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Palpatine’s gambit puts a new spin on Machiavelli. Palpatine realizes that an adversarial relationship between himself and the rest of the Republic won’t go his way: sometimes it’s better to be loved than feared. But fear can still be his ally as long as he’s poised, shoulder-to-shoulder with senators and citizens, against some external force. Long before the events of The Phantom Menace, Palpatine must have struggled with the same question as Pisistratus did: “How can a threat be manufactured that will unite the people behind me, and lead to their granting me special powers and a military force?” Palpatine’s scheming is all the more in-sidious because, through the Neimoidian Trade Federation, Count Dooku, and their allies, he manufactures the threat. But modern democracies in our world have faced real threats to their existence, both external (like war and terrorism) and internal (like crime and political corruption).

After Obi-Wan reports in from Geonosis about the genuine threat represented by the Separatists, a senator from Malastare loyal to Palpatine claims, “The time for debate [about the Military Creation Act] is over. Now we need that clone army.” Since the Senate won’t use the clones pre-emptively, the “hawks” among them decide that the threat justifies granting Palpatine emergency powers, an act that is the beginning of the end for democracy in the Republic. Like these fictional senators, we need to ask ourselves the difficult questions, “What measures can be justly taken to defend a democracy in troubled times?” and “Is democracy undermined if undemocratic measures are taken in its defense?” These are questions as relevant and controversial today as they were a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Power in the Hands of the Virtuous Few

There’s an important scene in Attack of the Clones that contrasts two major answers to these questions we just posed about the defense of democracy:

ANAKIN: I don’t think the system works. We need a system where the politicians sit down and discuss the problem, agree to what’s in the best interest of all the people, and then do it.

PADMÉ: That’s exactly what we do. The problem is that people don’t always agree.

ANAKIN: Then they should be made to.

PADMÉ: By whom? Who’s going to make them?

ANAKIN: Someone …

PADMÉ: You?

ANAKIN: No, not me.

PADMÉ: But someone . . . ?

ANAKIN: (nods) Someone wise.

PADMÉ: I don’t know. Sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship to me.

ANAKIN: (after a long pause) Well, if it works . . . ?

Anakin’s thoughts reflect Palpatine’s distrust of the politics of the Republic, which were expressed more subtly in The Phantom Menace over the Senate’s handling of the Naboo trade embargo. By this point, Anakin seems clearly under Palpatine’s charismatic influence, if not of the Dark Side itself. Anakin voices the view of his mentor that the bureaucratic aspects of a democratic republic hinder it when swift action is needed. Because of this, the Republic may be unable to handle internal or external challenges unless it leans on the leadership of its best, wisest, and most virtuous citizens. Padmé seems to recoil at his “great man” solution to political dissent, perhaps by maintaining that democracy has the resources necessary to survive. Their debate is reflected in the confrontation between the very different ideas of two recent political philosophers, Leo Strauss (1899-1973) and John Dewey (1859-1952). Both of them were concerned with the problems and prospects of a kind of democracy we haven’t really looked at yet: modern liberal democracy. But Strauss and Dewey understood the term “liberal” in very different ways.

Strauss thinks that political thinkers of the past, particularly Plato and Aristotle, provide timeless questions about the good life and the just state that today’s political philosophers should still be concerned about. But, he would say, modern politics has somehow gotten off