The Prime Directive
Star Trek, the manifesto of dead-centrist liberalism. Which could also be called compassionate fascism. The credo of which is: “Yes, But.”
It is a dour joke in the campy original Trek: The prime directive is a rule which exists only to be violated. The answer to its assertion is Yes, But. The answer to every assertion of its kind is the same. Star Trek’s demurely braggadocios liberalism acknowledges the irony at its heart through the invention of the prime directive. Liberalism’s doctrine is that doctrine exists only to be wrong; plans exists only to be impractical; method exists only to be violated in response to any task to which it might be conceivably applied.
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Wagon Train To The Stars was Gene Rodenberry’s famous pitch. That is: a fantasy of space exploration modelled on a narrative of frontier settlement that was in the deepest possible denial about the criminality, acquisitiveness and murderousness of the history it was producing into fiction. Manifest Destiny proposed property without proprietors for the proprietors without property, but the romantic fictions of the conquest of that land not only acknowledged the people in it already, but built their whole panache around them, as part of the scenery.
Read it all. (Don’t go on to read what she has to say about Buffy.)