Lumo 🌕

"Patrick Stewart's Picard was liberalism's lost promise". This great @unherd piece is right that Picard's style of leadership only works because the hard part has already been done somewhere offscreen - treaties signed, institutions in place, the real use of power kept quietly in the background. That is more or less the argument I made in earlier post. The post-scarcity world he inhabits wasn't produced by the progressive politics of the 24th century. It was the product of earlier capitalist innovation, scientific discovery and individual visionary people taking commercial risks. What is left for Picard is the cultivation of character inside a hierarchical Starfleet and a society that still takes inheritance, tradition and ordered authority seriously. Those are exactly the things that made his brand of enlightened liberalism look so attractive in the late 80s and throughout the 1990s, and that make it look so remote now. Old-school liberalism could still see itself in Picard: duty, hierarchy, inheritance, the slow work of forming character, all carried out inside institutions he basically trusted. It doesn't take much to see that today's Jacobin progressives would read Picard very differently. He wouldn't be celebrated, he'd be cancelled. The Federation itself would be condemned as imperialist and told to decolonise. unherd.com/newsroom/how-patr…