One of the things that has come out of the Disney+ explosion of Star Wars content has been a new layer of nuance in the good guys. It’s pretty obvious that after the fall of the Empire, the New Republic was fairly feckless – both in terms of hunting down and finishing off the Imperial Remnant and in countering the rise of the First Order. But what we’re seeing in a lot of ways, thanks mainly to Andor but also elsewhere, is that prior to the Clone Wars, the Republic was not exactly in good health – and neither was the Jedi Order.
In fact, the takeaway from The Acolyte is that 100 years prior to the Clone Wars, the Jedi were high on their own supply and convinced of their own right and righteousness, and in the ensuing century the Republic and the Senate were corrupt and strangled by their own bureaucracy. It all suggests that the Old Republic was closer to the Articles of Confederation than anything else, and the Senate much closer to the General Assembly of the UN (or worse, the League of Nations) than an actual galactic government. It’s not hard to see how the Separatists rose up and formed a united faction, because the Republic was ill-equipped to stop them with anything other than a handful of Jedi supporting individual worlds.
But even more than that – in the Mandalorian, Kuil says he was enslaved by the Empire for 300 years. Clem and Marva Andor were looting a Republic vessel on a planet devastated by extractive mining. It really seems as if the Empire just did in public what the Republic was allowing to happen unnoticed. And it makes it a lot easier to understand how people were willing to shrug off the coming of the Empire if it just made the shooting stop. Life in the galaxy can’t get any better anyway, so what does it matter what the powers that be call themselves? And then the Empire era was just a 20-year slow boil, to the point that I suspect the majority of the galaxy didn’t realize how bad things had gotten until Alderaan was vaporized.
And then the Emperor was gone, problem solved, why you bringing up old shit. Little bit on the nose, no?