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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