Why we should take lessons from Star Trek on Donald Trump's new era

Last week, Star Trek: Voyager was trending. The 30th anniversary of the fourth live-action show is undoubtedly a painfully big birthday for those who grew up with it.

Airing on January 16, 1995, the series had seven seasons, concluding in 2001. According to Netflix, the 'Endgame' finale is Star Trek's most watched and rewatched episode. It remains one of the most rewatched and long-running franchises in the world.

The central appeal of Star Trek is its balanced mix of popular science fiction and an esoteric examination of the human condition. It is bestiary in space with Starfleet officers and aliens rather than animals. If there was a graph, the more limited the budget, the more loquacious and philosophical the script.

The cast of the science fiction television series, Star Trek: Voyager. Picture: CBS Photo Archive/Delivered by Online USA/Getty Images

Star Trek portrays a utopian future where humanity has overcome many of today's problems, including war, poverty, discrimination and inequality. This optimistic vision has, curiously enough, made it a poster child for the Left, who have hijacked it as justification that their way is the best way to overcome global challenges like climate change, social inequality, and political unrest.

Star Trek fan groups are full of legions of people pouring their hearts out at the direction of Western society and the world.

The aggrieved cynicism online surrounding the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 47th president was vitriolic. After his stratospheric November win, there was a discombobulation between the vision of the future Star Trek promised and present social, economic and political conditions.

This is the hard pill to swallow for the same fans who consider Star Trek and left-wing politics to be a hand-to-glove relationship. There is a coterie of so-called liberal progressives whose ideology and militant hostility to the Right is a mirror to behaviours they claim to detest.

British actor Sir Patrick Stewart, who plays Captain Jean-Luc Picard in the Star Trek franchise. Picture: Getty Images

The response to Trump's win, legitimate to painful degrees with taking the popular vote and the electoral college, is a case in point of how wokeism has failed to mature and tolerate ideas its advocates disagree with.

Those who profess Star Trek as the Bible to a better tomorrow find it increasingly challenging to reconcile two extremes of the political spectrum. The far Left's obsession with identity politics and political correctness are two things which do not feature in the 22nd century and beyond.

To some, the post-scarcity politics of Star Trek's future history represent socialism come true. Others call it communism victorious.

The utopian reality of the future shows us humanity is enjoying extreme libertarianism - by the 24th century of Captain Picard and crew, personal responsibility for thought and action are the highest virtues beyond all else.

Human tolerance is at the apex of accepting a universe full of sentient life with often fundamentally disagreeable ideas. All you can do is work to overcome humanity's hard-wired bigotry, prejudice, and aversion to the unknown.

Star Trek's creator Gene Roddenberry envisioned a future that enshrines the support of individual liberty and opposes unlawful authority, state power, warfare, militarism and nationalism.

This vision also placed a premium on hierarchical organisation, duty and honour. The politics of victimhood in the Star Trek universe are considered irrational and harmful.

Starfleet, the fictional exploratory arm in Star Trek, resembles the Royal Navy of the 18th and 19th centuries, mixing scientific, exploration and military functions. Scientific facts in Star Trek operate side by side with total respect for religious and cultural convictions.

Organisations and officers presented in Star Trek work to preserve and expand individual autonomy and political self-determination. Their prime directives emphasise the principles of equality before the law and the protection of civil rights, including freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of choice.

More than anything, the fear of the unknown and the alien is rejected in favour of curiosity and openness. Tolerance in the face of increasingly anathema ideas, notions, and values is the cornerstone of the whole franchise.

Today's proselytising and zero-sum attitude to politicians or policies that some find contentious is not the future presented in a show some profess to love. Every week and every episode is a variation on overcoming differences.

If nothing else, the message of individual responsibility to the truth, not a truth, resonates now when the validity of 'fact', the trustworthiness of legacy media, and the mistrust of political power have debased political discourse in the so-called post-truth culture wars.

Both extremes of the political spectrum perpetuate the same attacks on reality because they are inconvenient. We have Orwellian newspeak propaganda as censorship in all but name: even if no one doctors historical records in Soviet-esque revisionism, the sectional effort to control ideologically approved versions of science and history is out of control.

Star Trek is lauded as a version of the future. It's a naive, childish notion. But it is also a work in progress, not an end in and of itself.

The older series, from the titular first series through to Star Trek: Enterprise – which ended 20 years ago – shows rational human beings, aware of their foibles, striving toward a better reality through dialogue, cooperation and a spiritual commitment to universal truth, whether it be personal or scientific.

The lesson of this long-lauded show is not that it stands the test of time as a justification to hate everything disagreeable today. The ubiquitous ethos of the different Captains, from Kirk to Janeway to Sisko and Archer, is they work to achieve lasting resolutions to problems by engaging and not condemning their opponents.

When put like this, you see how much some who profess to worship this enduring show do not extend its basic courtesies to their contemporaries who fall on the other side of political debates. The question is whether they can rise to the occasion on the cusp of four more years of President Trump.