this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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But all of this is either compatible with a conservative reading, or requires more analysis than most conservatives are putting in. I mean I doubt Musk read the Picard books.
But then you go on to mention stuff like family tradition, which is literally a key value for conservatives, especially when it involves joining the military.
Or people being well fed, or valuing self-improvement? Think about all the rightwing grifters who go on about self improvement all the time, or how they claim that communism killed 15 vigintillion people from starvation and only CAPITALISM can feed the world. Conservatives don't want people to be starving, starving citizens are the sign of a poor society. It's okay that the Federation doesn't use money because it is post-scarcity thanks to replicators, a technological solution to the issue of feeding the poor. This is perfectly compatible with the techbro mindset that tech is the solution to all our problems, and isn't challenging to those who believe that socialism is impossible without advanced post-scarcity technology.
What I'm trying to get at is that all the aesthetics are there for a conservative to read it in a way that is compatible with their ideology, in much the same way that a liberal will read it as a triumph of liberalism or a leftist can interpret it as socialist. It isn't challenging to those ideologies, because it's vague enough and alien enough to not map 1-to-1 onto any modern political system.
Starving citizens are required. They're there to keep those that aren't currently starving terrified of becoming that person. (And also to be someone to look down on.)
Okay, but that's capitalism. There's the classic cope of "this is simply a requirement because scarcity exists." They think it's necessary and unavoidable.
The conservative read of Star Trek is that feeding all its citizens is a sign of the Federation being so rich that it can feed all its citizens without the need for capitalism as we know it. True post-scarcity.
It doesn't challenge their belief that starving citizens are required in the modern day. If anything, to a conservative techbro like Musk, it reaffirms their beliefs because it's all about how rich the Federation is and how feeding the whole world would require massive advances in technology like replicators. It's even a common plot point how other civilizations want access to Federation replicators and other tech.
I agree that's the case. What I disagree on is the vagueness of the values of Star Fleet/The Federation, and how much of it we see in effect. There is plenty both on screen and off screen to see.
Sure, it doesn't map one to one. But it also makes it very clear that conservatives values are wholely incompatible with Federation philosophy. It's a psuedo democratic socialist state.
I agree that democratic socialism is probably the closest IRL system, I just think it's fairly vague about it and any assertions are easily glossed over or disregarded as fiction, or attributed to the advanced tech.
It comes back to the disconnection of tech, the vagueness, the allegory. You don't see queer people, you just see allegories for queer people that are either safer to accept or just aren't acknowledged as allegories. You don't see Federation imperialism being questioned that much, they're pretty much always right. The only meaningful people who question it are the Maquis, and Sisko loses himself in his vengeance and pursuit of them (but is never humbled for it—from the audience's perspective, he's right). And then there's S31, which is fascist to begin with.
And I'm just talking about canon here. Not the books or anything like that.
Technically money was abolished prior to the invention of the replicator, but we never hear any details about that. The most detail we get is a one off line in Voyager about a "New World Economy".
They don't flesh out what the economy actually looks like, or how we got here without replicators. The "without replicators" is an important bit, which might seem like a random thing for me to be focusing on but I've talked to conservative fans who will often cite replicators as something that would be required for the Federation's socialism. Even liberal fans often think that. The message of the show is about post-scarcity, not workers owning the means of production. It's not socialism in the ways that it exists on earth, and so conservatives don't hate it.