In essence, "conservativism."
Ah. Okay, I see what you were driving at.
Notwithstanding my wide-ranging and deep-seated lack of respect for modern political conservatism and the things it says and does, I wouldn't describe it
quite as derisively as you did. It does have some at least superficially coherent tenets that go beyond destroying things and killing people.
You have probably worked for such a person at least once in your life; they tend to be problem-oriented individuals who are far more concerned with assigning blame for blame's sake than coming up with a solution to whatever the actual problem is.
Thankfully, not really. I've worked under problematic personalities once or twice — in particular, people with seriously flawed notions of how to communicate. But never under anyone actively destructive, nor (thankfully) anyone who was politically conservative.
That's just it, right-wing conservatives have always managed to coexist with their more constructive neighbors for long periods of time even if the two of them are completely at cross purposes for their overall goals.
You do have a point here. In particular, right-wingers find safe harbor in the fact that liberal-minded people tend to value things like tolerance, diversity, and respect for free expression and dissent. Right-wingers don't necessarily value these things
themselves, but they can easily take advantage of those who do.
The scary thing is that rightists have a tendency to co-opt the more constructive efforts of the general population in order to gain power for themselves. Nazi Germany is a really good example of this; even the more forward-thinking constructive Germans who weren't themselves totally keen on Nazi ideology still TOLERATED it as long as the pogroms and oppression were directed at a convenient scapegoat. The same thing happened in France during the revolution, where the thought of preserving the political and bureaucratic knowledge of the monarchs and their servants was suddenly less important than the lower classes satisfying their need for revenge and, again, the imperative to eliminate the people they saw as causing the trouble in the first place.
More recently, the United States made a similarly colossal blunder in the invasion of Iraq, sweeping the entire Ba'ath party completely out of power ... And here again, the general population of the United States and even those in its military who should have known better went along with it because, really, it wasn't their problem.
Total agreement that it was a colossal blunder, of course. Not quite sure what analogy you see with anything in Star Trek, though.
Section 31 exists in that blind spot in human psychology where someone can do terribly destructive things for a long period of time and nobody does anything about it as long they're doing it to someone else. ...
But that's one of the areas where the Federation and Starfleet are explicitly supposed to have improved upon modern-day political dynamics. They
do value the lives, rights, and dignities of The Other. They operationalize diversity and equality far more effectively than we do today. They even have a Prime Directive that's all about protecting the interests of people who are explicitly not part of their society nor able to be, just to avoid exploiting, dominating, or otherwise running roughshod over them.
A society like that leaves far fewer niches for ideologies like Section 31's (as you describe it) to hide and thrive. To use S31 as a story element, then, in a way that shows it as pervasive, powerful, and effective (as STID unfortunately did), rather than marginal and isolated (as DS9 mostly did), is implicitly to say that the Federation is a social experiment that has
failed. That might not be the intent, but the message would be there.
(Indeed, that's a large part of what bothered me about DSC's finale, even without any S31 involvement. The notion that Sarek, Cornwell, and other high-ranking officials would ever countenance the plan they put in place, as I mentioned,
severely undermines the concept of what the Federation and Starfleet are supposed to stand for, no matter what actually happened in the end and what high-minded speeches Burnham gave. The showrunners seem to think the finale represented a vindication of the Federation's high ideals... but it did that only at the most superficial level. And that's why I don't trust them to handle S31 with any degree of nuance or sophistication.)
The fact that Abraham Lincoln personally approved the use of Total War (and Sherman's March, for that matter) doesn't sit well with a lot of people, nor does Eisenhower ordering the use of the atomic bomb. Speaking of otherwise good people who might have needed a reminder...
Lincoln certainly made moral compromises at times, but in his case we're at least judging the decisions of people in the distant past rather than in an idealized future. And it was Truman who made the decision to use the atomic bomb on Japan. (Eisenhower, to his credit, rejected MacArthur's desire to use it in the Korean War.) And yes, that damn well does not sit well with me; AFAIC that was unnecessary and unconscionable. It severely compromised the moral standing of the United States in the postwar years... as did the pervasive national security state Truman also helped put in place.
Well, yeah, the bomb plot was a complete asspull and they totally fumbled the execution of it. They SHOULD have just detonated it anyway (though with the effects being less than predicted) and had Starfleet try to wrestle with the moral consequences of it in the following seasons while the Klingons struggled to contain the scope of the disaster (and Burnham grappling with the fact that Starfleet is now giving her a medal and a pardon for doing the wrong thing, wiping out the prison sentence she got for trying to do the right thing). They might still go that route, but I kind of doubt it.
Hmm. Still not the wrap-up I'd have wanted to see (I'd have preferred if they kept Lorca around at least through season's end, and made him the locus of any moral conflict over how to end the war), but it would have been more interesting than what they actually did, and certainly more thought-provoking.
