On my corner of the internet, it’s become a commonly accepted fact the world we live in today weirdly mirrors the Star Wars prequels. Memes about trade disputes and tech bros meeting together like the Separatist Council abound. It’s a point of personal pride that I was an early adopter of this worldview, and I have a timestamp to prove it. This snippet from a chat with my good friend Austin on our now long dormant podcast sums up the idea pretty well (lightly edited for clarity).

JAY: You know, I used to think the politics in the Star Wars prequels was the weakest part. It’s what everybody complained about. Because it was boring, dumb, and unrealistic. And then you get to today, where all of our politics is about trade, (Austin groans) and like votes of no confidence,[^1] (Austin groans louder) and just like all this endless debate about how the republic no longer functions. And I’m like wow, you know, I used to think this was dumb, but then reality caught up.

AUSTIN: You’re hurting me.

JAY: So, like, looking back, the prequels really hold up.

AUSTIN: Oh my goddddddd! You’ve done me great and terrible harm. (Jay laughs) Because the whole time you were talking about that too, I was like “Oh god, he’s right.” And then I was also like “Oh man, it’s so dumb how that in the prequels it’s so obvious Palpatine’s evil.” Like he looks evil. He’s all fucked up. He doesn’t have any real charisma that is visible to like most sane people. And I’m just thinking about that and I’m like “Oh noooo! That’s all of them! That’s all of them right now!”

Hopefully you’re familiar with the particulars of the prequel canon. If not, this often memed Alex Jones clip will get you up to speed. Of course, Jones was shoehorning the prequels into his 9/11 truther conspiracy worldview, and I and my Bluesky lib/left comrades would say it much more lines up with the transnational right-wing authoritarian campaign to undermine democracy around the world that he’s a standard bearer for, but tomato tomahto.

Some of the more recent prequel content mirrors our reality even more closely. Take this excerpt from Reign of the Empire: The Mask of Fear set in the days after Palpatine’s massacre of the Jedi and proclamation of the Empire in Revenge of the Sith:

“‘I can’t keep up with it… Every day, there’s some new edict from the grand vizier citing the Emperor’s authority, judicial appointments no one asked for, an entirely new plan for this regional governor business… they’re deliberately burying us in changes.’

…‘You’re giving them too much credit… They’re boys given the keys to the store, making up rules as they go. Once the adults corral them, it’ll all settle down…’” p. 22

That book came out February 25, 2025 and was presumably written before the 2024 election. While much of what the happened in the opening months of the second Trump administration was foreseeable, the pace still caught many people off guard. The Mask of Fear also repeatedly refers to Palpatine’s government as “the administration” which made reading it in early 2025 especially spooky.

So let’s say you’re prequel-pilled like me. Having advanced the prequel world theory in my friend group for years now, I get questions like “how does x event align with the prequel timeline?” or “where in the episode I, II, II arc are we currently?” Even though I’ll make jokes like “watch Andor to see what will happen in the midterms,”[^2] I don’t see the prequels as a universal step-by-step process or a timeline that 100% maps on to our situation. Instead, I would argue we should interact with the prequels less as prophecy and more as theory with some bad acting and lightsabers. [^3] Pay less attention to the sequence of events than to the dynamics driving the action. Here are a few lessons from Star Wars I apply in my analysis. While many of them have actual hard theory with academic sources behind them that I’ll link if you’re interested, their examples in Star Wars are genuinely what my head goes to first.

Economic grievances matter, but not in the way you think

The primary divide that Palpatine leverages on his way to power is the economic exploitation of the mid and outer rim worlds by the core. It’s insinuated on screen in the movies and more directly stated in the books that grievances over taxation and underrepresentation of non-core worlds are key drivers of the separatist movement in the late republic. Now, this does not make Palpatine some champion of the proletariat. He colludes with corporate interests in his instigation and management of the Clone Wars. The Confederacy of Independent Systems also wasn’t a class-based revolt. It wasn’t the poorest planets or the slums of Coruscant and Corellia rising up, but a collection of middle-income planets upset they weren’t getting a better deal. While Count Dooku himself came from the outer rim planet of Serenno, he was a local aristocrat. And the Empire clearly does nothing to improve the material conditions of the outer rim after the war. In fact, it brings back slavery where the Republic had at least ended it in areas it directly controlled.

This dynamic where inequality driven conflicts start not from the bottom but from the middle mirrors what we see in history and in our politics today. Revolutions and civil wars tend to emerge from fractures in the ruling class. The French and Russian Revolutions overthrew their monarchs because there was sufficient discontent within the nobility and the wealthy bourgeoisie to undermine the regime’s base of support. While much has been written about Trump and the white working class, I share the opinion that a much more crucial base of support for the Trumpist political movement comes from what Patrick Wyman calls “the American gentry.” These are local elites (like Count Dooku) who want to maintain and expand their political and economic fiefdoms. They hardly want to see the liberation of the working class writ large, but they do see themselves as underdogs when put up against national/international elites.

A would-be authoritarian can instrumentalize these economic grievances for their own political purposes without actually solving the problem. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez alluded to that fact at the Munich Security Conference when she said “in a rules-based order, hypocrisy is vulnerability.” There, she was talking about double standards and inequality on a global stage, but it’s true in the domestic context as well. Economic grievance creates increasingly radicalized constituencies that can turn either to the light side or the dark side. And to quote a non-prequel source, as Yoda says, the dark side is not stronger, but it is quicker, easier, and more seductive.

War and emergency powers undermine democracy

This one may be the most obvious, but it’s worth spelling out. Palpatine uses the Clone Wars to seize emergency powers from the Senate. Here, George Lucas has his chief villain act in the mold of dictators like (of course) Adolf Hitler and Hafez Al-Assad who initially justified their extraordinary powers off a state of emergency and then never relinquished them. Carl Schmitt, the Nazi legal scholar, argued “Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception.”[^4] Any political system will encounter circumstances that it cannot handle through regular order. And genuinely exceptional circumstances like pandemics and invasions do arise. However, if an executive can declare a state of exception on his own, then he can essentially suspend whatever rules limit his action at will. War and emergencies create depravation for the masses and limit the time and scope for debate and provide legitimacy for unilateral executive action because somebody’s gotta do it.

There are currently 51 active national emergencies in the United States. Under the National Emergencies Act, the president can declare an emergency and can renew the emergency declaration annually. Congress can vote to rescind the emergency declaration, but in a farcical state of affairs, the president can veto a joint resolution of disapproval. Thus, functionally Congress requires a 2/3 majority in both chambers to constrain an uncooperative president.

Trump has shown himself to be a big fan of emergency powers. He declared 11 in his first term and 11 so far in his second. Biden declared 9, Obama 12, and George W. Bush 13. Trump in general seems uninterested in using his congressional majorities, preferring instead to assert executive power whenever possible. That includes launching a large-scale war without congressional approval or even debate. As the Star Wars canon shows, emergency powers are a short path to authoritarianism, and we should be wary of those who wield them.

Big conflicts can cover little ones

This point’s a little more academic than the other ones, but I thought I’d include it anyway. One of the things the Clone Wars series does well is give a taste of the vast scope of the Star Wars galaxy and the diversity of the planets. The Republic and Separatist armies often interact with local security forces and rebel groups. On Mon Cala, the two local sentient species, took opposite sides during the Clone Wars, with the Mon Calamari siding with the Republic and the Quarren the Separatists. The CIS sponsored a coup on Onderon, replacing its king and sparking a local insurgency where Saw Gerrera got his first taste of insurrection. The Republic supported insurgents on Ryloth after the CIS invaded and occupied the planet, wiping out the local clone garrison.

A macro-level conflict can cover micro-level disputes where already feuding parties can use the larger war to provide an excuse for going after each other for parochial reasons. A professor of mine explained this dynamic with a story from his experience in Afghanistan. While on patrol, his unit encountered a local man who accused his neighbor of belonging the Taliban. When they asked him how he knew the other guy was with the Taliban, the man exclaimed “because he stole my chicken!”

Political scientist and scholar of civil war Stathis Kalyvas argued that alliances between central and local actors can better explain violence in civil conflicts than simply focusing on the macro-level cleavage (in this case Republic vs. Separatists). The central antagonists provide military support to local forces to help them prevail against their parochial rivals. In return, the central forces get more resources from the areas they control to help them win the main conflict. Thus larger civil conflicts often include several smaller feuds interlinked or enabled by the overarching conflict. And it’s pretty cool that the Clone Wars series managed to portray that in a children’s cartoon.

Tyranny is brittle

To end on a high note, one thing I draw on both in my analysis and for a morale boost when monitoring the situation is Nemik’s manifesto in Andor:

There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy.

Remember this, Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause.

Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

And remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.

Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empires’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.

Remember this: Try.

Not much to add there. It’s just so good!

What did I miss?

What takeaways from the prequels or Star Wars more generally guide your worldview? What prequel lessons did I miss? I’ve set up this category as a space to write more about the eerie and absurd parallels between our world and the prequels. If you see something you want me to cover or if you have burning questions, let me know!

[^1]: For reference, we recorded this shortly after the first Trump impeachment.

[^2]: As they take place before the events of A New Hope, Andor and Rogue One are prequels.

[^3]: Andor is, of course, the exception to both.

[^4]: https://www.wzb.eu/en/research/corona-und-die-folgen/wer-ist-der-souveran