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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Wall Street Journal columnist Barton Swaim’s “A Suggestion for Young Radicals” to embrace moderation (October 1) might seem to bring the second least appealing news hook for a commentator whose outlet is named after the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison who famously asserted that he would rather “tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm” than “use moderation in a cause like the present … I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.”

At least Swaim’s contribution keeps the Journal‘s op-ed page going when even the New York Times has moved on to so-called “guest essays.”  P.J. O’Rourke, in contrast, opened A Cry From the Far Middle with a proposal for “an opinion-free news media source” called “Happy Medium” — and while Swaim commends Aurelian Craiutu’s Why Not Moderation? for how it “distinguishes moderation from ‘lukewarm wishy-washiness,'” O’Rourke would happily “bring the Wishy and the Washy back together … The extreme moderates’ non-negotiable demand? Negotiation.”

While O’Rourke made his lack of regret for moving from his hippie Maoist youth to middle-aged rock-ribbed-yet-still-hip conservatism clear with titles like Republican Party Reptile or Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut, his idea of mellowing in old age was writing a follow-up to a humor piece whose title infamously began “How to Drive Fast on Drugs” with one on “How to Drive Fast When the Drugs Are Mostly Lipitor …” (both reprinted in a 2009 book whose subtitle boasts that his ideal post-recession economy would be one “With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in Every Carport, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn”).

In contrast, Swaim seeks refuge in “institutions that require political actors to reason, argue and compromise with one another.” The Freeman founder Leonard Read anticipated Swaim’s invocation of Aristotelian moderation as an inherent good, writing in a 1956 article for that magazine that “the golden-mean theory cannot properly be applied indiscriminately … it is patently unsound when deciding between stealing nothing or stealing $1,000.”

Swaim paints a picture of a “hard left, from the French Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union” which always “tried to explain life’s complexities in terms of class warfare” (which makes it almost redundant for him to note that he “regard[s] socialism as itself a form of extremism”).

In the wake of that collapse, The Freeman ran an account about how “it is good to remember that from the beginning—not just among conservatives but among democratic socialists—there were many who saw clearly that Marxism was a weird mystique set forth by an egotistical crank” by democratic socialist Martin Gardner, who related how “[H.G.] Wells tried to convince Russian leaders that in England there were at least 200 different classes.”

Gardner could then point to Bertrand Russell’s The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism as a book-length exposé of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from the perspective of a less doctrinaire socialist “widely known” enough compared to Wells’s Russia in the Shadows to not need popularization (a category for which he could have also mentioned John Spargo’s Bolshevism: The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy).

As for actually existing capitalism, it includes not only such deviations from clichéd socialist theory as individuals like Wells’s “works foreman who is being taken in a train by an engine-driver to see how the house he is having built for him by a building society is getting on.” The editors of In These Times, which to Swaim exemplifies far-left “periodicals that might fairly be termed immoderate,” observed in 1980 that “federal regulation of the economy has been welcomed or sought by American business leaders” while being sold as a populist imposition on them — and thus socialism would involve “dismantling the highly centralized agencies created to insulate corporate power from popular control.”

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

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Andrew Langer’s “What JD Vance Gets Wrong About Hamilton” (The Wall Street Journal, August 28) could as aptly have been titled “What JD Vance Gets Wrong About Milton Friedman.”

Langer notes that Hamiltonian trade barriers were “generally moderate” in comparison with “President Trump’s sweeping protectionism,” but is just as concerned that “Mr. Vance also caricatures Friedman’s legacy by implying that laissez-faire elevates economic development above human dignity” — a distortion needed to justify the shift of American economic conservatism’s lodestar from one to the other as “obviously a good thing.”

Not heeding that, as put in John W. Campbell, Jr.’s Astounding Science Fiction, “the really appropriate epitaph for many and many a man is ‘Why, it’s obvious …’,” Vance’s supposedly self-evident case for reburying the man of monetarism in order to resurrect the man on the money is even more of a departure than the Broadway version’s hip-hop beats.

After all, many of the right and many more of the left have attributed virtually every American ill since the Reagan administration to free trade and deregulation.  Yet Vance argues for Friedman’s obsolescence by contending that his ideas succeeded back then — but only due to “a very rich and powerful institutional Christianity” that has become impoverished enough to require a ten-dollar substitute for its devaluated coinage.

The usual demonization of Friedman posits Margaret Thatcher as a Wicked Witch East of the Atlantic to his Elphaba, ignoring his influence on Estonia and New Zealand. Vance would need to make a stretch to find the “powerful institutional Christianity” responsible for the embrace of international markets in Israel, Singapore or even the India of Usha Vance’s ancestors.  At least it doesn’t seem like Vance is tracing his wife’s success at Yale Law School back to the influence on Gandhi of Leo Tolstoy’s “A Letter to a Hindu.”

Vance could buttress his argument by noting that American deregulation was more thorough, and brought more economic benefits, under faithful Sunday school teacher Jimmy Carter than the divorced Hollywood union boss who followed him.  Yet that would be as awkward for partisan platitudes as recalling that the previous Second Lady who had issued a 1987 jeremiad against a “bizarre occult subculture” which “rejects Judeo-Christian religion, turns good and evil upside down, and rebels against life itself” was not Barbara Bush but Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society author Tipper Gore.

Vance is also unlikely to compare his own adeptness at shedding convictions to what Friedman biographer Alan Ebenstein calls his subject’s “excessively religious phase as a young boy” — “noteworthy because it reflects the natural character of his mind … he tends to got he whole way intellectually or not at all, and seeks order and harmony in the universe. When he was unable to achieve this intellectual state through the logical observation of every detail of Orthodox Judaism in its dietary and other strictures, he dropped religion completely.”

In asserting that Hamilton’s heavy hand rather than a Jeffersonian lighter touch (let alone Adam Smith’s invisible mitt) “will dominate American conservative economic thinking for the future,” Vance isn’t just rebuking Jefferson’s anti-Hamiltonian’s view: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”  Vance may, to misquote the famous line from F. Scott Fitzgerald, have a first-rate ability to function while holding ten opposed ideas in mind. But all bring a risk of injury to your pocketbook and mobility.

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

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