Andor’s Allegory for American Authoritarianism

Disney Didn’t Mean to Make a Revolution Manual. But Here We Are.

An Essay by Friendo Media Editorial Staff

In A Galaxy Not So Far Away…

On a remote farm at the edge of the Galactic Empire, an officious security agent conducts a “census.” In reality, he’s hunting for undocumented workers. When he discovers a young migrant without papers, he corners her – first dangling the promise of leniency for sexual favors, then lashing out violently when she refuses. It’s a chilling scene of small-scale cruelty that would feel right at home in a report from rural America, where immigration officers have been known to round up farmworkers (and even U.S. citizens by mistake) with disturbing impunity. But this isn’t the evening news; it’s a pivotal moment from Andor’s second season, which trades lightsabers for a stark allegory about modern authoritarianism.

If watching Andor’s new episodes gives you a jolt of déjà vu, that’s no accident. The critically acclaimed Star Wars series has always chronicled the rise of a rebellion under the shadow of an Empire, but Season 2 makes that shadow look uncannily familiar to Americans. In a franchise long known for evoking historical tyrannies, Andor stands out as a timely mirror aimed at the Trump era. Its Imperial villains channel the banality of bureaucratic evil, its downtrodden planets echo communities under draconian immigration crackdowns, and its scrappy Rebels carry the psychological scars of resisting an overwhelming state. The show’s real plot twist? That a Disney-produced space opera is delivering one of pop culture’s most biting critiques of creeping fascism in America.

Tony Gilroy, Andor’s showrunner, has crafted a tale more All the President’s Men than A New Hope. Gone are the cartoonish Nazis-in-space of earlier Star Wars installments; in their place is a world of dull uniforms, corporate collusion, and paper-pushing tyrants. This is authoritarianism with its mask off – less the grandiose Emperor cackling with Force lightning, and more the mid-level apparatchik doing evil simply because it’s procedure. It’s an approach that resonates in a decade when Americans have seen democracy’s guardrails buckling and wondered if our “inextinguishable” institutions might actually flicker out. Andor’s genius is in using small, human-scaled stories – a wrongful arrest here, a coerced confession there – to illuminate the large-scale machinery of oppression. In the process, the series has become both a warning and a cultural artifact of democratic erosion in the late Trump era.