Don’t Get Your Politics from Andor

Praise has been nearly universal for Andor. The Disney+ Star Wars TV show, set between the events of Episode III and Rogue One, about the rise of the rebellion against the Empire, had its series finale top the Nielsen ratings, and the overall season has a 96 percent critic rating and an 89 percent audience rating from Rotten Tomatoes. It’s been praised by outlets like The New Republic as “The Best Star Wars You Will Ever See,” and won over the popular YouTube critic (and hater of pretty much everything modern Star Wars), “The Critical Drinker.” In an age where fans are divided by nearly everything Star Wars, and all of their projects seem to underperform, this show has seemingly done the impossible. And with the series having officially ended with its second season, there’s very little chance of opinions changing about Andor anytime soon.

One of the most interesting things about discussions around Andor is that, unlike most Star Wars fare, people don’t just see it as a great piece of entertainment but a true work of political art speaking about our time. The New Republic calls it “all too relevant to the real-life politics of 2025.” The New Yorker titled a piece from their website, “How ‘Andor’ Injects Contemporary Politics Into ‘Star Wars’ I.P.” The Guardian argues, “So much of the language in Andor’s second season immediately recalls the fear-mongering that facilitates the current onslaught against Palestinians in Gaza.” Likewise, author and former Youth Pastor John Pavlovitz recently posted on X, “If you watched Andor, you know what’s going on right now in Los Angeles.”

This is where Andor is somewhat problematic. As a piece of TV, Andor is great. As a piece of political commentary, it’s highly dubious. And the more seriously we take it, the worse it makes our politics.

Andor follows the adventures of Cassian Andor, a reluctant member of the Star Wars rebel alliance fighting against the Galactic Empire, along with his friends and enemies on either side of the conflict. In the final season, the Empire builds up to creating its greatest weapon: the Death Star, which it can only do if it seizes by force the minerals from the citizens of the planet Ghorman, even though it will mean massacring many of the inhabitants and taking direct control of it.

There’s no doubt that Andor deserves every bit of artistic praise it’s getting. It’s really well-written and mature storytelling against a backdrop of the mythic fable of Star Wars we all love. Characters in Star Wars have never been so layered, so morally grey, so thoughtfully full of contradictions that are so in keeping with how human beings are. Never has Star Wars delved so deeply into why freedom matters, or how complex and morally compromising rebellions are.

Leaders of the rebellion, like Luthen Rael, do terrible things to their followers with an aim to beat the Empire. Senator Mon Mothma tries desperately to balance standing up to the emperor publicly and supporting the rebellion privately without giving him an excuse to jail her. Syril Karn truly believes he’s the good guy for supporting the Empire. Meanwhile, the Empire does not simply invade Ghorman by force. Instead, it resembles real totalitarian regimes by playing a long propaganda campaign that makes their invasion and occupation seem legitimate.

If our society is what’s being critiqued as the Empire, and violent rebellion is the only ultimate solution, then it rather awkwardly sides with those who use political violence in our own country today.

But what makes Andor such great TV is exactly what makes it such bad politics.

While this realism and mature storytelling elevate the material, it fosters problematic implications if you try to apply it to our present-day circumstances. Star Wars works on a binary of good and evil, light and dark sides of the force, the Rebellion and the Empire. That’s great if your film is told like a fairy tale, where these are abstract ideas that took some work to apply to particular situations in our own world. Even where Star Wars has been political before—such as making allusions to Vietnam and George W. Bush—they were abstracted enough that the focus was on the underlying principles, so how you applied that message was up to you.

Yet Andor’s heavily adult storytelling constantly insists you apply the franchise’s childlike reasoning and solutions to real-world adult politics. In the first season, they deal openly with the politics of police brutality and their cover-ups, with private prisons, and the colonial occupation of indigenous peoples. In this season, they check off stormtrooper crackdowns of illegal immigration, sexual assault, and the giant propaganda machine involved in justifying state-sponsored abuse of protestors and genocide—things that either have happened in our own society, or at least reflect charges we are repeatedly accused of.

Moreover, they tend to cast largely the same level of fascist symbolism to all the above abuses. And they condemn as naive anyone who doesn’t see the need to rebel with violence. Mon Mothma’s attempt to fight the Empire above board, the Ghormans’ attempts to protest peacefully, and Sryil’s belief in being a good person within the system all come to ruin. Eventually, this must be replaced by violence and war. Only Luthen—who from the beginning sees violent overthrow as the only option—is validated in the end.

If our society is what’s being critiqued as the Empire, and violent rebellion is the only ultimate solution, then it rather awkwardly sides with those who use political violence in our own country today. Adrienne LaFrance wrote for The Atlantic about the disturbing trend of bipartisan political violence:

In addition to the recent assassinations in Minnesota, Americans have in the past year alone witnessed two assassination attempts against Donald Trump; the Midtown Manhattan murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO; an arson attack at the home of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro; the murder of a young couple leaving the Capital Jewish Museum, in Washington; the murder of an 82-year-old woman in a firebombing attack in Colorado; and the attempted kidnapping of the mayor of Memphis. With startling frequency, Americans are attempting to resolve political disagreement through violence. And all the while, leaders at the highest levels of American government are aggressively stoking this national bloodlust and demonstrating a willingness to carry out violence against citizens.

Most people who love Andor would condemn such violence. But I’m not sure they’re being consistent. Americans increasingly believe we live in a dystopian empire nightmare. And when we are told by fiction like Andor that the only way to stop empires is through violence, choosing violence is hardly surprising.

Even if you buy that we live in a dystopia, it doesn’t follow that violence is usually a good answer. In fact, it’s typically a terrible one. A 2024 comparative analysis of 65 quantitative studies revealed that “nonviolent revolutions generally lead to more positive institutional outcomes than violent revolutions across domains like democracy, security forces, foreign relations, ethnicity, culture, and well-being.” Moreover, “nonviolent resistance movements are more likely to facilitate transitions from autocracy to democracy, improve democratic qualities like civil liberties, transform security forces and judicial systems in rights-respecting directions, and enhance well-being measures such as life expectancy.”

But you hardly need a study to tell you that. History is littered with violent revolutions that were then simply replaced by comparable or worse dictatorships: the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, the Iranian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, etc. Meanwhile, famous non-violent revolutions have had great success—particularly in Western countries that Andor’s fans are so quick to compare the show to. Consider the Indian Independence movement and the American Civil Rights movement of the ’60s.

That’s not to say violence is never justified. But you have to be clear when it is and when it is not. This is one place that Andor, for all of its “adult” politicking, doesn’t ever seem to actually wrestle with. What’s the line between a government that does wrong but you can still protest peacefully, and one you can’t? There is a brief debate between the Ghormans that goes nowhere.

This cavalier attitude toward political violence may stem from its very romantic views of freedom and tyranny. The manifesto of freedom by the show’s Karis Nemik from the first season is often quoted by starry-eyed fans and is quoted in the show’s series finale:

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 then 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 Empire’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.

Not to be mean, but this is silly. Most of world history has been defined by tyranny, and the freedoms we have today developed only with long experience, and were conceptualized by brilliant thinkers like John Locke, Montesquieu, and many more who laid the intellectual groundwork for the kind of freedom we have. It’s why we couldn’t militarily transplant it somewhere like Afghanistan or Iraq. 

A show about rebels fighting the empire is much more exciting than ordinary people who disagree just a little bit on politics.

This brings us to the most important point. America (or Western civilization, if you want to broaden it) is not the Empire. I’ve written before about how the idea that we live in a dystopian totalitarian hellhole is largely laughable. Not only is violence consistently going down and wealth and prosperity consistently going up for the rich and the poor alike, but rates of racism and sexism are going down, while freedom itself remains robust and continues to grow. We don’t live under an Emperor Palpatine who can direct the entire media as a propaganda machine to his will. (If you don’t believe me, look at the countless news outlets that criticize each democrat or republican president at any given time.) We don’t live under an empire that commits mass slaughter against its own citizens. Perhaps that’s why, where there’s been police brutality in recent years, peaceful protests have brought it down. Perhaps that’s why, when the government tried to mandate COVID vaccines for employees, normal lawsuits got the Supreme Court to strike it down.

The reality is that we like to think that our political opponents are villains, but they’re typically not that different from us. One study showed that both the left and the right vastly overestimated how many people on the other side agreed with extremist views. As author and evolutionary psychologist Steven Stewart Williams described: “For example, lefties guessed that most conservatives wholeheartedly agreed with racist views, when less than a quarter of them agreed even a little. Conservatives, for their part, guessed that most lefties wholeheartedly agreed with banning free speech, when only a third did even slightly.”

So why do we imagine people on the other side are so bad? One reason is that it’s more exciting to imagine the other side is so bad that it justifies violence. As one study showed, “sensation seeking predicts support for a violent activist group.” That’s the appeal of shows like Andor, too. A show about rebels fighting the empire is much more exciting than ordinary people who disagree just a little bit on politics.

It also ironically makes things feel more hopeful. While we might not live in a dystopia, we still have problems in the world. If our problems are due to some villain we can fight and defeat, then the problems might go away. If not, there may be no way to fix them once and for all. As author and Soviet Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.” But the cost is too high. Because if we aren’t living in a dystopia already, we will be the ones who make it that way through our attempt to overthrow it.

Then what can we do? How do we fight the injustices we see in our day and our time? The boring answer is still the true answer. We do what we’ve always done, because it’s worked, and it’s continued to work. We live our ordinary lives, working, loving each other, making art, speaking out, and using the political process to change the world for the better. It’s not as fun as the version we see in Star Wars. But it’s the adult answer.

Andor is a great show that brings a level of adult drama to Star Wars never before seen. But it’s still ultimately a fairy tale. Those wishing to apply the politics of a galaxy far, far away to our own will likely find themselves on the dark side rather than the rebellion. And like Syril, they may not find out until it’s too late.