I agree with this point. I do not like pigeon-holing a person on anything, politics included. I may not agree with everything in conservative philosophy or liberal philosophy. I make up my own mind, though "conservative" seems to fit, most of the time. Same thing with Trek. Trek portrays a lot of different points of view, some pro and some con. The beauty of Speculative Fiction (SF) is the ability to regard those points of view and make up your own mind. Just because the Trek main characters are for something, does not automatically mean I have to support that.
marlboro, you do not know me from Kahless, but please let me advise you: Do not hate Politics, because it does not hate you, and hate, to paraphrase Yoda, leads to suffering, and comes from Anger, which comes from Fear, which is the path to the Dark Side. Having said that, get at smart a brain as you can about your local, regional, Federal, what have you, Politics, because it will run you right over if you do not see it coming!
That really is an analysis that doesn't have any point of correspondence with what actually happened in either case. Completely unobservant, but fascinatingly so.
I don't "hate politics." What I do hate (and when I say"hate," I mean that I'd rather have my genitals caught in a malfunctioning garbage disposal) is people arguing politics. It is the worst online in forums like this, and it never results in anything. It's not like some chucklehead I don't even know is going to change my point of view, so everyone in those discussions should just move on and stop wasting bandwidth.
Among my acquaintances, those on the Left generally think I am hopelessly conservative, and those on the Right generally think I'm a damned hippie liberal. So I figure I must be doing something right. Anyway, I don't think it's quite "fair" to compare Star Trek politics to today's politics, mainly because it seems clear that Star Trek is set in a world where everybody has enough of everything they want, while we live in a world politically colored by the fact that this is - at least currently - impossible for a host of reasons. And because of that world, individuals and governments have freedoms and abilities we can only imagine having in ours. When everyone can afford to be generous because resources are practically infinite, it works out a lot differently than when you have to budget your charitable giving so you can be sure to have enough to eat.
I LOVE arguing politics. Or rather, I enjoy small-scale debates about politics, because it gives me an opportunity to exercise critical thinking, and collect new data. Sure, I think in all the years I've engaged in it, I've changed my mind on an issue exactly ONCE, but hey, that IS once. Means I learned something, or at least expanded my capacity to see beyond my own point-of-view, a transcendent "All Good Things" kind of experience. (That might be a slight exaggeration.) But it's so hard both avoiding assholes when arguing politics, and restraining from slipping into assholery when one's emotions are triggered, that I mostly refrain from it now unless I'm among close friends where we know each other enough to safely snipe a bit, and at what point we have to back off.
I never thought 1960's Roddenberry was quite as liberal as people want to believe. They seem to think 1980's Roddenberry is an all encompassing view of him.
I think he was as liberal as the contemporary TV censors of his time would allow him to be. 60's or 80's.
In the 80's, that obviously isn't the case as he had no real TV censors to deal with and other shows were tackling relevant social issues. I think that is what makes TNG such a disappointment overall. Roddenberry supposedly had this avenue to bring his "vision" to the screen and it ended up being far more tepid than the original Star Trek.
As with most any show, creators are subject to having their vision 'fixed' by network suits who want to tweak things...
Except TNG was sold into syndication on a station-by-station basis. There were no 'network suits' in the traditional sense. No network suit quashed "Blood and Fire", Roddenberry did.
I know this will surely rankle the Roddenberry zealots, but Roddenberry is not the lone creator of Trek. Of course it was his idea and of course, he would be the nucleus around which everything was initially built, but that doesn't mean that he didn't have bad ideas. Left to his own devices, Spock would have had a tail. Sometimes those suits had good ideas. -But not often... But I digress. I do not know the backstory of TNG so I defer to your knowledge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_Fire_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) This is the Star Trek (and Roddenberry) that some go on an on about. The one with a desire to make the world a better place. But when Roddenberry had the opportunity, he quashed it. Instead we got the planet of black people, the planet of scantily clad white folks, the planet of the women and the episode of Irish stereotypes. Which were all entertaining to one degree or another but not exactly calling cards of a progressive series.