There is no mistaking the left-wing themes of the Disney+ Star Wars series Andor. Set five years before the movie Rogue One, Andor shows the Empire strip mining planets, exploiting workers, arresting innocent people, and massacring civilians.
At a time when the Democratic Party is claiming that the Trump administration is arresting U.S. citizens and whisking them off to torture facilities overseas, it is impossible not to see the show as a critique of the authoritarian impulses of the current president.
But outside of the show’s overarching oppressor-oppressed narrative, there are also distinct conservative themes.
For starters, anytime the villain of a story is a government, classic conservative anti-government notes will be played. In episode four of season two, a broker for a fabric co-op complains that the Empire’s “ground inspections,” “freight penalties,” and “new imperial shipping codes,” which he notes, “they changed again last night without any warning,” are killing family estates that have been in business “for almost a millennium.”
“The Empire is killing them,” the broker says of his clients. “The Empire is killing us.”
It is hard to think of something more conservative than small business owners complaining about distant bureaucrats issuing new, cumbersome regulations that force them toward bankruptcy.
Then there is the unmistakable nationalism of the local struggles against the Empire. In season one, the population of Ferrix constantly tries to preserve their customs and way of life against the Empire’s galactic homogenization. In season two, the citizens of Ghorman are even given a national anthem that they sing before the Empire slaughters them.
Raise your eyes to homeland skies
We are the Ghor
Breathe the air and know you’re there
We are the Ghor
Valley, Highland, let me spend my every day there!
Call your kin to come and sing
We are the Ghor
Voices loud and standing proud
We are the Ghor
Valley, Highland, let me spend my every day there!
Hear the horn, it’s here we’re born
We are the Ghor
Raise a cask, and if they ask
We are the Ghor
Valley, Highland, let me spend my every day there!
This is an anthem of blood and soil localized to one place and one people, not a left-wing call for workers of the galaxy to unite.
Finally, as much as Andor avoids the Jedi, the Force does make an appearance, albeit briefly.
In season two episode seven, Andor Cassian’s lover, Bix, urges Andor to visit a Force healer who has been helping the rebellion on Yavin. While Andor expresses skepticism because his adoptive mother “hated” Force healers due to a bad experience with one 10 years before, he lets the Force healer work on a blaster injury of his, and it is healed.
While the healer is working on Andor, she senses his role in the struggle to come. “Thank you,” the healer tells Andor, who is confused. “Thank you for what?” he replies.
“The clarity. That feeling. It’s been a very long time. I thought it had gone for good. It’s so easy to lose faith,” she says.
Just by touching Andor, the healer has regained her faith.
Unimpressed, Andor leaves. But Bix stays behind and asks the healer what she saw. “I sense the weight of things, things I can’t see,” the healer says. “Pain, fear… need. Most beings carry the things that shaped them. They carry the past. But some… very few… your pilot… They’re gathering as they go. There’s a purpose to it. He’s a messenger. There’s some place he needs to be.”
“There’s a purpose to it.”
Andor is not the materialist world of the Democratic Party that atheists dominate. It isn’t even the world of Phantom Menace where the magic of the Force was replaced with scientifically measured “midichlorians.”
No, Andor is the same galaxy where Luke came to believe in the Force, where Yoda taught him that, “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.”
Andor is an artistic work in which the spiritual world not only exists but also guides and gives us purpose.
It is hard to think of anything more conservative than that.