The Old Republic In Star Wars Deserved Its Doomed Fate

One of the reasons fans tend to look at the Old Republic with rose-colored glasses is because of a statement that Obi-Wan Kenobi makes in A New Hope. “For over a thousand generations, the Jedi knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the old Republic,” he said. “Before the dark times… before the Empire.”

This statement lays out the typical good/evil binary that Star Wars is famous for. The Old Republic is associated with the heroic Jedi and a period of unprecedented “peace and justice,” and Obi-Wan makes it clear that the arrival of the Empire brought “dark times” to the galaxy. The implication is that the advent of the Empire took that peace away and that The Old Republic is just another victim of Palpatine’s injustices.

Revenge of the Sith shows us the exact transition between the Old Republic and the Empire. Even in that movie’s deleted scenes, we see how few Senators (Mon Mothma among them) are willing to stand up to any of Palpatine’s tyranny. In the theatrical version, when Palpatine is making the big speech about creating a Galactic Empire, Padme, and Bail Organa seem to be some of the only people who aren’t losing their minds cheering for this change.

Of course, all Star Wars fans know that Palpatine dissolves the Senate around the time of A New Hope, effectively bringing the last remnant of the Old Republic crashing down. In my eyes, though, that was a collapse that all of these leaders brought upon themselves. What did the Senators who were fine with Palpatine basically eliminating all checks and balances think was going to happen when they didn’t push back whatsoever at the man giving himself (ahem) unlimited power?

Plus, if you “love democracy” like Palpatine, you can’t help but consider that all of these Senators were voted into power by their constituents. In other words, these were the best leaders that the various planets could put forth, ones that everyone trusted to speak for them and protect them. I don’t want to callously say that every single person in the Old Republic deserved the tyranny of Palpatine’s evil, but they happily voted for the people who gave that evil a position of permanent power.

But the institution as a whole absolutely deserved its grim fate…as Luke Skywalker rightfully argues in The Last Jedi, the galaxy’s Force-powered defenders were failures who allowed the rise of a horrific tyrant.

On a fundamental level, the Jedi were basically serving as cops-turned-soldiers during the Clone Wars, and it was actually the Senators of the Old Republic who allowed the Empire and its Emperor to rise without saying anything. With respect to Padme, democracy didn’t die with thunderous applause…it died, bit by bit, with silent apathy.