this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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I think I was too abstract about it to properly make sense.
So: People have started using "political" to mean for example some movie star saying that Israel shouldn't be killing all those people, or NFL players kneeling, or movies having queer people in them sometimes. Those are the "other things" that I was saying that are being defined as "political." When "political" is used to criticize this stuff, it basically means that they are demanding that no other people in the world have opinions about it or speak out about them, unless they're agreeing with the baseline that is defined as "not political." The genders for video game character are "male" and "political," the races for a sitcom character are "white" and "political," the politics for a football player are "Republican" and "political." And so on.
It is true that those same people never define it as "political" when someone is having opinions (usually much more explicitly and tribally political) that agree with their own. It's only "political" when it's against their opinions, and even if the "political" content is in some totally apolitical way, which is why they're all of a sudden freaking out about Star Wars and Sesame Street. That was sort of what I was alluding to, I guess a little unclearly, in the first part.
But I'm not even talking about that too much. I'm saying that in addition to being aware of that discrepancy, we shouldn't even be buying into that redefinition of the word. If Star Wars had someone come out and say that you should make sure to vote for the Democrats because they have more sensible fiscal policy, that would be political. If Tim Tebow put a big Obama sticker on his helmet, that would be political. Both of those would actually be fine (and happen all the time in the other direction, and pretty rarely in the anti-Republican direction), but in any case, the expansion of "political" to mean that any type of worldview which happens to make some politicians look bad or disagree with them is automatically "political" is what I was objecting to, in this case applied to Star Wars. It's just a story about good guys and bad guys. You don't have to be political to dislike Nixon or use him as a template internally for an evil character or something. It's just good sense, Nixon was a piece of shit. He was a bad guy. If you dislike him because he's a Republican, that's political.
frankly, I think you are mistaken about what it means to be political. It isn't strictly about one party vs another. you can talk about politics without explicitly supporting or disliking a political party.
being political at the core is about policy.
and this is why star wars was political from the start. it wasn't just a cool story, it was meant in part to make you sympathise with the rebels, and dislike the empire. And crucially, to link the rebels to Vietnam and the empire with the US and Nixon. it shows a dislike of what the US was doing, what the party in charge was doing, and perhaps to turn people away from that.
saying all that isn't political is like saying Bob Dylan wasn't political because he didn't support one or another party
If you went back to the 1970s and told people you thought Star Wars was a political movie, they would think something was really wrong with your thought process. The themes, characters, and the basic structure of the story (the Hero's Journey / monomyth) was old when the Greeks invented democracy. It certainly predates anything we could call politics, it predates almost everything about us. It is probably one of humanity's oldest inventions that's still in common use.
Bob Dylan was always political, by the definition I would use, because he talked about issues of public policy and society in his songs. A New Hope was never political and still isn't. If a person wants to define the new and more inclusive Star Wars, and Sesame Street, as "political," then fine, although I will probably want to probe their definition and probably will try to make the case that the way they're defining this neologism is part of a toxic propaganda structure they've unintentionally absorbed.
I don't usually like to get into extensive wrangling about what words mean what things, but this one I do think is important because of how it features in a particular type of propaganda structure which is good to call out.
Star Wars is a movie about the policy of an authoritarian government, and the actions of those that fall on both sides of that policy. It's explicitly political. It was written to be so.