It’s One Of Those Magic Mirrors
Lifted from the comments, another feat of progressive self-admiration:
Jean-Luc Picard remains the single most compelling vision of progressive politics I am familiar with — secular, rational, compassionate, egalitarian; a believer in progress & abundance but also duty, hard work, and a constant battle for self-improvement and improving the world. https://t.co/PQyh0qnouD
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 30, 2026
It’s curious that Mr Yglesias should pick a fictional character from a fictional world where commonplace human motivations have been done away with, simply written out of existence – a world with no discernible economic costs or constraints, and in which, as said character puts it, “money doesn’t exist.”
And as others note in the replies, it’s something of a stretch to imagine the modern progressive as somehow being driven by hard work and duty, or being defined by rationality. It’s almost funny.
Update, via the comments:
Dicentra adds, somewhat pointedly,
It’s hard not to trip over the vanity, the sheer indulgence of it.
Mr Yglesias’ chosen epitome of progressivism – which is to say, the epitome of his own politics – is a made-up world, the economics of which do not make sense, even according to its own writers, and in which 700-metre starships, equipped with Impossibility Engines, are built, one assumes joyfully, in great numbers, at no cost, by people who don’t get paid.
Mr Yglesias’ adventures in fantasy have been noted here before.
Not all of the writers “ate their own dogfood,” as it were.
Wherein I expound.
Heh. It’s hard not to trip over the vanity, the sheer indulgence of it.
His chosen epitome of progressivism – which is to say, the epitome of his own politics – is a made-up world, the economics of which do not make sense, even according to its own writers, and in which 700-metre starships, equipped with Impossibility Engines, are built, one assumes joyfully, in great numbers, at no cost, by people who don’t get paid.
[ Post updated. ]
Madrigal of note.
Dude, they had Heisenberg compensators.
And Jeffries Tubes!
Just like our college leftists and their professors. The students who think they deserve an A for mediocrity and the professors who gladly dole them out. The students who think people who work and have money should pay for them to sit on their arses all day while “caring” about the less fortunate. They “care,” but they don’t do.
What duty have leftists ever felt called to, other than the revolution? What hard work have they done, except hold up signs at a protest?
Yes, we will work for free, and the government will care for us. Where does the government get the money? They print it! Duh! Or from the wealthy. But what happens when the wealthy run out of money? Seriously, how fast would governments run through all the money the so-called wealthy have? A year? Two?
Commies gonna commie.
I should add that over the years I’ve spent many hours being entertained by Star Trek, but that was generally despite its laughably fudged economics and moral contrivances that were often more credulity-straining than teleportation, warp drive, or the spatial anomaly of the week.
And it’s worth noting that the strongest, most memorable episodes are very often those that pointedly depart from the smug progressive conceits that Mr Yglesias presumably finds so affirming. And in which those conceits are revealed to be unsustainable and ruinous:
It’s worth pointing out that pious hand-wringing didn’t save the Federation from annihilation. What saved the day, and billions of lives, was something else entirely.
I remember taking my pre-teen daughter to the 2009 Star Trek movie. There was a battle between ships. Flying debris. Much cacaphony.
My daughter frowned. I asked her what was wtong and she said, “Space is a vacuum. Why do they have sound effects of objects hitting things?”
Again, a society that consumes waaaaaay too much fiction such that the fiction has replaced reality in much of the consciousness.
I didn’t pick up on this aspect until after they started making the movies and nerd critics began discussing it. I still don’t believe it was anything seriously considered by those of us watching TOS back then, even as Saturday late morning reruns.
The Enterprise was a military organization on a mission. We no more thought about where their food and entertainment budgets came from than we would some aircraft carrier in a war movie. It just wasn’t part of the plot space. Yes there was some references to where the stuff came from, which was necessary and kinda silly but that wasn’t an essential part of the stories. It was about as relevant as the resupply of a ship. How often is that part of a war movie? Then of course once the ST universe popped up on the radar of “serious” movie critics, politics via economics had to be introduced.
The needless but emphatic insertion of things that don’t work, and which the proponents can’t devise a way to make work, despite decades of opportunity, is also something of a progressive signature.
See, now when I say that…My bigger distraction is where does all the gravity come from? To me that’s the dividing line between SF fantasy and SF proper. Taking the former even remotely seriously is silly.
Who else here has encountered other instances in SF of dubious socialist fantasies?
Off-hand, I recall hearing respectful mentions of UK communist Ian Banks’ Culture novels and “democratic”socialist Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series. There’s Ursula K. LeGuin, but it’s been so long since I’ve read anything by her that I cannot clearly recall specifics. There’s got to be much more, but that’s all I recall at the moment.
Apropos of both Yglesias and Roddenberry.
Part and parcel of the leftist program to demoralize and disarm the West.
This cannot be said too often.
Regarding the whole moneyless society conceit, it’s remarkable how it adds practically nothing of significance, dramatically speaking. Barring some naff dialogue, as in the clip linked above.
It does, however, introduce all kinds of inconsistencies that have to be explained away or, more typically, ignored. How does Sisko buy his home on Bajor? How does his father’s restaurant work? Do his customers pay for their meals? Does the guy cleaning up afterwards get paid, and if not, what motivates him to wipe someone else’s dirty dishes and sweep someone else’s floor?
It just creates more crap you have to not think about, despite it being referred to as something of immense importance. Because it’s absurd.
I mean, okay, let’s go with warp drive, and transporters, and time travel, and all of the imaginary technology. Okay, fine. Fun can be had with that.
But weirdly altruistic human beings who merrily clean up other people’s shit day after day, forever, for no reason beyond some supposed inherent niceness, previously untapped?
A harder pill, methinks. It’s a needless, unconvincing conceit with no dramatic pay-off. It doesn’t even work dramatically.
Given the (admittedly chance) resemblance to portrayals of Lenin, Yglesias’ choice of images is … curious.
Iowahawkblog worked it out once. Confiscating every last thing every wealthy individual in the U.S. owns, would just cover the federal budget for one year. The following year was left as an exercise for the reader.
Indeed:
.
I had issues with the effing NURSERY on an effing starship that could sterilize a planet.
There are scenarios where merchant ships with children on board need to fight (read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downbelow_Station as well as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finity's_End). The Enterprise was not such a vessel.
What you’re not understanding is that there are people who are content doing lowly manual labor*. They’re not high brow intelligent beings like you and I. Capitalism has made them think that they can be but in a properly ordered economic society, they don’t have to needlessly stretch themselves. Those people who can do those jobs just…do them because that’s what they are happy to do. Less stress. No one needs to try hard because glorious communism gives everyone everything for free…wait a minute…
*though more to the point…robots will be doing that work…so…more time for glorious interpretive dance. Because it’s hellfun!
I do not understand https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2026/11/its-one-of-those-magic-mirrors.html#comment-221490
Or being a security meat puppet whose function is to die.
Picard is Plato’s Philosopher King: noble, wise but with absolute power. Plato had lived through anarchy, which he said was the worst form of government (lots of deaths), and which we now see in France and elsewhere. The problem of course with a philosopher king is that the next guy who gets the power may be a dick but still have the power (Brazil). It is the perpetual problem with utopias.
The Venn diagram for this one is pretty slim. I even get it but forget why.
“There are four lights.“
Roddenberry was a native Texan. Texas is home to a lot of communists today. Not saying anything about causation but what has become of Texas over the years makes me smdh.
From Wherein I expound.
I don’t know about that. Mostly, yes. But who would you rather have a beer with? Even if you don’t like him, Bones would be fun to mess with.
While I would lean pretty hard to Spok, his (admittedly much later in the later movie) “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one.” That line holds a lot of communism in it. That’s probably where I started to believe what people were saying about the sociopolitical message of Star Trek, which up to about that time I thought was a take that was overwrought. That line goes a bit beyond John 15:13, especially in the context of the scene. Letting emotions rule, as seen historically, is bad policy. Pretending emotions don’t exist or that they can easily be dismissed is tempting from an engineering perspective. Yet for a society to function you need more than bridges and airplanes.
OK….lost the meme…
Garak, saviour of the universe.
To a very large extent, yes. Ditto the ruthless (and loudly disapproved of) counter-intelligence agency Section 31. I.e., parties not restrained by all those fluffy progressive pieties or an urge to share their feelings while disdaining commerce.
He complained that the censors would not allow female costumes which exposed the undersides of their breasts. What would have been next? Pasties? Ultra-sheer bodysuits? I like pretty women, but this was supposed to be drama, not soft core porn. I find it very easy to believe he was an absolute creep in person.
McCoy always seemed to have a stash of illegal off-planet booze. And he was pretty free-and-easy with that allegedly medical hypo-spray. He spent a lot of time injecting people with stimulants.
All that naive One World bullshit.
“Hand over the stash, Dr Feelgood.”
Not just gender: Disagree with the left on anything and this happens:
Slander. Dehumanization. Censorship. Deplatforming. Systematic corruption of scientific and and scholarly institutions.
Josh Slocum has some thoughts:
Among the examples:
I really disliked those episodes. See also, Janeway and Picard, upthread.
Not to let Star Wars have a pass.
Added: Some days this photo size limit really busts my chops…
And as Thanksgiving is just around the corner…
Age has done no favours to that particular brand of idiocy.
Previously in The Atlantic:
I could of course go on. But we’d be here all day.
LBJ was a native Texan too.
So … have the beer but open it yourself?
As alternatives, a nice libertarian fantasy is The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, another good novel exploring high technology with social concepts is Steel Beach by John Varley
“unknown group”