Andor, and It'd Be Nice to Have an Evil Empire to Fight

Plus: what are the revolutionary movements that should be ongoing but aren't?

Andor is a great show about the banality of evil (the Empire) and the moral complexity of revolution.

Set in the Star Wars universe but without the fantasy element of light sabres and Jedi mind tricks, Andor is a story about rebels who are messy and human. One senator offers up her daughter in marriage to fund the resistance. Another revolutionary leader lets a naive civilization unwittingly sacrifice itself to make the Empire look worse. Some rebels are idealistic and noble; others paranoid, brutal, or broken.

When you zoom in, everything is morally murky. But when you zoom out, the moral landscape is clear: the Empire is cruel and must be crushed. The rebels’ cause is just. Their revolutionary fervor is warranted.

Don’t we all yearn for morally clear causes? For me, I wonder about Trump: Is he a history-changing autocrat or merely a standard backslide before the next lurch toward progress? And is there anything that can be done other than casting an absentee ballot in 2028? I lack clarity on the severity of the villain and the action I’m supposed to take.

Even if a cause isn’t perfect, and even if I disagree with it somewhat, I often admire the revolutionary fervor behind the chants, marches, and the rattling of barricades. Protesters, revolutionaries, social justice warriors—they’re often moved by something admirable: a concern for faraway people they’ll never meet, for animals or ecosystems they’ll never see, for future generations they’ll never be. Even when that fervor is misspent, misplaced, or a touch naive, it’s still a positive symbol of our moral development.

We are raised to care for others, so we search for a worthy cause into which we can plug our compassion or rage.

Some generations are blessed with clear causes. The Civil Rights Movement. The fight against Nazism. The 1970s environmental movement. The Union’s battle to end slavery and preserve the republic. These were fights with moral obviousness, with enemies who made themselves known.

We look back on these histories and ask, What would I have done? We tell ourselves we would have been the German who resisted, the South Carolinian who defied slavery. So when a new and decent-enough movement marches around our street corner, we’re eager to live up to our self-image and finally do our part. For the left, it might be the Gaza war protests, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, or Extinction Rebellion. For the right, it might be the January 6th Insurrection or the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” torch parade. (To be clear, I have zero respect for the right’s inexcusable insurrections and parades, so no false equivalences here.)

But the clarity we crave is rare. Even the most admirable movements stumble. The Gaza protests, though nobly focused on the suffering of civilians, have been tainted by antisemitism. #MeToo, disregarding due process, generated collateral damage and had us all walking on eggshells for years. Black Lives Matter exposed systemic injustice, but many of the demonstrators (causing $1-2 billion in damages) were not interested in changing hearts or minds. The villains we once rallied against (Harvey Weinstein) aren’t even as monstrous as they once seemed, and some heroes (the Palestinians) are led by men who raped, killed, and abducted civilians.

I envied Andor’s rebels’ clarity. Their enemies were obvious. Their goals were noble. They had loving comrades to protect, timeless tracts to write, brave speeches to make. It’d be nice to experience the sacrifices, risks, and thrills. To feel the full breadth of emotion that comes with living on the edge of life and death—of being part of something much bigger than oneself.

But our causes today are complicated. Or are they?

Are there movements sitting under our noses, waiting for us to see them clearly? What about the billions of animals that live and die in squalor in factory farms? The topsoil stripped by industrial agriculture? The ecological collapse underway? The unaffordable housing, the broken healthcare systems, the deepening inequality? The corrosion of democracy?

In America, patriarchy and racism once served as clear villains. But they’ve been diminished, almost to the point of obsolescence. Meanwhile, the larger monsters—runaway capitalism, climate breakdown, extractive economics—slink past us, too big to grab, too abstract to burn as effigies.

Maybe we don’t need to go to space to find evil. Maybe it’s here in the systems we tolerate. In the comforts we don’t question.

The question isn’t whether we’ll ever get to be rebels. The question is whether we’ll recognize the Empire when we see it.

**Paid subscribers get access to everything I’m watching and reading below, including a fuller review of Andor, a terrific English movie similar to American History X, a surreal movie about a G7 summit, and I share what might be my favorite podcast episode of the year.**