You Don't Want a Revolution

Politics | Recovery | Current Obsessions

Last week, I had the honor of speaking at a fundraiser for the DFL Senate primary campaign of Peggy Flanagan, now the lieutenant governor of Minnesota. My friend Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl introduced Peggy and made a somewhat glancing reference to how we are currently struggling with an evil empire, stormtroopers dragging people away, rebellions crushed—and, Dara told the crowd, “You can’t put a rebellion on a Visa,” so pay up to Peggy.

Peggy picked up the thread: “Well, if we are in a rebellion,” she said, “you know what rebellions are built on?”

“Hope!” I shouted—that quote from Rogue One had been planted in Andor just the night before.

When it was my turn to speak, I circled back to Dara’s point: you can’t put the rebellion on a credit card. I admitted I wanted to call Peggy our own Mon Mothma—but added that it shouldn’t have to come to that.

Star Wars fandom has a reputation for being toxic, but one of the more endearing things to come out of Andor’s second season is how many otherwise normie recappers get caught up in the show’s politics and head straight for condemning the actions of today’s politicians. They get to the Ghorman massacre plot¹ and say some version of, “When [Mon Mothma] pivots to calling what happened on Ghorman a genocide, you can't help but think of Gaza right now.”

Or switch between breaths from, “Some TIE Advanced V-1s are Cassian’s pursuers and it’s so awesome!” to how the Empire’s round-up of immigrants on Mina Rau is “just like what’s going on in America.”

My Space the Nation co-host Dan Drezner observed that when it comes to the Ghorman reference, at least, there’s quite a gulf between the well-to-do spider-textile merchants of that planet and the historically marginalized Gazans. But if the beginning of political education is seeing the patterns in the victims of genocide, the beginning of wisdom is clocking the commonalities among the perpetrators.

There is a problem with drawing direct comparisons between Ghorman and Gaza—or the show’s politics and anything in the news—and it’s this: Showrunner Tony Gilroy consistently pushes back on it. “You could drop this show at any point in the last 6,000 years,” he told The Hollywood Reporter, “and it would make sense to some people about what’s happening to them.”

The recappers are engaging in the politics of the moment. Gilroy, meanwhile, is trying to get people to see the galactic, historical cycles of oppression and resistance. To put it in terms that nerds already know: “All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.”

The show’s quietly radical message is Gilroy’s insistence that repetition doesn’t weaken the urgency of the fight for human liberty—it intensifies it. That humans (and non-humans) continuously cycle through domination, rebellion, new empires, and fresh resistance doesn’t make freedom less precious. If anything, it makes it more so.

But much of the online left has been less interested in Gilroy’s historical sweep than in parsing the ethics of resistance portrayed in Andor. Season 1 explored the rebellion’s earliest tensions between ruthless accelerationists and wealthy, institutionally adjacent reformers. Season 2 checked in on that same split over a full year’s time, culminating in what looks like a third, inevitable path: formal war between two organized armies.²

Stellan Skarsgård plays Luthen Rael, a charismatic revolutionary often undercover as a successful antiques dealer. His devotion to the rebellion is so total that he’s willing to sacrifice his own morality for the sake of future generations being able to maintain their own.³ Luthen tells Cassian he’s okay with the Ghor suffering under the thumb of the Empire, especially because they’re rich. The Ghor's amateur-hour resistence, says Cassian, "will go up in flames." Luthen replies: "It will burn... very brightly."

The monied do-gooders are represented by Mon, an intergalactic space heiress billionaire senator from Chandrila. Watching Mon plead with her fellow senators for action on the situation in Ghorman before it comes to a head is uncomfortably reminiscent of watching the current Democratic leadership dither. One senator tells her they’re taking a wait-and-see approach; the senator from Ghorman even says he’s willing to acquiesce to the Empire, because maybe then the Empire will realize that the Ghor mean no harm. After things degrade further, Mon returns to the Ghorman senator, apologetic: they’re going to send a strongly worded letter, basically.

By the time the Ghormans are actually massacred, Mon and her few allies are forced to use parliamentary tricks just to get her speech denouncing the genocide onto the floor. After the speech, she has to flee the Senate forever—and Cassian shoots Imperial agents on the way out the door.

As satisfying as it is to imagine a firebrand (whether it’s Peggy or her recent endorser, Liz Warren) giving Mon Mothma’s exuberantly defiant oration, the specific context of the speech in the show reminds us: it shouldn’t come to that.

When Season One begins, Mon is already illegally funneling money to the rebels. By Season Two, her childhood friend is threatening to blackmail her over the financial shenanigans (maybe she did put something untoward on her credit card?). Firefights between irregular forces and the Empire are happening regularly. Torture is an accepted practice. The rebels are split into squabbling factions with their own deadly battles.

So as satisfying as it is to imagine ourselves in a romanticized righteous resistance, be grateful that we’re not there yet. Not in that final, fatal stage. Not yet. (Though Gilroy would remind us that rebellions come for us all eventually.)

That’s why the tools we have now—letters, phone calls, campaigns, boycotts, mutual aid—are so precious. They’re still available. They still work. And the costs of using them today are so much lower than the price we’ll pay if we wait.

We’re not yet in the stage of blasters and bombs. Most of us still won’t be arrested for writing a letter or showing up at a protest. We can still reach our neighbors. We can still speak freely.

As I said at the fundraiser:
The sacrifices we make to keep the Empire from rising now are cheap compared to what it’ll cost us if we hope for the best.

I’ve soured almost completely on the Democratic Party; Peggy is an exception for me until other candidates prove themselves equally devoted to preventing the need for a Mon Mothma in Washington. If you have a candidate you like, consider giving. If not, there are a thousand other worthy causes near you. Take action while you still can.

After I left the stage, our host introduced the evening’s musical guest, Twin Cities indie folk troubadour Jeremy Messersmith. Messersmith stepped to the mic and told us he had just the right song for the moment—though it wasn’t the one he expected to play: “Tatooine.”

In other news…

🎙 Past Due is live and growing. Our latest episodes dive into the cultural churn and career disorientation that so many of us are living through right now. If you’ve ever wondered whether there’s a humane way to make a living inside a system that wants to grind you down, this show is for you.
→ Find all our links here or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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