Separatist Crisis to the attempted Jedi “coup”, each served as a convenient pretext for Palpatine to expand his authority under the guise of promoting ‘security’ to a galaxy that had suffered from years of political decadence. Palpatine may rightly be considered a master liar and manipulator, but his actions in this scene are a classic example of a rational political entrepreneur acting within the constraints of the incentive structures embedded in the decaying republic around him. As public choice economist Obi-Wan Kenobi articulated, politicians, like all individuals, make decisions that are largely shaped by incentives to secure their self-interest.
Public officials do not become bleeding heart altruistic agents of the common good simply by stepping through the halls of Congress. Just as consumers respond to incentives in the market, political actors (including aspiring despots) respond to incentives in politics.
Like any savvy authoritarian seeking to consolidate power, Palpatine only needed the right justification—which he got when the Jedi Order confronted him and attempted to arrest him.
Mace Windu: In the name of the Galactic Senate of the Republic, you’re under arrest, Chancellor.
Supreme Chancellor: Are you threatening me, Master Jedi?
Mace Windu: The senate will decide your fate.
Palpatine doesn’t go quietly, of course. And when he survives the attack (thanks to Anakin Skywalker), he has his justification to seize control. After all, there are few crises more suitable to justify suppressing your political opposition than convincing your constituency that said opposition tried to assassinate you (which wasn’t entirely untrue).
Following Palpatine’s declaration are some of the most visually striking sequences in the entire Star Wars trilogy: the aftermath of the Jedi Temple massacre and the slaughter of Separatist leaders on Mustafar by the newly anointed Darth Vader. By casting both the Jedi and the Separatists as enemies of the Republic and threats to democracy, Palpatine exploited public fear to eliminate the final barriers to his absolute power.
Palpatine is the poster child for a bad-faith but rational actor who knew how to manipulate institutional rules and intergalactic events to serve his goals: more control.
Star Wars lays bare a fundamental insight into the nature of power: Power, especially centralized power, naturally attracts those who wish to exercise it, and crises give them the opportunity.
‘All Who Gain Power…’
Even before announcing his plan to reorganize the Republic into the first Galactic Empire, Palpatine had exploited crises to accumulate power.
As Chancellor, he used the Separatist crisis to gain “temporary” emergency powers, which he used to unilaterally create a standing army through the Military Creation Act. He justified massive spending and borrowing to finance the engineering of five million additional clones to fight a war. As the Clone Wars raged on, he abrogated the principles of sound money by nationalizing the Intergalactic Banking Clan (IGBC), effectively granting himself total discretion over the Republic’s fiscal and monetary policy to finance the Republic’s war machine.
It’s easy to overlook the fact that the Separatist threat was orchestrated by Palpatine himself. This was no accident. The Sith Lord understood that the power and control he sought required a nemesis, and his plan worked perfectly.
By the time Revenge of the Sith begins, the senate and the courts, the police, the prisons, and the entire government had been turned over entirely to the military. Palpatine had effectively seized both the power of the sword and the purse and was given full discretion over their use with little to no oversight.
Over and again Palpatine used crises to claim more power. There’s an obvious reason for this. Political emergencies alter the incentive structures both for politicians and for the public at large. In stable conditions, citizens are more skeptical of state overreach, but when secession and civil war loom, people become more willing to trade liberty for the promise of security, empowering leaders who claim only they can restore order.
“Emergencies have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek wrote in Law, Legislation, and Liberty.
Hayek was not wrong, history shows. The American historian and economist Robert Higgs wrote an entire book about the phenomenon Hayek described. Crisis and Leviathan examines the well-documented history that shows governments frequently expand their powers during emergencies and rarely relinquish them willingly afterwards.
Palpatine promised that his extraordinary measures would be temporary, but he was merely playing the long game. Instead of seizing total authority outright, he did so by gradually expanding the powers of his office and playing each move as a necessary response to an emergency.
Higgs and others have referred to this phenomenon as the Ratchet Effect, a concept in economics and political science that describes how government power tends to expand during crises and rarely returns to pre-crisis levels once the emergency has passed.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman once quipped that “there is nothing more permanent than a temporary government program,” but it was Palpatine who observed that “all who gain power are afraid to lose it.”
‘This Is How Liberty Dies…’
Ultimately, the fall of the Galactic Republic tells the story of a political situation not dissimilar from our own. A struggling population tired of the ineptitude of its government and yearning for change looks to a charismatic leader claiming to stand against a broken establishment, making extravagant promises and the decisive action people crave. The leader oversees the erosion of safeguards against unchecked power under the pretext of protection, using emergencies, crises, and wars to consolidate their power further and silence their political opponents and anyone else who could pose a threat to their regime. By the time the people realize what they’ve lost, the government they once knew has already been overturned, and any institutions that existed to resist them have already been dismantled or absorbed.
What is perhaps most telling about this scene is that Palpatine did not seize power in secret–he did it with full transparency and widespread public approval. Authoritarian regimes, like many in today’s world, are not only imposed from above but are oftentimes welcomed from below. The senators and political institutions designed to prevent the emergence of a despot became the very means by which one came into fruition, and the public, conditioned by crisis and rhetoric, offered little resistance. Palpatine’s rise to power, embodied by his famous speech before the senate, offers a telling commentary on the warnings of political economists across generations: a politician’s first duty is to themselves, crises breed opportunism, and despotism frequently comes from the fear-driven compliance of its citizens.
Liberty is hardly lost overnight, nor is it always through external coercion or evil mustache-twirling villains tricking their foolish populations into giving them a power mandate. The road to tyranny is paved with apathy, corruption, and a public too willing to trade its freedoms for the false promise of security. To quote Ahsoka Tano, “The deadliest enemies of a society dwell within its borders.”
May the Fourth be with you.