Anakin Skywalker and the Fall of the Republican Party

It’s over. I’ve already portrayed myself as Zoomer-Anakin and you as Millennial-Obi-Wan and the Boomer-Council.

If you didn’t understand that sentence, don’t worry, it just means you aren’t connected 24/7 with the bowels of political X, which is almost certainly a good thing. The past few days, one of the hot trending topics among the right wing leading up to the 2026 midterm elections was the “Anakin meme.”

Originally, it was just video edits that began last month of Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequel trilogy that made him look super cool. Generation Z has a nostalgia for the prequels similar to what Generation X feels for the original Star Wars trilogy. Anakin is the tragic hero who eventually falls to the Dark Side, and it’s easy to make him look cool since he fights with a lightsaber, has catchy one-liners, and wins the love of a princess.

But then, apparently, it went too far. Instead of just edits, the online “far right” turned to memes as well. The memes portray Anakin with the stances and opinions of the conservative, America First younger generation, and Obi-Wan as the Millennial or Boomer giving the lines of the establishment Republican Party (i.e., the Jedi Council). The establishment Republicans did not take this well. James Lindsay wrote that the Anakin meme was to “get angry young people to identify with the rejection of God’s order” and was an “obvious influence operation.” Dana Loesch said people forget that “Vader lost in the end” and that “I would hope that their example is Luke, not Anakin.” Seth Dillon asked whether Anakin was the good guy and responded, “No, he wasn’t,” then compared Anakin to Hitler. If you aren’t up to date on political code terms, this means that the establishment GOP is angry at the young right and is trying to bury them and distance itself from them.

As the hand-wringing about this reached its climax, Republicans were utterly demolished in the midterm elections across the country. As of this writing, they lost at least seven seats in the Senate, 30 in the House, and five governor races. And somehow, two years after the most unified Republican Party of the century decisively won Donald Trump the presidency, nobody was surprised at the midterm failure. Why?

Surprisingly, in what is hopefully a good sign, part of the answer came straight from the vice president himself. On Nov. 4, JD Vance tweeted that it was not poor voter turnout that lost elections, but rather it was Republicans deciding to vote for Democrats instead. He cited a pollster who found four reasons for this phenomenon: the Iran war, cost of living, not putting America First, and the relationship of the U.S. with Israel. Sure, it would be easy to come up with about 12 more reasons, but for someone entrenched in the administration in question, Vance gives a refreshingly honest explanation.

It was a good moment for Vance, but in truth, his hand was forced. He had to admit that some conservatives were voting Democrat because those people were extremely vocal about it. There was a segment of the conservative movement that actually celebrated the losses.

Now we come to the elephant in the room. The face of the movement that encouraged people not to vote Republican and focused on the issues Vance brought up is Nick Fuentes. Did he flip the elections single-handedly? Probably not. But his movement, America First, offered the rationale for not voting Republican at a time when many people were already disenchanted by the GOP. Without going into the weeds, I think most people know that there are real problems with Nick Fuentes. Before we get to that, let’s examine the political strategy in question.

For the last 40 years, we have been lied to by Republicans. We have been told one thing during election season, and sold up the river when we win. Trump’s first term seemed like it might be a step in the right direction, giving us a real win through the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. On this, and the promises of the 2024 Trump campaign, we started gaining hope. If the guy who built his political persona on not being able to be bought, hating George Bush’s pointless wars, and draining the D.C. swamp couldn’t reverse the trend, then who could? Then we elected him and he betrayed us, as nearly every Republican does.

As Catholics, we are always told that we must vote Republican, or else the world will end tomorrow. But what if we could actually change the party? What if we could influence the decisions that our politicians make? If our vote was not guaranteed every election, we could make far more influential demands on our politicians.

It was with this in mind that the America First movement did not vote Republican and let the party lose. The goal was to make clear that if a candidate wants the full conservative vote in the future, concessions will have to be made to those who will not vote for the kind of party that gets into pointless wars in the Middle East, among other things.

Enter Anakin Skywalker. Young, brash, and cocky, he sees problems in the world and thinks he can solve them. First, he goes to the current political system. He attempts to work with the “good guys” to bring order to the galaxy. But he discovers that the system is broken. The powers that be will not let him change anything, or even stop the decay already happening. So he breaks the system and overthrows it.

Whether or not this is what actually happens in the movies is beside the point. That is how Anakin is being portrayed and why he has become the latest avatar of America First. The Anakin meme did not lose Republicans the midterms, but it did give an accurate picture of the disillusionment young conservatives feel toward the Republican Party. We are not willing to go along and vote for the lesser of two evils every election like those before us. We will let the “good guys” lose if it is our only real shot at political change.

There are two primary issues that come to mind when discussing the strategy of letting “our” side lose, one of them practical and one of them principled.

The practical issue is that the Democrats now have more power. This is not a good thing, and I will never claim it is. We are playing a dangerous game, and one that could have real negative consequences. But think about the situation. It’s the midterm elections after Republicans won everything in 2024. It is a general rule in politics that in situations like this, the other party is bound to make up some ground in the next election cycle. Besides, Trump has become a very unpopular president whose term will soon be up, and whoever his successor is will need to distance himself from the wreckage. What better excuse to distance yourself from that wreckage than a set of elections in which your own voters turned against you? And would you look at that, the prime 2028 candidate, JD Vance, is already beginning to use that excuse and do just that in the tweet I mentioned earlier. Politics is a prudential matter. We have to weigh the potential benefits of a better long-term Republican Party against the cost of a few years of Democratic control.

The issue of principle is that the face of the America First movement is Nick Fuentes, who has done and said things that make him unfit to be the leader of a political movement. But that might not matter. America First is the idea that the Republican Party should put our country and our people first in their policies. This idea is separate from Fuentes, and many more people agree with it than follow him. He uses the idea mainly to try to disentangle the Republican Party from Israel. Whether or not you agree with him on that issue, we have to see that there are other issues important to us as Catholics that are not being addressed by our politicians. If we can unify around the idea of America First, we will be more able to demand a change in the GOP on issues like foreign policy and abortion. The America First sentiment is broad enough to be bigger than Fuentes, and more powerful. But it only works if enough people stop voting for Republicans just because they give meaningless lip service to things we like.

We may disagree on strategy, but it is time to stop acting like we can do the same things over and over again and expect different results. The protest of this election cycle may work; it may not. Either way, it is an attempt at a different way of achieving political goals, and it seems that trying something different might not be the worst idea after 40 years of failure. Maybe a little more Anakin is what’s needed to shake things up right now.