12.1.2 The Oxbridge Academical Companion To Starfleet Academy, Chapter 2 (Politics)

Ric Crossman
7 minutes ago
24 min read

Beta Test

President Sadal, stood behind a tree out of focus. — Figure 4: President of Betazed Emerin Sadal, during a diplomatic mission to Earth (SFA, "Beta Test")

2. Politics

In this chapter, we will build upon our comments in the introduction regarding the general political tenor of Starfleet Academy, as initially explored by "Kids These Days". We note first that the show's political commentary is focussed not on deconstructing our present, but in constructing our future. More specifically, a foundational theme to the show is that said future must be built by the young, if it to truly even be the future, rather than evermore faded copies of an already flawed past.

As discussed in Chapter 1, this theme is a fitting one for both a show about students and in higher education, and for a show bearing the name "Star Trek". In fact, as again we have discussed, it is arguably a more accurate reflection of progressive politics in the 1960s US than the Trek show actually made in the 1960s US was able to offer.

Comparing TOS and SFA in terms of their political underpinnings helps reveal not just where they align, but where they differ. For all that every episode reminds us this intended as a story about the frontier, the original show rarely concerned itself with a central truth of the US Western frontier, as represented by the cowboy shows Roddenberry (at least in part) took inspiration from. The Federation frontier almost never expanded. There are, as noted, exceptions to this - the Gorn attacking a newly-constructed outpost in uncharted space in "Arena", and arguably the attempts to secure a friendly spaceport in "A Taste Of Armageddon". For the most part, though, the UFP's borders appear essentially static, with related stories almost always focussing on societies on the other side of the line, and the mischief they plot to expand their borders at the Federation's expense.

The point might be widened, by noting that the Federation of Kirk's era seems more or less static in general. For all the technological and social development between our time and theirs, within the three years we spend with Kirk's crew on the small screen, there's essentially no sense of progress. To some extent, this can be considered pragmatism; the nature of television at the time strongly discouraged imposing a narrative order to episodes. This explanation though does not take into account the ways in which TOS is not just unchanging, but opposed to change. Whenever change is suggested or referenced, whether directly1 or through metaphor2, the show argues that society should stay just as it is.

Starfleet Academy takes a rather different approach. The Federation of its time has been torn to pieces, and forced to ride out a comparative technological dark age for over a century, finally emerging just a handful of years earlier. Accordingly, there is a sense of both outward and upward motion to the show. On the one hand, this too seems entirely in keeping with a focus on youthful exuberance and the next generation being the shapers of the future. Our children are supposed to have it better than we did, and they are supposed to ensure they can pay it forward.

On the other hand, there are questions to be considered about the wisdom of creating a show about a coterie of people with American (or for that matter British) accents arguing why the future can only be secured through what is ultimately territorial expansion. We need also take into account what it means for a show ostensibly about the next generation shaping future to be so focussed on the need to rebuild a society that generation has no knowledge of, or even views with hostility. Put another way; is stasis necessarily the wrong model for the years to come.

In this chapter, we shall consider those questions in depth, with a particular focus upon the episode in which they are both initially explored: "Beta Test".

2.1 Rebuilding The Federation

What does it mean to want to rebuild?

You may find this a difficult question to answer, if asked. A first step here is to collapse the ambiguity in the verb "rebuild". Are we talking about taking what once existed, and recreating it? Or the creation of something wholly new, in a place where what once stood there no longer does? For purposes of disambiguation, we shall refer to the former as "restoration", and the latter as "renewal".

These two approaches to rebuilding frequently have different political connotations. To restore means to look to the past; to renew is to focus on the future. The latter is where the term "progressivism" originates from3. While self-identified progressives will recognise there have been any number of cases in which they have argued for a return to some status quo ante, this is not inconsistent with the desire to move forward. If one takes the wrong turn, one must often double back before the journey onward can continue. Restoration, in contrast, does not quite line up with "conservatism" in terms of etymology, but many would argue is certainly consistent with how conservatism is manifested in practice. After all, what is gone forever is definitionally impossible to conserve, and yet conservatives will often demand it be reconstructed, often irrespective of what may need tearing down in the process4.

In its most extreme expression, the insistence that we must wholly reconstruct what once was becomes the fascistic myth of the Golden Age5. which is centred on a wholly imagined past stolen from humanity by a purposefully ill-defined enemy. This is, indeed, a key feature of the current fascist American executive, who recently argued (albeit implicitly) that deviations from the white-supremacist slave-owning society within which the US Constitution was written is the only acceptable form American society can take, and all attempts to move away from that, even via constitutional amendment, are automatically invalid6. An immediate corollary is that their imagined Golden Age took place at a time when people could be owned as property, and only white men were permitted the vote, with the enemies that betrayed that age accordingly being anyone who believed in equal rights for women and Black people.

Given all this, the decision for the first Trek show to debut under a coherently fascist US government to focus on rebuilding a society from over a century previous is one that requires careful consideration. A concern that might be raised here is whether restoring the ideals of the Federation exists in fundamental conflict with restoring the reach of the Federation.

One important point to bear in mind is the unusual nature of the "Golden Age" so many characters in Starfleet Academy hold dear. It is, perhaps, the only such lost paradise in fiction one can have extensive direct knowledge of (via TNG, DS9, and, to some extent, Voyager) but which, precisely because of its fictional nature, we have no actual direct experience of. There are plenty of after-the-fall science-fiction stories which offer glimpses of where people have fallen from - Asimov's Foundation stories are one such example, as is Roddenberry's own Andromeda. None though offer us more than the merest fraction of the understanding of what once was than does Star Trek. The only exception is fiction which sets its apocalypse in the present day7, for which we very certainly do have experience of the quiet past. Such stories are distinct from what we see in Starfleet Academy, however, not just because our lives are real and fiction isn't, but because stories of this type almost never centre around attempts to wholly recreate 20th/21st century society. Indeed, those who believe this is desirable or even possible are generally framed as foolish at best, and villainous at worst - that villainy often expressing itself through which aspects of the past they choose to prioritise. It is therefore vanishingly rare to know precisely what it would mean for characters like Ake and Vance to find a way to push forward by going back, and to find their intent laudable.

This is not the whole of the matter, though. It is not difficult to argue that Voyager was a show about the need to regain the Federation, with the only difference being it was space that separated our heroes from where they wanted to be, rather than time. This framing led to Voyager becoming a conservative show from its very first episode8. As we discussed in Section 1, early Discovery and, to an even greater extent, Strange New Worlds took this a stage further, with it not being its characters who wished to return to their glory days, but the franchise as a whole.

There are several ways to argue Starfleet Academy avoids similar issues.. The first of these, perhaps fittingly, predates the show itself, with Discovery's decision to place the Burn almost seven hundred years after the end of Voyager. Most likely, this was done to allow future shows (including Picard) space to explore the post-TNG era without forcing a fixed end-date on it all, but it also means the Starfleet/Federation that Ake remembers and Vance wants to rebuild is not precisely the one older fans remember. Viewers of the author's vintage are primed to be sympathetic to their goals, but are also aware the past the show's heroes seek to recapture is a distinct one from the one we remember.

As a result, the show finds itself in a strong position - we know enough about the Federation to recognise a desire to renew it isn't an expression of conservative anemoia9, but we also know the goal isn't to try returning to exactly what we've seen before.

2.2 Courting The Betazoids

While Discovery helped to set up the board, though, it was still up to Starfleet Academy to play a good game. The opening moves take place in "Beta Test", and in particular, with respect to the academy hosting diplomatic talks around the possibility of Betazed and the systems within its sphere of influence rejoining the Federation.

The choice of the Betazoids as the species being invited to rejoin is worthy of analysis. As noted in Section 2.1, the Burn occurred well over six hundred years after the ending point of every other Trek series. Between that fact, and the implications throughout the first season of Starfleet Academy that space travel between all four galactic quadrants is now possible10, there was essentially no restrictions upon what race could be being courted, beyond the small handful already known to be Federation members in the 32nd century. For the same reason, it would have been perfectly possible for the conference to be about an entirely new species; some powerhouse of the Federation in later years that had yet to be encountered by the Starfleet of Picard's era.

It is true that this wide field is narrowed when we consider Tamira Sadal. Advantages of centering this episode on the Betazoids include it giving her first meeting with Caleb Mir the space it needs, and allowing her to join the War College, rather than start out as a cadet. Both of these would have been difficult objectives in the already crowded premiere. This though merely pushes the question on one step - why have Tamira be a Betazoid, rather than any other empathic/telepathic species? All this would have cost was the occasional reference to naked weddings (it would also mean the absence of black irises among the delegation wouldn't seem odd).

A plausible conclusion from all this is that Betazed has been chosen deliberately, as a reference to the franchise's history. And yet, the planet's own diagetic history, and that of its people, isn't touched upon. It's culture features, yes; the naked wedding jokes have already been mentioned, and we can add to those the similarities between Tarima's titles and those of Lwaxana Troi. But the most prominent historical event we're aware of for Betazed isn't so much as mentioned: its occupation some six months into the Dominion War.

This might be viewed as a strange omission. Given President Sadal's isolationist tendencies, why not reference the terrible price Betazed once paid for membership in the Federation? Given the degree to which he is clearly looking for excuses to refuse to rejoin, why not make an issue of the presence of a (half) Jem'Hadar - the race who so brutally dominated his planet for months, or even years, - at the conference soiree.

A Watsonian reason for this is easily constructed. The conference is as far removed from the invasion as we are (at time of writing) from 1305, the year Scottish folk hero William Wallace was captured and executed, in the most humiliating and painful manner possible, by the English11. This is clearly not an event fully obscured by the fog of history12, but one does not expect the leader of the Scottish National Party to refuse to attend a drinks reception if there will be an Englishman present, or to base any case for Scottish independence upon the excesses of Edward I.

How Betazoids process the crimes of the distant past is an open question, however. Every generation must not only learn of the horrors the last generation experienced, but feel it. There's also the fact that we can safely assume extensive video/holographic documentation exists of what six-to-eighteen months of Dominion occupation must have meant for the planet's population. We simply have no understanding in 2026 what it could mean for 700-year old war crimes to be wholly and easily viewed.

While a Watsonian justification therefore exists for not referencing the occupation, such considerations do not preclude such a reference either. Accordingly, the decision to not mentioning the war is perhaps better considered through a Doylist lens. We can argue the history of Betazed isn't raised because litigating the franchise's past is antithetical to what Starfleet Academy intends for itself. References to what has gone before are only to be used when they serve a greater purpose than proving the writers know their Arcturians from their El-Aurians. All that was needed here was to reassure older viewers that these are the same Betazoids we have always known (contact lens notwithstanding), and to lead the audience toward favouring them rejoining the Federation, and oppose Sadal's seemingly reflexive hostility to the idea.

This shaping of the audience's sympathies is helped by Sadal's commitment to isolationism. Considering how this political stance's presentation in "Beta Test" suggests about the politics of Starfleet Academy will require a definition of the term. There are multiple concepts of isolationism that we might reach for13,14,15, The central core upon which all agree is that isolationist governments will seek to mimimise their nation's international interactions, both diplomatic and (especially) military. Here, we will follow the arguments of Artiukhov16 in suggesting this approach be better named non-interventionism, with isolationism involving not just a desire to avoid influence outside the country's borders, but also resistance to extra-national influence of any kind within the nation itself, including via trade, immigration, and culture. This philosophy leads to, and is led in turn by, a veneration of the cultural and economic practices of the nation, with any outside influences not prevented being framed as dilution at best, and infection at worst.

It is this more narrow and stronger definition of "isolationism" that we shall make use of. Our justification for this choice is the degree to which is matches how the term is meant when discussing American politics. Starfleet Academy is an American show, and its uses and presentations of political terms should be explored in that context. The isolationism Sadal represents is, first and foremost, American isolationism, which is to say, a political movement within an extremely multicultural society which attempts to preserve and idealise a mono-culture, Even the language here is deliberate - the barrier erected by the Betazoids is referred to a wall, designed to keep people out. The obvious American parallel to this would be the once-promised wall across the US southern border, to prevent border crossings from Mexico.

We note here that we are not equating isolationism with fascism. It is true that the former provides fertile soil for the latter, particularly through its obsession with a mono-culture. It has been further been observed that many so-called isolationists reverse this stance once their preferred political party takes power17, suddenly finding the militarism, including international militarism, of fascism perfectly to their tastes once they feel it is being exercised on their behalf. We can point as evidence for this contention to the fact Trump ran as an anti-war President, only to launch an unprovoked war against Iran barely one year after being elected a second time; this is not the first or only example of Republican politicians claiming to be non-interventionists until they are given the power to actually intervene.

All that said, the two political philosophies are not equivalent. This is important, because it means "Beta Test" is presenting us with an unfriendly politician who is not intended to directly represent the US fascist movement. While it can be argued he is not engaging in wholly good faith, Sadal is someone who can be reasoned with. Starfleet Academy, then, can be said here to be offering an antagonist close enough to the far right to make opposing his policies reasonable from the franchise's (generally) liberal perspective, but not so close that engaging in dialogue can be considered a waste of time, or even a form of appeasement.

Some sources have criticised this season for failing to adequately address the globally resurgent far-right18, albeit more with respect to "Rubincon" than "Beta Test". One response to this criticism would be to note that the history of Trek shows it to be a franchise where, even in its most militaristic phases, one’s first instinct should be to at least try to talk things out. The fact it may be difficult to believe that, in the real world, an isolationist could be persuaded to abandon their isolationism in exchange for becoming the heart of the culture he didn’t want anything to do with in the first place, should perhaps be considered less important than Starfleet Academy following up its action-packed premier with a story about how we can talk to our enemies, and perhaps, in doing so, find they become friends. The show was never going to start from the premise that political action short of protest (at the very least) is of no value. The show is arguing that defeating fascism requires more than simply fighting the fascists themselves, and treating every contrary position as either fascism or not worth bothering about is a good way to end up committing non-trivial category errors – note how Caleb here defines fascism as having to do anything at all he doesn’t wish to.

Returning to the topic of isolationism, the philosophical objection to such stances is immediate: the mono-culture ostensibly being defended does not exist, and never did. Irrespective of how many paeans are sung to a simpler, stronger bygone era, the American Right can no more resurrect their Golden Age any more than Scotland can plan an equine breeding program to bring back the unicorn. "Beta Test" references this through its talk of dozens of species living behind the Betazed barrier, absolutely none of whom appear to have been included in the delegation sent to Earth. It seems Sadal feels quite comfortable speaking for every race inside his borders, deciding their fates wholly without their input.

There are also practical objections. Isolationism has to maintain the line that there is nothing that could be better done outside the nation than inside it. It can be allowed that something might be done more cheaply on the other side of the border, but not with greater craft, or at a greater speed, or in a less wasteful manner. It is this assumption that makes trade tariffs politically palatable - the additional cost for importing from aboard is framed as a necessary bulwark to preventing cheap but shoddy foreign products crowding out the nation's careful and competent craftspeople.

As an approach, this comes close to being mathematically disprovable. Talking to and working with more people means more ideas, more innovation, more successes through collaboration. The only way to even imagine otherwise is to hold your own people up (or, as we've covered, some subset of your own people) as superior to literally all others; to return once again to the dilution metaphors and worse. The reality, because of course there is no such thing as superior peoples and inferior peoples, is that isolationism leads inevitably to stagnation. Admiral Vance puts this to President Sadal directly. The Betazoid's strategy of walling themselves off from the rest of the galaxy has resulted in their technological development being slower than those around them, making them an ever-more tempting target for the Venari Ral and other marauders.

One conclusion then is that, even if the Betazoid's isolationism was at one point working for them (for likely a definition of "them" both narrow and problematic), this is no longer the case. Whatever version of "Make Betazed great again" President Sadal is choosing (or feels politically compelled) to use, it isn't even working on its own terms. Sadal probably knows this, given his first demand is that Starfleet send warships to help defend Betazoid space, and given that his strategy during talks is not to justify his policies, but to look for excuses to drag the focus of conversation away from what those policies are. Either way, it is made clear to the viewer that isolationism cannot meet the political moment.

And yet all of this proves to be the episode's carefully constructed trap. The audience are primed to recognise how Sadal's approach isn't solving his problems. and so to accept Vance and Ake's solution. But in truth, the former does not imply the latter. It is only a sense that a Federation without the Betazoids "feels wrong" that obscures this fact. "Beta Test" sets us up to assume rejoining the Federation is the best outcome, but it does so to demonstrate the ways in which that assumption is flawed.. For those who lack former knowledge of the Federation at its height - which is to say, much of the intended audience - Ake and Vance are confusing the fact Betazed needs help for the idea Betazed needs them.

How Ake, and the audience, are reminded of this distinction is something we shall consider in Section 2.3, as part of a larger exploration of how Federation diplomacy/politics is presented on the show.

2.3 The Practice And Practitioners Of Statecraft

Starfleet Academy takes an unusual approach to dramatising the business of governments and nations. In part, this is an extension of a broader tradition in the franchise. While a Federation Diplomatic Corps (hereafter FDC) is known to have existed both before the Burn19 and after it20, those two references are each to a story in which the business of diplomacy is assigned to a Starfleet captain, the second of those occasions by Admiral Vance himself. This latter example suggests Vance has at least some authority over the FDC - when he decides to send Burnham to Ni'Var to negotiate them rejoining the Federation, he "loops in" the FDC, rather than requesting permission for, or even a discussion of, his plans.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Vance is the most prominent face of the "special assembly of the Diplomatic Council", who we otherwise do not meet during the episode. What is surprising is the form the negotiations take. Sadal and Vance face each other across podiums in public for their exchanges, before reporting back to their respective delegations. This is not an advisable way to conduct diplomacy. Demands and counter-demands, and subsequent compromises and climbdowns, all need to happen behind closed doors. It's much easier to cross a red line when almost no-one knows you ever drew it. Meeting in public to list your sine qua non, and then having each delegation leaf through their Latin dictionaries separately, runs directly counter to that truth.

Figure 5: President Sadal and Admiral Vance engage in statecraft (note the literal red lines separating each delegation.) (SFA, "Beta Test") — Figure 5: President Sadal and Admiral Vance engage in statecraft (note the literal red lines separating each delegation.) (*SFA*, "Beta Test")

What can be said of the decision to offer so strange an approach to interstellar dialogue? One possible explanation returns us to Doylist reasoning. Perhaps the intention here was to begin showing how our cadets learn the topology of the current political landscape. If this requires some warping of what we might consider a realistic approach, this is justified by the need to demonstrate how these cadets represent the future in a dramaturgically engaging manner. A show in which students begin their political journeys at demonstrations and in student unions would not make for an entertaining Trek show (we shall return later in the book to the issues with holding dramaturgy hostage to (subjective definitions of) realism).

This argument has one major flaw, however; no part of the story presented requires the use of what the cadets learn from these exchanges. Only Caleb has any actual interaction with the Betazed delegation, and the knowledge he gains about the Betazoids comes from Tarima, rather than her father. The insight he offers Ake which ultimately salvages the talks comes from a conversation about another topic entirely. Had Sadal and Vance been talking to each other in an empty room, it would have made little to no difference to the story's resolution (note that the truly important conversation in amongst all this political theatre occurs at a drinks reception - as Lin-manuel Miranda put it21, "diplomacy happens at night").

An alternative argument can be made from a production standpoint. The academy concourses and the assembled student bodies, along with the Betazed youth delegation, give the necessary weight for interstellar talks, and help the show continue to set up its visual language - perhaps particularly important given "Kids These Days" introduced the academy campus itself so late into its runtime. There is, though, another direction we might pursue. What if this approach to diplomacy through public dialogue was not the intent of Vance or the FDC?

The argument would go like this: we have several indications that President Sadal is not entering into these negotiations in good faith. He won his campaign on his promise to not lower the psionic wall. He tries to use the record of a single cadet as ammunition to call his host's competence into question, seemingly in an attempt to concoct a minor diplomatic incident he can then use as a pretext to collapse the conference. Vance himself notes that Sadal appears to have come purely to say "no". Perhaps offering his demands almost immediately, and in a public setting, is part of his strategy. He insists, in three different ways, that Betazed be considered uniquely important should it choose to rejoin, and he insults the Federation too, by treating its "core identity" as a mere bargaining chip that might be spent to keep him happy.

There is simply no way the Federation can meet Sadal's demands, and he's fully aware of that. Making those demands immediately and publicly, then, is another deliberate attempt at derailment, one which has the greatest chance of succeeding if done without forewarning (note here that Vance did not intend for the talks themselves to take place at the academy, merely the drinks reception). Whatever one's feelings on Betazed rejoining the Federation, Sadal's gambit here is impressive - he turns what was presumably only intended to be a brief exchange of comments for the cameras into an attempt at a round one knockout for the whole process.

This though raises an important question: why is Vance so wholly blindsided by so simple a strategy? One answer is Starfleet arrogance. Not because Vance fails to realise the importance or the difficulty of the upcoming talks - he explicitly notes both. Rather the arrogance comes from not recognising that this admitted importance and difficulty demand a tighter and smarter strategy than just repeating how much the Betazoids need the Federation's help. There's no sense at any point that a gameplan exists, beyond repeatedly reminding the Betazoids that they used to be in the Federation, and that life was easier before the Burn. This is exactly the kind of reflexive veneration of the past it is critical that Starfleet Academy avoid.

And we must ask ourselves at this point whether Chancellor Ake is faring any better. During the reception, she deflects Sadal's criticisms about allowing Caleb Mir to enroll in the academy, only to immediately fall into the trap the episode has set, by criticising the Betazoids for not being as welcoming as they used to be. In doing so, she finally provides the president with the pretext for ending negotiations he has been aiming for since he first activated his interpreter drone.

We return to a topic raised in Section 1: the Federation must prove itself anew, both within and without its fictional universe. Sadal knows that the status quo is untenable, and so something needs to change. In this, whatever he may say publicly, he is in full agreement with Vance and Ake. Where that agreement ends is with the idea that joining the 32nd century Federation is the change he's looking for. He's fully aware a new future needs to be built, but why should he trust the UFP to be the ones to help him build it? Being lectured on his failure to resemble the past his hosts so clearly venerate, as though simply having changed is in itself a problem, simply confirms his worst fears.

The irony, of course, is that at this moment in the episode, Ake's politics are as similar to Sadal's as they ever get. Behind all the fretting about trade, and culture, and immigration, what isolationism truly wants to block out is the flow of time itself. The Chancellor is risking becoming precisely what she claims she stands against.

As we have noted, it is ultimately Caleb Mir who provides an escape to the trap. The point was made in Section 1 that, in order for Starfleet Academy to work both as Trek and as a story about college students, it would be necessary for the faculty to learn from their students at least as often as the other way round. This is demonstrated once again here, as Caleb prompts Ake’s revelation that restoration is not the same as building anew.

What’s notable here is that Caleb achieves this during a conversation wholly unconnected to the apparently failed conference. Rather, they are talking about his mother. A repeated theme in the episode up to this point (and which featured prominently in “Kids These Days”) is Ake's frustration over Mir prioritising his quest to find his mother over other people’s safety. This problem is intensified here, insofar as last episode the cadet risked a single starship, and did so without really recognising that this was what he was doing. In "Beta Test", though, Ake explicitly warns him that millions of people might live or die depending on the talks with Sadal. Caleb then decides to prioritise his own impulses anyway, risking the entire conference in the process. His hero moment here is limited to undoing that mistake, by persuading Tamira to persuade her father in turn to not leave quite so quickly.

All of this, though, can be said to be mirrored in Ake. She too prioritises what she wants – for both Earth and Betazed to once again become the worlds she remembers – over the lives of the people on either side of the barrier. The conversation where Caleb truly listens to Ake about the importance of the conference (leading to him apologising to Tarima, and asking for her help) is the same conversation where Ake finally truly listens to Caleb on the topic of his mother, and in so doing, saves the negotiations. The chancellor has been extolling the virtues of including the youth in the political sphere throughout the episode, but it’s only here that she realises that inclusion has direct benefit now, rather than for the future. It’s one thing to recognise youth influence as value outside your sphere (Ake is impressed by how the Betazed Youth Movement put enough pressure on Sadal to compel him to at least pretend to seriously consider a return to the Federation). It’s different when it’s your own kids telling you that what you want them to value isn’t where they’re putting their own priorities. When they tell you that it's your own priorities which need to shift.

2.4 Conclusion

We can see this as being the primary political message of Starfleet Academy – even people with the very best of intentions need help to realise how different the same political objects look at a distance, and up close. We see this again in Ake’s trial in “Rubincon”, when the question is raised as to why Lieutenant Li’s children should matter so little in comparison to Anisha Mir’s (again, more on this in Section 10). We also see it in the other politically-focussed episode in this season, “Vox In Excelso”, where Caleb takes a paternalistic we-know-best attitude to the Klingon diaspora that he finds enraging whenever he detects it being applied to himself. This then feeds upon, and is fed upon in turn, with the Starfleet tendency toward superiority, resulting in a kind of passive-aggressive approach to diplomacy, with the Federation expecting credit for only implying their opposite numbers are behaving unreasonably. This is again seen in "Vox In Excelso", with Ake struggling to accept Wochak's very simple position that his people would rather die as Klingons than live as something else.

That episode, indeed, works as an inversion of this one, with Ake insisting another species has changed too little following the Burn, as opposed to too much. What remains constant across this inversion, beyond the positionality and arrogance, is the chancellor's need to see Starfleet as the hero, saving both the Betazoids and the Klingons from themselves. This is why it matters so much that Caleb tells Tarima "The Federation.; they're the villain of my story too". For the Federation to prove itself, it needs to listen to those who are critical of it, and adapt in light of that criticism. It is this, far more than how quickly Mir can complete an exam in the back of a shuttlecraft, that represents his potential. If it is indeed true that "politics is the art of the possible"22, Caleb - indeed all our cadets - have an inherent edge, because they do not define what is possible by what has worked (or been claimed to work) in the past. They're willing to try something new, because everything for them is new. Ake wants her charges to learn from her how statecraft is performed, but they, perhaps even without knowing it themselves, want to start performing it already.

This, then, is what Starfleet Academy stands for. We cannot wait for the future to arrive before we build it. We have to, always, get started now. If the tools and tricks of the past are helpful in that process, all well and good. If they're not, we should leave them beneath the dust of history.

And how do we decide what will and won't be helpful? We listen to each other. We consider the criticisms of those with different perspectives.

We recognise where and when the best thing we can do is to get out of the way.

Notes

1. See for instance the anti-computer stories "Court Martial" and "The Ultimate Computer". 2. There are many ways to argue for the existence of anti-progressive messages of "And The Children Shall Lead" and "The Way To Eden". Indeed, the former episode could be fruitfully analysed as wholly contrary to the message and intent of Starfleet Academy as a whole. 3. https://www.etymonline.com/word/progressive 4. Consider the efforts of the Republican Party and their allies in the judiciary to roll back civil rights for multiple minoritised groups (e.g. effectively killing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, just two days before this chapter was submitted for publication), to allow states to once again criminalise abortion (de facto impossible for states between 1973 and 2022), and to nullify elements of the 14th Amendment (enacted in 1898). 5. Ur-fascism, Umberto Eco. 6. "Is the 14th Amendment unconstitutional? Views differ", Paul Campos, Lawyers Guns & Money 7. Examples include The Walking Dead, Survivors, and The Tribe, among hundreds of others. 8. Ric Crossman, Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations, "...Can't Find Reverse"

9. A word coined by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, meaning nostalgia for a time never actually experienced. This is a rather less problematic form of the general phenomenon under discussion, but it will suffice for our purposes. 10. Examples here include the running joke about a fur fly from Talax, and the Brikar seen in "Beta Test" itself.

11. A summary of Wallace's "trial" and execution can be found here.

12. Braveheart (dir. Mel Gibson), 1995. 13. Neutrality, Political, Encyclopedia.com 14. Isolationism, Oxford Academic 15. Isolationism, Perego.com 16. Artiukhov, A.a. (2022), "The conceptual characteristics of the notion of "isolationism" at the current stage of history", Meždunarodnyj Naučno-Issledovatel'skij Žurnal [International Research Journal] (in Russian). 8 (122). Yekaterinburg, Russia: 2 17. Urbatsch, R. (2010), "Isolationism and domestic politics", The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 54 (3).

18. Sabrina Mittermeier, for example, criticises "Rubincon" for the ways in which Nus Braka is a poorly written political enemy in the context of fascism, and that the collapse of his anti-Federation alliance fails to address the mechanisms by which fascist sympathisers need to be engaged. We will address these concerns more fully in Section 10. 19. Star Trek: Insurrection 20. Star Trek Discovery, "Unification III" 21. "Ben Franklins' Song" (recorded by the Decemberists)