I’m not trying to gatekeep the franchise and my political biases are obvious with my screen name, but I just find it confusing that a conservative wouldn’t automatically be pissed off from a franchise that has had liberal/left biases baked into it from the beginning. I know a lot of them don’t like “NuTrek” so I won’t even get into those. DS9, which was the “darker” and more morally ambiguous show, had these biases still baked into it, what with a pro union episode that positively quoted the Communist Manifesto. Or Past Tense or a host of other episodes I could list. Enterprise’s last two parter was an anti xenophobia, and basically pro “globalism” episode and etc etc. The franchise has always been a left soapbox of sorts so it just kinda confuses me that there’s apparently a legion of conservative, right wing fans.
It’s baffling to me too, but considering how much the post-DS9 “NuTrek” showrunners like to trot out Section 31 and give them more power and reach and even respectability among the protagonists each time they seem to show up (such as in Picard where for some reason Worf and Jurati were associated with them and they apparently “had all the best toys” in a way that sounded quirky and cool rather than an unaccountably self interested bunch of murderous criminals as seen in DS9), there’s a fair amount of overlap it seems between the “black ops special forces shadowy adults in the room that make the hard decisions and get shit done” power fantasies of typical right wing entertainment and whatever Kurtzman keeps trying to push on the Trek franchise.
That’s even more baffling because the average self-described conservative Trek fan seems to hate “NuTrek” anyway, even the stuff that I myself enjoy like Lower Decks, The Orville (yes I count that as Trek, it earned it), Prodigy, and Strange New Worlds.
The final 20 minutes or so of this video summarize how I feel about the Discovery/Picard’s preoccupation with edgy grimdark gimmicks that seem to be trying to appeal to a crowd that nonetheless can’t see past the “politicalness/wokeness” of having too many nonwhite nonmale characters and the like.
Bruh. Paul Ryan’s favorite band is Rage Against The Machine. These people are fucking dense.
A bunch of random thoughts I’ve had about this over the years.
If you want to use a hard right lens you can interpret some Star Trek stuff in a way that aligns with your worldview.
- Starfleet is a pseudo-military organization. Rank is very very important. They’re the best of the best, and they come to save the day often with phasers blazing.
- Sure the humans are egalitarian, but each race has its own behaviors and personality types and traits: Klingons are aggressive, Ferengi are greedy, Romulans are duplicitous, Bajorans are spiritual, etc.
- (idk about this one) Men are more “important?” in older trek. Women were sexualized more. In TNG after Tasha died, the leading women were a doctor and a counselor. And they put poor Troi through so many tropes, including random pregnancy and those tight outfits.
I feel like Starfleet in Trek accidentally but directly led to the modern US Space Force.
Good points here
Two words: media illiteracy. They don’t understand the themes in what they are watching; moreover, they can’t connect any themes they do recognize to their own beliefs because they are disconnected from reality in the first place.
Modern conservatism has noticed that reality rarely agrees with its values, so its response has been to reject reality. That has a lot of side effects, and the inability to hear the message in the media is one of those side effects.
Yeah that could explain why they complain about “woke” messaging to the point they do
Media literacy is low among conservatives. Unless its literally spelled out they probably miss it even when directly quoted.
I notice they tend to find metaphors and allegories confusing.
Conservatism is fundamentally tied to a lack of empathy for people beyond one’s immediate circle, and creativity in large part is fueled by the ability to imagine other people’s experiences, i.e., empathy. It’s likely why there are so few conservative artists, and when they do exist, they tend to focus on literal/realistic or derivative art.
Trek always had to soft-sell some of the socialist ideals (e.g. “we don’t need cash” without really explaining how things really do work) and then also a lot of science fiction that was popular in the more literary side of things during the 80s was actually frighteningly right-wing.
There’s not really a good version of conservatism that works in this modern era, especially when you come to where the parties are staked in the US, but even in general. You can’t have a modern society with all of the complexities and interrelations and cost and then have it be entirely hands-off conservative capitalism. This is why even when you talk to people who are nominally part of the right wing and actually go through the checkboxes of things that they must necessarily adhere to, you see a lot of people who are so-called RINO people … and then a bunch of weirdos who nobody likes.
The brain’s got a bunch of structures probably to prevent us from spiraling into depression when we were hunting the African savanna when our buddy got eaten by a tiger and there wasn’t anything we could have maybe done about that that cause today’s cognitive dissonance.
So basically the only way you can get a frighteningly actually unpopular platform through the electorate is by taking advantage of cognitive dissonance. Because you have to project this idea that a fundamentally backwards idea is going to move us forwards somehow.
If Copyright hadn’t been extended for so many centuries, Trek characters would already be in the public domain and we’d see them fictionally used much in the way that we use all of the characters from actual public domain works. Shakespearean heroes, for example. But, even as things are now, the characters of Trek have had such a presence in the media scene that they do kinda take that aspect on. Thus, basically repeating the plot of part of the Babylon 5 episode “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars” where you have the crew of Babylon 5 being used by a new fascist empire being holographically simulated to say 1984-esque things… one of the weapons to maintain a state of cognitive dissonance is to go back and kinda put fascist words into leftist mouths.
So it’s a bit of an accident on the part of the person, who is being dragged along politically, but it’s very much part of the conservative movement to “reclaim” old media and the relatively milquetoast treatment of alternatives to capitalism and a complete abandonment of queer issues in middle-era Trek makes that kinda easy, which I guess is why NuTrek does go through some pains to state things a bit more forcefully.
Despite being a supposedly post-scarcity society, Star Trek depicts a lot of trading and direct capitalist influences (gold-plated latinum everywhere, the rights to mining worlds being fought over). I’m pretty sure it took until Enterprise for a direct gay analogy (Vulkan mind space AIDS or whatever they called it) to show up, and until Discovery for a main character to actually be gay. While Garak and Bashir were obviously bisexual lovers, Riker would’ve been down to experiment with anyone, and Lt. Reed was pretty much played gay even if the script didn’t call for it, it took forever for them to actually recognise non-heterosexual relationships, and even when they did they were quite weird about it.
Trek also had plenty of “freedom from oppressive government” episodes, as well as examples of some more powerful force needing to step in because the local oppressed population didn’t have the resources to free themselves.
Plus, it’s not that hard to see the “everyone is a cog in the machine” elements of the Borg to be a reference to some communist ideals of shared ownership and the authoritarian control most communist regimes enforced. Seven of Nine was clearly a brainwashed commie freed from a Soviet peace mission while both parties fought the nazis, and has struggled for years to integrate into an individualistic society!
And say what you want about the greedy Ferengi, but Quark plays a essential role in keeping DS9 together, providing valuable resources and trading skills that the Federation lacks.
What probably also didn’t help is that most Star Trek was made decades ago. People have radicalised a lot since then, with left and right wing politics becoming some kind of sports team rather than alternative views on complex issues. A lot of modern conservatives who enjoyed Star Trek as a kid probably weren’t quite so deep down the rabbit hole when they saw their most memorable episodes.
With modern Trek (Discovery and later), the Federation is shown to be far from the perfect communist state it was once purported to be. Burnham became important because the state decided she’d be more useful doing service rather than sitting out her treason sentence, Picard showed the Federation to not give a damn about its ideals during a crisis, and SNW is revising war and xenophobia from a direct perspective. I don’t particularly like the setting of these plots, but I can see a conservative being shown this and thinking “see, space communism won’t work out in practice!” For every “see, black women can overcome challenges and be a cool captain too” episode in Discovery, some racist misogynist can come out with the takeaway “look at this naive black woman barely capable of doing her job, this is why we shouldn’t be giving them the job”. Assuming they bothered to watch the new shows, that is, as I can imagine strong conservatives having a problem with a cast that’s intentionally “anyone but straight white guys” like Discovery.
To me, Star Trek will always be a progressive, leftist show, but I can recognise facets of conservative thinking all throughout it. Perhaps some of those conservatives are wondering the same thing, how someone could possibly interpret the constantly collapsing space socialists to be a leftist message.
Star Trek should absolutely be gatekept from conservatives.
