It may have lightsabers, stormtroopers and fussy droids, but George Lucas’s Star Wars saga is in fact an acute reflection of the politics of the 21st century. What will Episode VII tell us about our times?

It can’t be a spoiler – literally, since I haven’t yet seen the film – to quote JJ Abrams’s vision for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. “It came out of conversations about what would have happened if the Nazis all went to Argentina but then started working together again.” Critics and fans have tended to extrapolate from this that the new enemy ideology is a white supremacy movement, borrowing its template of hate from the quasi-Nazi road map laid out in the first six films.

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In this reading, the original evil – the wellspring of Darth Vader and Sidious – is borrowed from Hitler. I think this is mistaken. The nature of evil in the first three films (when I say “first three”, I mean the first three films to be made: I am not in the business of pandering to a fictional chronology) is very broad, using tropes and images from the Bible to the mafia. At the start of 1977’s A New Hope, the political aim of the Empire is the suppression of remote systems by fear – being able to unwind local structures of central enforcement is actually a sign that the reign of terror is working well. It reminds me a little bit of George Osborne and the “northern powerhouse”, but it doesn’t really suggest Nazism, with its extermination of the other. Darth Sidious – instrumentally paranoid in the service of greed – is more like Herod than Hitler.

Yet, just as the eyeliner in Cleopatra roots the film far more evocatively in 1963 than in 30BC, so the nature of good and evil in Star Wars is revealed by the small details. The six films so far constitute a highly unusual cultural resource: you can see how concepts such as nobility, meritocracy, class, equality and dignity have changed over time, by the way they are reflected in George Lucas’s work.

So, initially, the distinction of the Jedi knight isn’t that he comes from a superior class, but that he is an abstract thinker in a world of concrete thinkers. In the first film to be made, the Force isn’t hereditary. Nothing is hereditary until Darth Vader is revealed as Luke’s father in the second film, The Empire Strikes Back (1980), but Lucas explicitly said after the release of A New Hope that the Force was “Like yoga. Everybody can do it. It’s just the Jedi who take the time to do it. If you want to take the time to do it, you can do it; but the ones that really want to do it are the ones who are into that kind of thing.” This he was able conveniently to ignore later on, when the theme of lineage had become so strong as to be defining.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Boyega, Peter Mayhew and Harrison Ford in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Photograph: Allstar/Disney/Lucasfilm

Strength, in the beginning, is inextricably linked with higher feeling, sensitivity, empathy – “stretch out your feelings”, Obi-Wan tells Luke Skywalker, as if concentration were its own superpower. Han Solo is shown as a contrast, but he isn’t a person of lower birth so much as of lesser mind – essentially conveyed by his cupidity, and his lack of ambition for anything other than money. The Jedi ideology is meritocratic: anyone can be a higher being, though this will be self-selecting to a degree, since only higher beings are going to work at it. It’s a rather elegant balancing system: the higher beings are marked out by their superior ability to feel, which in itself prevents them feeling superior, since they empathise with the inferior. What marks them out from the crowd, in other words, is what binds them back to it.

By the time of the third film, Return of the Jedi, made in 1983, the hereditary aspect has been established. Luke tells Leia that the Force is strong in his family; now the nature of the gift has fundamentally changed and the Jedi become quasi-aristocratic. Lucas takes up this notion and goes wild with it, in 1999’s The Phantom Menace, when he decides that the quality of the Jedi is actually measurable in units known as midichlorians via a simple blood test. Young Anakin, before he becomes Darth Vader, breaks all known records with more than 20,000. Luke and Leia are generally assumed to have identical midichlorian counts, being twins. The next highest after Anakin, though, is Darth Sidious. And so the Force is now an amoral physical property, whereas previously it was a mental property – thought itself, the source of empathy and therefore, arguably, the source of morality.

Han Solo isn’t a person of lower birth so much as of lesser mind – he lacks ambition for anything other than money

Not only is the democratic foundation of the Jedi undermined by this new idea of them as thoroughbreds; Jedi legitimacy, if not eroded, is at least problematised: you start to get a load of slightly chinless self-justification from the order. “I didn’t actually come here to free slaves,” says Liam Neeson as Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menace, like a person to whom a huge number of vexing tasks has been subcontracted.

By Attack of the Clones, three years later in 2002, the Jedi have a kind of UN blue helmets mandate – “You must realise there aren’t enough Jedi to protect the Republic. We are keepers of the peace, not soldiers,” says Mace Windu, apropos some urgent battle or other. Now we’re in a postmodern, post-heroism landscape, where good and evil still exist, but good is on the clock and evil has all day.

It was noted in 1977 that A New Hope, both in its tone and in its reception, represented a kind of wish-fulfilment after Vietnam, the rebuilding of shared moral absolutes after a visceral pasting. Two decades on, a sad adaptation to a new reality had taken place, where the living incarnation of all that is noble – the Jedi – are critically limited by the rather limp and indecisive democracy that governs them. This is inevitable, if the highest beings are aristocrats but the highest stated value is democracy. The ideas that all citizens share the dignity of being born equal, and the best among them are more equal than the others, are simply incompatible. This explains why the goodies are suddenly so complicated while the baddies’ motivation is intact and as strong as ever.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The fussiness of the C-3PO/R2-D2 relationship makes them the most three-dimensional characters of the lot.’ Photograph: Alamy

You could say this was simply a plot exigency, since why would so many key players move to the dark side, if the side of light weren’t just a tiny bit dysfunctional? But I think it’s actually rather an acute reflection of the post-ideological politics of the 21st century: egalitarian values are vaunted but equality is not pursued, since the essence of modernity is that it is post‑historical, directionless, has nowhere left to go. Naturally, though, it is going somewhere, towards refeudalisation, as intensifying wealth concentration is post-hoc justified by a kind of neo-Georgian notion that some people are intrinsically better than others. Undermined by the inconsistency, the culture cannot confidently express itself, and fixates instead upon enemies who are bound to be stronger because they know who they are.

Why would so many key players move to the dark side, if the side of light weren’t just a tiny bit dysfunctional?

The classic Jedi response to subservience can be seen in the contrast between Luke’s first meeting with C-3PO – “I see, Sir”; “You can call me Luke”; “I see, Sir Luke,”; “No, just Luke” – and Qui-Gon Jinn meeting Jar Jar Binks: “Mesa your humble servant”; “That won’t be necessary”. Qui-Gon Jinn is impatient, imperious and patronising, while Luke is, above all, humble. He has no reason not to be, since at this point he is just an indifferent farmer, but it still foreshadows his knight-personality, which is more of a jiu jitsu, strength-through-attentiveness affair than a born-to-rule act of self-assertion.

There is a species-supremacy subplot between humans and droids, with droids not allowed in bars. Opinion is divided: this either conjures up the civil rights injustices that were so recent in 1977, or can be seen as a perfectly legitimate decision by bar owners, since droids take up space and they don’t drink. I lean towards the first interpretation. If a director can invent a droid, he can invent a droid cocktail made of oil. The fussiness of the R2-D2/C-3PO relationship makes them the most three-dimensional characters of the lot; portraying them as beings with the same feelings as humans but fewer rights invites the viewer to reconsider how hierarchies were formed and commonalities established.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Domhnall Gleeson and Adam Driver in Star Wars: The Force Awakens

While the original trilogy was pretty evolved in gender terms, if not at all diverse, the later three films are rife with stereotypes. Jar Jar Binks is famous for the tang of racism in his conception – his accent is plainly Jamaican, or Jafaican, if you prefer – and there’s a forelock-tugging slave-subtext that is crass because it’s unaddressed. Sure, have slaves, if they’re going to have dignity and fight for their own agency – like Anakin, for instance. But borrowing the cliches of a slave portrayal, and draping them over a character who is basically a bit thick, lacks the sophistication that one associates with Lucas. Then there’s Viceroy Nute Gunray, who is considered by some to have a Chinese accent, and to be a slur on the nation for its money-grabbing, market-fixated nature.

Nonetheless, in the quiddity of the Jedi you can see a director who was alive to the change in the political culture and its profound but rarely discussed shifts. If only Lucas could have carried on for ever, we might have been able to carry on using this franchise to plot the changing century. I get the sense with JJ Abrams that he’s mainly interested in people jumping off vehicles that are still moving.