In The Force Be With Us?, James Pinkerton explains that America must present itself as a good empire, unlike the empire of George Lucas’s Revenge of the Sith:
Through much of history, Babej notes, ‘empire’ had positive connotations. The Roman Empire was seen as a unifying and civilizing force; its fall is still fixed in our psyches as one of the great sad swan songs of all time. Thus it was easy, as late as the 19th century, for Thomas Jefferson to think of America as ‘an empire for liberty’, a great realm of conscience and community.But in the 19th and 20th centuries, the resonances of empire darkened. Colonialism and nationalism, followed by fascism and communism, shifted the emphasis of ‘empire’ away from benevolent confederation, toward coercive subjugation-and worse. And of course, the original ‘Star Wars’ fed into scheme: not only did Darth Vader wear that big Wehrmacht helmet, but others on the imperial side wore the grey and green of old Germany, even as they arrayed themselves in Riefenstahlian formations, all to the tune of ominously Brucknerian marches.
Still, Babej believes that if ‘empire’ could be shifted one way, from positive to negative, it can now be shifted the other way, too — back to positive. After all, he argues, other empires, of a kind, seem OK; he cites the European Union and NATO as more harmless exemplars of empire: ‘The faulty assumption about ‘empire’ is that it is necessarily based on conquest and territorial incorporation.’ What’s needed instead, he continues, is ‘a conscious campaign by the US to emphasize the Jeffersonian vision of empire — as an empire of liberty, in which freedom is the centerpiece.’