Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power
· Vox
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.
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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.