The Republic is the UN- you want it to exist and to work, but not too well, and not meddle too much. Sometimes the price is war. If you don’t want war in your own neighbourhood, manage your own nation’s affairs and its foreign relations effectively and your chances are good. If not, that’s the price you pay.

Alternatively, the Republic is the UN as Coruscant is to the US, if the US chose to seize control of the UN, merge with it, and rule through it. I can’t say I’d like that either.

And it’s worth noting that the chief power hungry elites of our own time are on the side of the empire- globalization, international order, merging of peoples and cultures, standardization of law, erosion of sovereignty – “for a safe and secure society”. The Trade Federation and the Banking Clan are NOT Separatists in our world.

I can envision times when the universal state [the classic meaning of 'empire'] is beneficial as the culmination of an international system, as a police measure [if you can find John Reilly's Proclamation of the Ecumenical Empire online, this is what he was getting at]or for defence against actors from outside that particular system. The Roman, multiple Chinese and multiple Indian empires served both ends. Not always well. But they also introduce new tensions as powers compete for the mastery of the empire. Longer periods of general peace may result in various-length periods of general war for control of the whole system, larger and less geographically concentrated than the local wars of before. The aforementioned empires also introduced this phenomenon repeatedly.

And there’s always the all-important ‘who,whom?’ question. Just whose culture and political system set up and, at least initially, run the empire from which we are all to benefit?

I suspect Lucas or his wife just plain stole the Star Wars plot and dialog from some old pulp Civil War story. A long time ago, in an antebellum Southland far, far away. . .

However, my rough analysis is that the creative team initially wanted to deliver a black-and-white, good-versus-evil story. Jedi are “good” by California standards – i.e., they do not torture people, but they are willing to tell little white lies, supplemented by “jedi mind tricks.”

The later movies introduced clumsy moral ambiguities, not because of some artistic vision of alternate ethics, but mostly due to incoherent writing teams. The plot points of the later movies were simply due to confused writers who wanted to keep the fans happy in the short run. In the long run, fans discovered inconsistencies in their previous belief in Jedi goodness. The publicists spun these inconsistencies as evidence that the writers were aiming for morally ambiguous Jedi, but in fact the writers were just short-term thinkers.

Who’s unwholesome, besides Vader? Palpatine manufactured a loyal army of clone infantry, which was a good move. But while he was able to sweep away the entire Foggy Bottom bureaucracy, he still had to rely on Arlington’s leadership class which was left over from a weak, decadent era when they cooked up such stupid stunts as forcing soldiers of the Republic to walk in high heels to show solidarity with victims of sexual assault. The officers constantly bungle major combat operations and occasionally Vader will force-choke them to try to hold them accountable, but it seems Palpatine could find no viable replacements for that weak leadership class as a whole. Admittedly, the best of them were probably lost in the first Death Star, which is why Vader has to force-choke so damn many officers in Empire Strikes Back.