This isn’t a column about Star Trek, but the times are, shall we say, science-fictional in their weirdness—which isn’t necessarily bad.
For instance, tempting as it might be to dismiss Robert Kennedy as a kook who, like many conspiracy theorists, fears the impact of geoengineering and chemtrails on the planet and, unlike most professional environmentalists, has been criticized for faking the circumstances of a bear cub’s death, sawing the head off a whale, and at one time having a worm in his brain, I think the emerging eclecticism of Trump’s second administration—likely to include Kennedy and have roles of some sort for Tulsi Gabbard and Elon Musk as well—is a good thing.
The discordant, postmodern jumble of views likely to make up a second Trump administration—J.D. Vance, for example, being an unnatural hybrid of paleoconservative and neoconservative all by himself—may offer more chances for freedom and experimentation than would the continuity and conformity of, as it were, four more bland-yet-unsustainable years of Harris. The big-spending, eagerly regulating “uni-party” of which most Democrats such as Harris—but also most Republicans—are a part ideally shouldn’t be allowed to wield power in any form, but a form that’s like a crazy, multi-headed hydra out of an old Ray Harryhausen movie might do the world the favor of spending much of its time fighting itself or even flailing in a beneficial direction once in a while.
It’s misleading to call a second Trump term a “unity” government, as Kennedy has. More like a “disunity” government, simply because it will likely include populist/autocrat Trump, self-proclaimed “classic liberal” would-be eco/health czar Kennedy, and various other oddities—possibly even libertarians such as Larry Sharpe, the recent New York Libertarian Party gubernatorial candidate turned head of the main Kennedy PAC, or nationalist-libertarian Trump-booster Vivek Ramaswamy, which may be some small consolation if Libertarian presidential candidate Chase Oliver doesn’t pull off a surprise win in November. Heck, even independent presidential candidate Cornel West exchanged friendly tweets with Kennedy recently.
But the beauty in all this lies more in the potential for strange ferment than in some homogenizing kumbaya effect. The Democrats do kumbaya. That allows us to slip sleepily into $34 trillion in federal debt, an endless avalanche of regulation, casual half-assed wars, and ever-increasing surveillance. It’s the disunity rather than unity of a second Trump term that might yet be beneficial. Every loose cannon vs. the stifling establishment.
Kennedy himself (who has coined the slogan MAHA, standing for “Make America Healthy Again,” echoing Trump’s MAGA and perhaps portending Kennedy’s elevation to Sec. of Health and Human Services) likens his new alliance with Trump since dropping out of the presidential race to the cordial working relationship in the 1960s between his uncle JFK and conservative/libertarian Barry Goldwater. Had JFK lived to run against Goldwater in 1964, Goldwater would likely have found himself in a more reasonable debate than he did butting heads with Lyndon Johnson, whose underling Bill Moyers, the political propagandist later turned pseudo-journalist, caricatured Goldwater as a lunatic eager to use nukes even as a hypocritical Johnson expanded the Vietnam War.
Bitter neoconservative-turned-Democrat William Kristol—himself now a living embodiment, like Johnson, of the combined craving for perpetual warfare and an expensive welfare state—likens the Kennedy-Trump alliance not to the Kennedy-Goldwater friendship but to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Stalinists and Nazis. He may be projecting. But perhaps Kristol would contend that he is “projecting American strength.”
Given that the right and left, like the mythical twins Romulus and Remus (evoked in the latest Alien movie, now in cinemas), are both dangerous, potentially empire-spawning warriors more fit to be raised by wolves than nurtured by humans, we probably ought to be grateful for almost any surprise triplet, rival species, black sheep, renegade shepherd, or obsessive border collie who appears to disrupt suckling as usual. Needless to say, the twin political ideologies that usually drain us aren’t sucking their sustenance from some wild canine, either.
This coming weekend, if sci-fi were truly prophecy, would see the start of the September 2024 political disruption called the Bell Riots in the fictional history of the Star Trek franchise. The franchise hinted in fairly conventional 1990s liberal fashion that the riots were an inevitable strike by the oppressed, walled-off have-nots against the callous but glamorous haves. If the emergence of populist coalitions that defy the old right/left model of politics helps people to look beyond the Marxist class-struggle explanation for why some people keep being shut out of power, that’s likely good. Corporations may not have your best interests at heart, but it’s time to stop pretending the politicians, activists, rioters, revolutionaries, or regulators are helping matters.
In the Star Trek universe, the Bell Riots were suppressed by the National Guard, and by an odd coincidence Trump has just announced that he thinks the U.S. Space Force he created should be supplemented by a Space National Guard. The Bell Riots inspired the creation of Starfleet in the Trek story, which was meant to be something of a happy ending. In the real world, we may find that the authoritarians and liberators keep being presented to us all bundled up together and that the best we can hope is to keep finding strange new opportunities for choosing among them.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey