Watcher

I can empathise with this take but it seems to me a very 1990s reading. Picard wouldn't really fit the progressive mould today. Let's remember that he grew up on a family vineyard that had been in the Picard line for generations, run the old way by a family who saw replicators and other modern conveniences as a threat to something worth keeping. That same man later returned to the estate after leaving Starfleet. The tastes he carried with him - Shakespeare, archaeology, a clear preference for the deep past - don't sit easily with a politics that treats tradition as something to get past. His great leadership happened inside Starfleet's rank structure and chain of command. More importantly, it took place in a post-socialist society that had already solved material scarcity; a post-scarcity future that owed its abundance to earlier capitalist innovation, scientific discovery, and risk-taking. What remained was the work of self-improvement. That combination looks less like progressive politics and more like an older idea of ordered life sustained by inheritance, hierarchy, and the cultivation of character. Even the milder progressive of the 1990s would have trouble claiming Picard now. A contemporary progressive would read his authority as white male privilege exercised inside a hierarchical military that expands under the name of exploration. Today's self-righteous Jacobins would treat the Federation itself as a form of soft imperialism that absorbs other cultures while calling the process enlightenment. The family vineyard would be inherited wealth and settler privilege; Shakespeare and archaeology would be the Western canon and colonial grave-robbing. The defence of Lt. Data as a new sentient life form would be dismissed as individualist rights talk that ignores structural power. Add the absence of identity-based solidarity, the human-centred Prime Directive that still ranks other species, and the quiet Eurocentrism of a French captain quoting dead white men on the bridge, and Picard would not be celebrated. He would be cancelled. This is why both old-school liberals and conservatives could still enjoy 1990s Star Trek. They disagreed about secularism and rationalist visions of society, yet they shared enough ground on duty, hierarchy, inheritance, and the cultivation of character to recognise something of themselves in Picard. The newer Jacobin progressives share almost none of that ground. The distance between the liberalism of that era and the progressivism of this one is, in the end, as wide as a galaxy.