This isn’t a column about Star Trek, but the times are, shall we say, science fiction-like in their craziness—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
For example, as tempting as it may be to dismiss Robert Kennedy as a crackpot who, like many conspiracy theorists, fears the effects of geoengineering and chemtrails on the planet, and who, unlike most professional environmentalists, has been criticized for faking the circumstances of a bear cub’s death, sawing off a whale’s head, and temporarily having a worm in his brain, I still think the emerging eclecticism in Trump’s second administration – which will likely include Kennedy, and in which Tulsi Gabbard and Elon Musk will also play some role – is a good thing.
The discordant, postmodern jumble of views that is likely to make up a second Trump administration—J.D. Vance, for example, who is all on his own an unnatural blend of paleoconservatism and neoconservatism—may offer more opportunities for freedom and experimentation than the continuity and conformity of four more bland but unsustainable years of Harris. The profligate, regulation-happy “uni-party” to which most Democrats like Harris—but also most Republicans—belong should ideally not be allowed to exercise power in any form, but a form that is like a mad, many-headed hydra from an old Ray Harryhausen movie might do the world the favor of spending much of its time fighting itself, or even occasionally steering in a beneficial direction.
It is misleading to call a second Trump term a “unity government,” as Kennedy did. More likely a “disunity government,” simply because it will likely include the populist/autocrat Trump, the self-proclaimed “classical liberal,” the eco- and health-care czar Kennedy aspires to be, and various other oddballs—possibly even libertarians like Larry Sharpe, the recent New York Libertarian Party gubernatorial candidate and now chairman of the main Kennedy PAC, or nationalist-libertarian Trump supporter Vivek Ramaswamy, which might be cold comfort if libertarian presidential candidate Chase Oliver fails to pull off a surprise victory in November. Heck, even independent presidential candidate Cornel West recently exchanged friendly tweets with Kennedy.
But the beauty of all this is the possibility of strange ferments rather than a unifying kumbaya effect. The Democrats are doing kumbaya. That allows us to slide sleepily into $34 trillion in national debt, an endless avalanche of regulations, casual, half-hearted wars, and ever-increasing surveillance. It is the disunity rather than the unity of a second Trump term that might yet prove useful. Any unpredictable opponent against the suffocating establishment.
Kennedy himself (who coined the slogan MAHA, which stands for “Make America Healthy Again,” reminiscent of Trump’s MAGA and perhaps foreshadowing Kennedy’s rise to Secretary of Health) has compared his new alliance with Trump since dropping out of the presidential race to the cordial cooperation between his uncle JFK and the conservative/libertarian Barry Goldwater in the 1960s. Had JFK lived to run against Goldwater in 1964, Goldwater would probably have found himself in a more reasonable debate than his confrontation with Lyndon Johnson, whose subordinate Bill Moyers, the later political propagandist and pseudo-journalist, caricatured Goldwater as a madman ready to use nuclear weapons while the hypocritical Johnson expanded the Vietnam War.
The embittered neoconservative-turned-Democrat William Kristol—who, like Johnson, is now himself the living embodiment of the combined lust for perpetual war and an expensive welfare state—compares the Kennedy-Trump alliance not to the friendship between Kennedy and Goldwater, but to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Stalinists and Nazis. Perhaps he is only projecting that. But perhaps Kristol would say he is projecting “American strength.”
Given that both the Right and the Left, like the mythical twins Romulus and Remus (invoked in the latest Alien movie, in theaters now), are dangerous warriors with the potential to spawn an empire, and who are more suited to being raised by wolves than tended by humans, we should probably be grateful for almost any surprise triplet, rival species, black sheep, renegade sheepdog, or possessed border collie that seems to disrupt suckling as usual. It goes without saying that the two political ideologies that normally drain us don’t suckle their sustenance from any wild dog, either.
If science fiction really were a prophecy, this coming weekend would mark the beginning of the September 2024 political unrest referred to in the fictional history of the Star Trek franchise as the Bell Riots. The franchise suggested, in fairly conventional 1990s liberal fashion, that the unrest was an inevitable strike by the downtrodden, insular have-nots against the callous but glamorous haves. If the emergence of populist coalitions that oppose the old right/left model of politics helps people look beyond the Marxist class-struggle explanation for why some people keep getting shut out of power, that’s probably a good thing. Corporations may not have your best interests at heart, but it’s time to stop pretending that politicians, activists, rioters, revolutionaries, or regulators are making things better.
In the Star Trek universe, the Bell Riots were put down by the National Guard, and by a strange coincidence, Trump has just announced that he thinks the US Space Force he created should be complemented 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 be presented with authoritarians and liberators in the same pot over and over again, and we can only hope to keep finding new, strange ways to choose between them.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X by @ToddSeavey
