Kevin Drum finds a truth

[elfs]

Mike Potemra at National Review Online recently posted one of the silliest things to appear on those unintentionally comic pages, leading Kevin Drum to post this amusing observation:

From Mike Potemra, over at National Review Online:

I have over the past couple of months been watching DVDs of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show I missed completely in its run of 1987 to 1994; and I confess myself amazed that so many conservatives are fond of it. Its messages are unabashedly liberal ones of the early post-Cold War era &emdash; peace, tolerance, due process, progress....

You know, conservatives don't usually confess straight up to finding peace, tolerance, due process, and progress so disagreeable. But I guess they slip up every once in a while.

John Holbo piles on:

Poterma forges on:

I asked an NR colleague about it, and he speculated that the show's appeal for conservatives lay largely in the toughness of the main character: Jean-Luc Picard was a moral hardass where the Captain Kirk of the earlier show was more of an easygoing, cheerful swashbuckler. I think there's something to that: Patrick Stewart did indeed create, in that character, a believable and compelling portrait of ethical uprightness.

But surely the proper conclusion to be drawn, then, is that being an ethically upright and generally virtuous person is, however surprising this result may be, consistent with being tolerant, peace-loving, even with upholding due process. And there is no particular difficulty to the trick of being in favor of progress while being skeptical about human perfectibility. I say this is a semi-serious point because I think, for some conservatives, the main objection to a somewhat vaguely conceived set of liberal values really is a strong sense that they are inconsistent with a certain sort of hardassery in the virtue ethics department.

I think this may be serious grist for the story mill, because it implies what happens when Kirkean values mestastasize into what has become modern "conservatism."

Kirk (after Oakeshott) rightly understood that "conservatism" isn't really an ideology or a political position: it is, and best, a sentiment. Embracing Kirk's third principle of "the prescriptions of antiquity" as a sort of gospel, modern conservatives, even the smart ones, have neglected Kirk's tenth priciple: "The thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society."

Picard (and Kirk before him) embody a recognition that change is inevitable. I disagree with many of Picard's more over-the-top rejections of "technologies man was not yet meant to have," and the post DS-9 institutionalization of that sinean anti-progressivist impulse in the form of the Section 31, but in the general sense Starfleet, envoiced by Picard, allowed a modicum of progress in much the same way that the Chinese government allows a modicum of progress but makes heavy-handed decisions about what progress "the people" may and may not have. But denying all change would be insane and obvious, so Starfleet adopts a bread-and-circuses attitude toward the slow accretion of progress.

In the real world, the citizenry of the United States seems ready to embrace those oligarchal steps: we don't really care about what corporations know about us as long as we get enough food, sex, shelter, and entertainment. We worry about what the government will do because the government seems to have more power, and therefore the power to shift suddenly.

Modern conservatism has responded by encysting into a time-wasting entity, the movement of "No, no, no!" No progress is acceptable. Any progressive idea is so beyond the pale that the right controls the idea of "what is the center" and has successfully dragged it right. The health care delivery bill, that "insane," "radical," "socialist," bill, is pathetically far to the right of what every other modern state has, and far to the right of what the Clinton administration proposed back in 1993. Meanwhile, our government has turned over the very act of regulating trade to private intellectual property lawyers.

Potrema's little outburst shows how this malignancy has infected common discource: he mocks "peace, tolerance, due process, progress," because "the other side" proposes those. We're down to tribalism: my team versus your team, and I don't care what the team is actually saying and doing.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

And next you'll be telling us that the sky is blue. ;)

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I have to point out something about that whole DS-9 "Section 31" thing:

Back in the late-80's-early-90's, J. Michale Straczynski (or JMS for short) was trying to find a network to pick up, "Babylon 5." He pitched it to several companies, including Paramount. Paramount's reaction was, "No thanks; we already have a Space-Opera-Franchise." When "Babylon-5" was finally picked up, Paramount announced Deep Space 9 … which, to JMS, sounded and awful lot like what he'd pitched to Paramount.

Now, when I first read about that on Usenet, I figured that it was just a coincidence.

But, as B5 continued to be renewed each season, and the story progressed, all sorts of similarities started popping up, season by season. Hardcore fans would ask numerous questions on Usenet, JMS would post a teaser answering the question in a roundabout way, then the details of that teaser shows up on DS-9. Not always, not constantly, a few here or there, but fairly obvious copies nonetheless. (JMS often complained, "I don't care that Star Trek is doing a show about a space station. I just wish that they were doing they're own show about a space station." Or something like that.)

The whole Section-31 thing was one of those; an out of context copy of a piece of a key sub-arc of the B5-story arc. And it was a hamfisted copy, at that. Paramount even booked the same actor from B5 to play the equivalent character in DS 9's copy.

The original story-arc from B5 is, actually, far more relevant: A particular group of politicians uses their power to fund several xenophobic organizations and militia groups, eventually pulling them together under an umbrella-movement to act as the footsoldiers for intimidating the populace into obedience. And those politicians were, in turn, being assisted by others with much more sinister goals.

Sounding familiar, anyone?

[solarbird]

We're down to tribalism: my team versus your team, and I don't care what the team is actually saying and doing.
About time you got here - where the hell you been? Eating breakfast?

[l33tminion]

This. When both sides have blown the stakes up to apocalyptic proportions, cognitive dissonance drives you to demonize your political opponents.

[l33tminion]

Reminds me of the Slate piece on TNG's take on the use of torture, as compared to the more simplistic use of torture as a plot device in the recent Star Trek movie. And Picard isn't just liberal because he takes a liberal view on a lot of subjects. He's also liberal in temperament, he thinks carefully about the trade-offs involved in his ethical decisions instead of making a simple appeal to authority. (In this aspect, Picard is far more liberal than Kirk, who also rejects authority but tends to just go with his instincts.)

Interestingly, I think a lot of this has to do with feminism or, more specifically, conservative refusal to engage with feminism. Conservatives paint liberal men as feminine in part to play into misogynistic rhetoric (liberal = feminine, feminine = bad, liberal = bad, QED). But it's also in part because, unwilling to consider how a concept of masculinity would / should work in a more egalitarian society, they assume that the two concepts simply can't fit together. Picard is a believable character who's both masculine in an admirable way and clearly liberal. Hence, Picard is a source of confusion for conservatives.

This ain't football.

[bikerwalla.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I can't just unequivocally say "Chargers Suck" and not have any facts to back that opinion up, and people can't say "Well of course you would say that, you're one of those Raiders thugs."