His diagnosis that the prequel films were a disaster because “Lucas seemed to think he had to deal in the political science of institutional decay, instead of showing us the personal relationships and rivalries that a decaying political process brings back to the fore” strikes me as about perfect. There is a gap in those movies between the institutions edging back and forth across the fulcrums of power and the people who the movies identified as the main characters. The members of the Trade Federation are essentially indistinguishable from one another. The Republican Senate seems more like an endless tube lined with bobbing theater boxes than an actual, vibrant legislative body full of distinct personalities. It’s fitting that the supreme commander of the blandly named Confederacy of Independent Systems is an expressionless robot.

And so I enthusiastically second Douthat’s argument for what the next trilogy might look like: a series of stories about the characters’ relationships to institutions and to the idea of themselves as institutions:

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Give me First Citizen Leia Solo’s difficult relationship with her resentful, ambitious daughter (matriarchy, this time, instead of the politics of “I am your father”); give me an ex-lover’s conflict between Leia and Han; give a battle for the Sith succession between whomever and whomever; give me new tensions that are connected, in one way or another, to the dynastic struggles of the last trilogy. Tell me who has power, in other words, and how they intend to keep it, and who wants to take it (back). The rest of politics, the advanced aspects, belong in another story, another galaxy, and a different genre altogether.

We see some of this in George Lucas’s original trilogy: how Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda have weathered the pressures of going into hiding and refusing to use their considerable power to keep their order alive and off the Empire’s radar; how Han Solo gradually comes to accept and even crave a return to respectability and a position of authority within the Rebel Alliance’s command structure; the ways in which Luke’s Jedi abilities and training both earn him a place in organizations like Rogue Squadron and separate him from from even his most gifted peers. A New Republic, and a new generation, will offer plenty of creative opportunities.

The place of potentially greater disagreement is where Douthat thinks we differ about the basic question of politics. I suggested that it might be phrased as “how to have a better life,” which I recognize might be taken as a call to principled self-improvement. Douthat counters by suggesting that “It seems to me that the most basic question is a little bit more, well, basic, a little less high-minded, than ‘how to have a better life.’ It’s something more like Lenin’s famous ‘who? Whom?’ – ‘who rules, and who doesn’t?’ That is, politics is about power before it’s about human betterment, it’s about in-groups and out-groups long before it’s about the pursuit of the common good, and therefore it’s about families and clans and personalities long before it’s about institutions.”

I would respectfully submit that “who rules, and who doesn’t?” is inextricably tied up with the question of how to have a better life, or at least with the observation of who has a better life than the one you currently possess. In as much as “who rules” comes first, that’s a question that needs to be activated by a character’s (or a person’s) realization that people in power have a material impact on the conditions of our lives.

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When Lucas introduces us to Luke Skywalker, the primary authority figure in his life is his uncle Owen, who keeps putting off Luke’s dream of enrolling in the Imperial Academy. Luke only begins thinking about the people who are ruling the galaxy on a more sophisticated scale after Storm Troopers kill his family and the organization he initially saw as a source of adventure suddenly becomes more sinister.

Similarly, Michael Corleone (since Douthat mentions “The Godfather”) is aware of where power lies in American public life at the beginning of the trilogy — we know, since he believes he’ll be able to acquire it for himself. It’s his deeply personal realization, through his discovery of police complicity in a plan to assassinate his father, that the game is rigged that propels him forward, both to murder and to a way to buy his share of power rather than winning it through a political campaign. In “Game of Thrones,” Arya Stark knows that Prince Joffrey is a dreadful, entitled little boy almost from the moment she meets him. But it is his order to withhold mercy and have her father executed that sets her on the road out of King’s Landing and ultimately toward Braavos, where she will receive the training she needs to exact revenge.