I feel like when people try to isolate Anakin’s moral failures as purely individual rather than tied up in the corruption and strife of a deteriorating Republic, they’re kind of..like…missing the remarkably unsubtle allusion Lucas was making to modern day American. Like, people realize we’re the Republic, right? We’re the ones supporting immorality through our apathy.
Exactly. The result of that apathy is that we cease to even try to stop the immoral things happening around us. We stop believing in the people’s right to govern. We stop voting, because what good does it do? We ignore the small problems, because someone else will handle it, and what could I do anyway? These small problems build up, and build up, and build up until you get a quagmire of corruption. Apathy, all of our apathy, is what destroys us.
In AoTC, Queen Jamillia says something that’s actually quite profound, “The day we stop believing democracy can work is the day we lose it.” That’s true. The day you give up on government, and remove yourself from it, the day you remove the significance of the individuals’ political power from the community, is the day you allow a tyrant to rule over you. When you stop believing that your government can work, you stop trying to hold government officials accountable, and corruption runs wild, and you get a Palpatine in office, because you let him. Palpatine may have been a Sith, but his rise to power was ostensibly legal. As @redrikki and I discussed in Commanding Love and Respect, the message of Star Wars now is politics and diplomacy doesn’t work, blasters (guns) do. In reality though, the message of the prequels is that you are forced to use blasters, and violence, when you allow yourself to become morally stagnant, when you allow yourself to become trapped in despair, and that is a tragic thing indeed.