The week before the November 3 midterms, Ryan Zickgraf didn’t need to know their outcome to be sure that a fictional, far-future “television captain from the Eighties” could “still offer a more ambitious political vision than the people governing us” in “Patrick Stewart’s Picard was liberalism’s lost promise” (UnHerd, October 30).

That week would see its share of memorials to Stewart and his Star Trek comrade Walter Koenig. They wouldn’t have been on the ballot (X-Men voice actor Lenore Zann becoming a Canadian parliamentarian while Stewart anchored that franchise’s live-action film series is the exception that proves the rule), but neither were their principles: Matthew Yglesias summing up Stewart’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard as embodying conspicuously absent “secular, rational, compassionate, egalitarian” values is, as Zickgraf notes, “an affectionate tribute with an awkward implication.”

It wasn’t the physical implausibility of transporters and holodecks which led Stewart to tell Variety that “the world of ‘Next Generation’ doesn’t exist anymore” since “nothing is really safe” in 2020 (just before Picard premiered in January of that year).  Zickgraf notes that Picard retreating from the Federation’s flagship to being “holed up at his family vineyard” amid a future “devolved into suspicion and isolationism” is “roughly where American liberals found themselves in the decade since November 2016, nursing their Obama nostalgia” during “the loss of liberal idealism of post-Obama America.”

Zickgraf could have added that liberals spent that decade far more suspicious of Russians than audiences viewing Koenig’s Pavel Chekov innocently asking about American “nuclear wessels” while time traveling to the then-present of 1986’s Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.  Deeming Stewart’s debut a year later “just in time for the end of history” would have seemed premature at a time when the winding down of the Cold War was as hard to be confident about as that of Reagan’s drug war.  Even if the New York Times saw a Trek crew refocusing on “coping with problems within their own borders” under new management in contrast to “President George Bush,” overly “fixated on foreign policy,” in 1993.

It was wishful thinking to hope that Barack Obama would become what Zickgraf called “a real-life version of Picard mixed with [The] West Wing’s Josiah Bartlet,” the latter character himself embodying who Democrats wished Bill Clinton would have been. George W. Bush likewise failed to trounce America’s enemies with the take-charge action-hero tactics of Clinton-era crowdpleasers like Independence Day and Air Force One.

Yet it’s not merely the case that earthbound politicians can’t avail themselves of “advanced technologies such as replicators and energy-to-matter conversion.” Like the nominally “progressive socialist” labor leader in The Mouse in the Moon, they see any shift from the status quo as “a plot to deprive the people of work, or raise prices beyond their means” in Leonard Wibberley’s 1962 satirical novel about a microstate racing to the moon as the easiest path to foreign aid, while standing in the way of more efficient production and distribution that would lower prices. Don’t Copy That Floppy! warned VHS tape viewers not to duplicate such computer software as Oregon Trail (developed via Minnesota state taxes) and Tetris (from the Soviet Union).

The ultimate testament to Stewart’s acting skill is that he made it hard not to suspend disbelief, one hour at a time, in what Zickgraf calls “authority with authoritarianism apparently filtered out.”  In the real world, we have what we need to exclude authoritarians from getting in the way of getting things done.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

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I’m writing this column on the morning of November 3, technically “election day” in the US even though, per the Assocated Press, more than 57 million Americans voted “early” (in person or by mail) this year. Chances are you won’t read it until later this week, after the polls have closed and most of the mail ballots have purportedly been received and counted.

In almost any US election of the 20th century, the election would have mostly been considered “over” late Tuesday or early Wednesday. Perhaps a few razor-thin races might remain unresolved, with recounts in the offing.

Not that there wasn’t any grousing about it. Many still living can recall the claims in 1960 that “the graveyards of Chicago” brought in late and fraudulent votes to put John F. Kennedy over the top versus Richard Nixon for president. But that grousing was after the fact — the election was “over” and by golly those deemed winners were certain to take office.

These days, elections don’t end when the votes are cast and counted. In every close race (and many not-so-close races) of consequence, the supposed losers and their supporters move immediately to screeching “Rigged! Stolen!”

They demand recounts. They go to court seeking to have ballot boxes seized and election officials indicted.

In one case, which you may remember, they even stormed the Capitol to prevent certification of the results and, potentially, to hang the vice-president of the United States as he presided over said certification.

In another, earlier case, the losing candidate immediately went to work trying to blame Russian meddling, rather than her lackluster campaign and well-deserved negative public image, for her loss.

How did we get here? I trace it all back to a presidential election which was arguably actually “stolen.”

In 2000, it came down to 537 votes in Florida. The courts halted recounts and declared George W. Bush the winner; subsequent analyses almost uniformly concluded that Al Gore would have won the presidency if the recounts had proceeded.

Attempts to undo the courts’ rulings failed, in part because Gore, himself vice-president, congenially presided over Congress’s certification of his loss instead of going to war over the matter. But Democrats never forgave, or forgot … and we entered a new era of bipartisan “fight them until hell freezes over, then fight them on the ice.”

No matter what happens today, expect Election 2026 to drag on into the new year.

If the predicted “blue wave” materializes, Republicans will contest every close election both in the courts and, quite possibly, by declining to seat newly elected Democrats in the US House and Senate. They’ll declare any and every unfavorable result “rigged” or “fraudulent.”

If the “blue wave” crests lower than predicted, Democrats will contest every close election in the courts and declare any unfavorable result “rigged” or “fraudulent.”

Those of us who expect (and usually get) business as usual from government no matter how elections come out can only shake our heads and note “play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

If you voted last week, or vote today, I won’t put you down for it. I voted too, because voting is one way of expressing my opinion and I like to express my opinion.

But voting is mostly just entertainment — and the Great Election Show, like Happy Days, has long since “jumped the shark.”

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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It’s all over the Internet, of course. People are worried and wondering what’s up (including my sister-in-law, who called my special attention to it). From a random look at stories about it, here’s  International Business Times lede:

“The Pentagon is preparing every major U.S. military base to operate independently for at least 90 days without outside electricity, fuel, water or supplies, as part of FORTRESS, a sweeping initiative designed for a major war that could cripple power grids, disrupt supply chains and threaten critical infrastructure on American soil.”

Between actual war (on semi-pause) with Iran, potential spread to other areas of the war in Ukraine, and justified suspicion that US Donald Trump may  get more aggressive than he already has in attempting to nullify midterm congressional elections (the phrase “Insurrection Act” gets thrown around a bit), the question “why exactly NOW?” does seem rather pertinent.

It’s not just the US military. It’s not even just the US. Newsweek reports that regimes around the world are leaning into an emphasis on civilian “prepping” for unspecified disasters, urging their populations to keep canned food, batteries, and other emergency supplies on hand.

I’d like to say “don’t panic,” and that’s exactly what I will say — not because I’m convinced nothing bizarre is about to happen, but because “prepping” is always good advice anyway.

These news cycle indicators may or may not be predictive in the near term, but laying in some shelf-stable food and bottled water can’t hurt and will stand you in good stead for even the smaller “disasters” that have always been part of life (blizzards, hurricanes, etc.).

IS something big coming? I haven’t the faintest. I don’t move in circles of power where I’d pick up that kind of thing before you.

That said, we live in a time of multiple escalating crises.

You’ve already seen what even limited war with Iran has done to gas prices and is starting to do to food prices with less oil and less fertilizer precursor material moving through the Strait of Hormuz.

While the Russian armed forces have somehow managed to bog down for 4 1/2 years in their invasion of a country with a quarter of Russia’s population, the Kremlin remains eminently capable of hurting “the west” in various ways if it sees a reason to.

Most modern countries rely on complex and far-flung “grids” to keep people’s lights on and refrigerators running. Storms and minor accidents already knock out power to millions of people for days on end.

Targeted attacks at vulnerable nodes on those “grids” — or if the attackers can and do go big, the electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear detonation in the upper atmosphere — could affect far larger numbers of people, far worse and for far longer. Most power outages are inconveniences. Tens of millions, for weeks, would be deadly.

In the US in particular, Donald Trump has openly worked to develop and implement a more effective plan than the Beer Belly Putsch of January 6, 2021 for holding on to power when the voters disagree.

If push comes to shove on that front, it’s not impossible that we’ll see open fighting between the citizenry and federal law enforcement (and even military troops) in America’s urban cores over the next few months. Events of that sort usually mean power outages, telecommunications disruptions, and curfews (even if one otherwise felt safe trying to get to the grocery store).

Picking up some extra cans of soup, pods of shelf-stable milk, etc. might feel like doing not much of anything, but, again, it can’t hurt … and it might turn out to be more important than you think.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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