https://unherd.com/newsroom/how-patrick-...edition=us
Interesting take on Picard and Obama and why Obama failed. Article concludes that Democrats are still about nothing other than, "we aren't Trump."
I always found TNG pretentious and self-righteous. TOS sometimes made social points, but it did it subtly, not trying to lecture you. Picard lectured people like he was all knowing. The characters, other than Geordi and Data, really weren't especially likable.
"Patrick Stewart’s death at the age of 86 has prompted tributes to both the brilliant actor and the famous role that defined him: Star Trek’s Jean-Luc Picard. Matthew Yglesias, centrist liberalism’s inescapable pundit, today called the character “the single most compelling vision of progressive politics I am familiar with: secular, rational, compassionate, egalitarian, committed to abundance and self-improvement”. It’s an affectionate tribute with an awkward implication. Why does a television captain from the Eighties still offer a more ambitious political vision than the people governing us?...
There’s a catch, however, with the Picard model of statecraft: it works because the Federation had already done much of the heavy lifting offscreen. His diplomacy unfolds in a universe where the Klingons eventually signed a treaty, where Starfleet’s institutions can largely be trusted, where even the villains mostly respect the etiquette of the hailing frequency. The eloquent explanation is decisive because everything beneath was already settled, and the use of power needed to create and maintain that order hums in the background.
In reality, Obamaism failed and eventually curdled into a MAGA counterrevolution in part because it did not alter the course of a slow American decline, much less attempt to build the post-scarcity world of Star Trek. In the film First Contact, Picard explains to a woman from the 21st century that the economics of the future are different. Advanced technologies such as replicators and energy-to-matter conversion eliminate basic material scarcity, and so nobody on the Enterprise has rent due, and nobody is rationing insulin....
For a time after November 2024, Democrats briefly seemed to grasp this problem. There was a long season of soul-searching and a flood of think pieces asking why the working class walked away, not to mention a quiet retreat from the more alienating vocabulary of 2020 (farewell, “Latinx”). For a moment, it looked as if the party might ask what its society was actually for. That moment has apparently passed, and everyone seems resigned to recasting the next captain, when the problem was always that Picard’s “Make it so” only works when somebody has already made the ship."
