When Patrick Stewart, who died on Wednesday, first stepped onto the bridge of the Enterprise in 1987 in his defining role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the Berlin Wall still stood. The Soviet Union would not fall until the fourth season of that show, Star Trek: The Next Generation, had already begun. Yet Picard’s generation of Star Trek franchise anticipated both events, portraying a post-Cold War world just as the Cold War was ending. It was the quintessential show for an age of American hegemony.
For those unfamiliar with the franchise, Star Trek is primarily a story about Starfleet, which serves as both the military arm and as a kind of diplomatic corps for the United Federation of Planets, a benevolent, democratic union of more than a hundred worlds. In Star Trek’s Original Series, the 1960s episodes featuring Kirk and Spock, the Federation stands in the same shoes as the Cold War United States — vast and powerful, but also harried by other galactic superpowers like the Klingon Empire.
Picard’s Federation, by contrast, is the sole dominant power in Earth’s quadrant of the galaxy. The Evil Empire is now an ally. The Original Series’s writers conceived of the Klingons as thinly veiled stand-ins for the Soviet Union, but on Picard’s Enterprise there was a Klingon, Lieutenant Worf, serving directly behind Picard on the Enterprise’s bridge.
Yet, while the Federation was a metaphor for an American empire victorious after the Cold War, it was also an idealized vision of the United States. The Enterprise spent far more time rescuing people from environmental catastrophes or shuttling ambassadors to peace negotiations than it did battling aliens in space. Picard flew around the galaxy in a ship packed with enough armaments to destroy entire planets. But he more often used that ship to distribute vaccines.
In its best moments, The Next Generation was a meditation on the just use of power. And Picard, as Enterprise’s captain, was the voice of 1990s liberalism — known as much for his eloquent soliloquies in defense of universal rights as for his tactical prowess as commander of the Federation’s most advanced weapon.
Looking back, it’s easy to see Picard’s liberalism as a vestige of a lost era. The Next Generation showcased a just and highly capable Federation that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the current United States government. But, while America has fallen far short of Star Trek’s Clinton-era aspirations, it would be a mistake to abandon those aspirations today.
The children of nearly four decades ago watched Stewart’s portrayal of Picard and saw a role model for how the most powerful people in society should behave. Those lessons are just as relevant today as they were then.
The institutionalist liberalism of Jean-Luc Picard
The decision to cast Stewart, one of the preeminent Shakespearean actors of his generation, as the Enterprise’s captain was an inspired choice. Though the show often burdened its actors with heavy-handed dialogue, Stewart delivered his lines with the same aplomb and gravitas he would bring if he were playing Macbeth.
Consider, for example, Stewart’s performance in The Measure of a Man, an early episode focused on the legal status of Lieutenant Commander Data, an android who serves as one of the Enterprise’s senior officers. In it, Data is ordered to report to an expert on artificial life forms who wishes to dismantle and study him in order to learn how to construct more, similar androids, and Picard is tasked with defending Data’s right to refuse this order before a judge that he personally loathes.
The turning point in the episode comes when Picard realizes that he is arguing, not just to save one android’s life, but to prevent the creation of an entire class of people with no more rights than a toaster. “A single Data,” Picard says in the trial that will determine the android officer’s future, “is a curiosity, a wonder even. But thousands of Datas, isn’t that becoming a race?”
“Are you prepared to condemn him and all who come after him to servitude and slavery?” Picard asks the judge in his closing argument.
When this episode first aired in 1989, democracy was ascendant. The Berlin Wall would stand for only a few more months. And the United States had emerged from the 1960s and even escaped the Reagan administration with its commitment to civil rights intact. Just a few years earlier, American liberals outmaneuvered opponents of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the law that probably did more than any other to dismantle Jim Crow — and persuaded President Ronald Reagan to sign legislation expanding its scope.
And so the conclusion of The Measure of a Man mirrors this optimistic reality. At the end of Picard’s courtroom defense of his android officer, the judge concludes that Data has the “freedom to choose” not to be dismantled and studied. In the liberal universe imagined by The Next Generation’s writers, institutions are trustworthy and responsive to reasoned argument.
Indeed, for a show about naval officers tasked with securing a hegemonic power, Star Trek spends a surprising amount of time on courtroom drama. In another episode, The Drumhead, Picard battles an admiral who is pulled out of retirement to investigate allegations of sabotage aboard the Enterprise — and who eventually leads a witch hunt into a largely innocent crewman whose only crime is hiding his Romulan ancestry (the Romulans, like the Original Series’s Klingons, are a longtime enemy of the Federation).
Like the trial of Commander Data, The Drumhead is best known for Picard’s speech in favor of universal rights. “When the first link of the chain is forged,” Picard tells the admiral, “the first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, it chains us all irrevocably.”
And, in keeping with Star Trek’s belief that institutions can be forces of good, the episode ends with Starfleet’s head of security storming out of the admiral’s inquisition and putting an end to it.
There have been several attempts to revive Star Trek during the Trump era, and they’ve often fallen flat in an age when US institutions can no longer be trusted to defend universal rights and freedoms. Star Trek: Discovery, which launched during Trump’s first year in office and aired for five seasons, featured sinister captains with hidden agendas, and culminated in two seasons about a collapsed, distrusted Federation struggling to rebuild itself.
Indeed, when Stewart revisited his breakout role in Star Trek: Picard, an uneven series that opens with its titular character as a retired admiral, Picard is less a crusader for justice than a relic of a more enlightened age. In the series’s first episode, a reporter asks why he decided to resign from the Federation’s corps of warrior diplomats, and an angry Picard responds, “because it was no longer Starfleet!” He then denounces the Federation’s descent into prejudice against artificial life forms like Data, the very lives he fought to protect in The Measure of a Man.
Picard might as well have been speaking about the United States. In 2020, when this episode first aired, the institutionalist liberalism that defined The Next Generation was hard to defend. Donald Trump, a man who launched his campaign by labeling Mexican immigrants rapists, was president of the United States. He’d already transformed the US Supreme Court into a rubber stamp for his own biases. And the world was about to be plunged into a global pandemic that showcased the US government’s incompetence.
With its focus on artificial life forms as a potential new enemy, moreover, Star Trek: Picard anticipated the techno-pessimism that now defines an age of addictive social media platforms and artificial intelligence models that may take all of our jobs — or worse.
The Next Generation imagined a utopia, but it was a utopia built on military might, advanced technology, and institutions capable of eradicating hundreds of billions of lives. The heroes of Star Trek embrace hierarchy — most of the important characters literally wore their rank on their collars — and they held no illusions about what hegemons must sometimes do in order to maintain peace and prosperity.
In one of the franchise’s greatest episodes, In the Pale Moonlight, a Starfleet captain spends 45 minutes confessing to a murder he committed in order to trick the Romulans into joining a war against an enemy that threatens to eradicate the Federation.
And yet, Star Trek’s message has always been that power can be wielded justly, even by superpowers. And that people who do so, like Picard, are the only ones who can build utopia.
Star Trek is right
One of the hardest parts of living in Trump’s America is that the man never gives us time to grieve. Every day can bring a new executive order that thousands of people must mobilize to fight. Institutions, like the federal judiciary, that exist to uphold universal rights are rapidly being corrupted into tools of the regime. A pandemic is overshadowed by a crisis of democracy. Even Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election could only pause the parade of outrages. We are constantly being shuffled from one crisis to the next, without any time to pause and reflect on what we have lost.
And so, as we mourn Patrick Stewart, we must also grieve the optimism that his portrayal of Jean-Luc Picard embodied. What if the United Federation of Planets was always a fantasy, and Trump’s America is inevitable?
Yet, while the United States may never become the utopia imagined by The Next Generation, Star Trek is not wrong about the role benevolent institutions must play in building a just and prosperous society. In their magisterial book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, the Nobel Prize-winning economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that successful nations share two traits. One is “inclusive economic institutions” that “encourage participation by the great mass of people in economic activities that make best use of their talents.”
These nations, the two economists write, feature secure property rights, an unbiased legal system, and public services such as universal education that prepare citizens for economic success.
But it is not enough, according to Acemoglu and Robinson, for a nation to simply aspire to inclusion. It must also centralize power in a strong government that can enforce the rule of law and even, when necessary, use force to prevent the mighty from trampling on the weak. As the economists write, without a monopoly on the legitimate use of force “and the degree of centralization that it entails, the state cannot play its role as enforcer of law and order, let alone provide public services” that require taxation, or “regulate economic activity” by wealthy businesses.
Without a strong federal government, humanitarian US institutions like Medicare or Social Security cannot exist. America owes its prosperity to police forces that protect individuals from theft and assault, and to a military that, like Starfleet, secures us against external adversaries.
Star Trek’s core insight is that there will always be powerful institutions, just as there will always be militaries capable of exterminating human life. Anarcho-communist notions of a world without hierarchy or state-sponsored violence are nothing more than fantasies. There are only institutions, which can be led by good or evil individuals.
Which is why it is important for American children to grow up with fictional role models like Jean-Luc Picard — or perhaps like Atticus Finch, the model of white rectitude taught to so many American schoolchildren — who teach people who are destined to wield power to do so inclusively and justly.
In Trump’s America, such role models have become unfashionable for two reasons. The first, as I’ve already laid out, is that it is hard to tell a hero’s story about good men achieving justice by working within noble institutions when this story is so much at odds with how institutions function in the real world. A closely related reason is that, even before the rise of Trump, there were myriad examples of powerful, well-meaning individuals fostering death in the name of democracy. The Iraq War, and the broader neoconservative foreign policy project, was a failed effort to spread liberal democracy through warfare.
Given these failures of American institutions, it is easy to dismiss fictional heroes of liberalism — like Picard or Finch — as white saviors whose idealism cannot work in the real world, and to conclude that efforts to emulate them will only lead to an Iraq-style disaster. And it certainly is naive to think that evil can always be defeated by reason and good intentions. The world of To Kill a Mockingbird, where Finch ultimately fails to save an innocent man from conviction and death, often bears far more resemblance to the actual world than The Measure of a Man.
But even if just institutions are not inevitable, they are still the only way forward. As Acemoglu and Robinson show, the only thing that has ever built a sustainably prosperous and egalitarian society are strong governments that empower individuals to share their talents with their countries.
And so we should teach children to emulate characters like Jean-Luc Picard, because someday many of those children will wield unimaginable power — and because they can, by wielding that power justly, sustain the closest thing humanity has ever known to utopia.