Look I'm not a trekkie. I watched my first Star Trek series five years ago as an adult. I know of a single other person IRL who watches Star Trek and they use it as sleep therapy. I don't care about the minutiae of canon. But this is straight up evil: the foundational fact of Picard s2 seems to be that humankind has two paths ahead of it. On one hand it can go to space and find a magical microbe that literally solve all of it's problems. If not then it becomes a genocidal space empire.
Trek canon on how exactly humanity built an utopia is somewhat vague, I guess? Priorities really do seem to change with each generation of writers. Vulcan solidarity reflect the quasi religious beliefs in alien saviors that rose up strong in the last century. WW3 and the eugenics wars are deep seated in the post WW2 psyche. Enterprise reminds us humans (and vulcans!) didn't have replicators when they eliminated poverty. DS9 was certain to make it about a political struggle. Sure, it was naive about it. The Bell episodes seem to think the internet would eventually unleash a torrent of regenerative empathy across humanity and boy did that idea crash and burn. But the end of the literal concentration camps was still triggered by actual resistance.
Oh, sure you might say: what about the mirror episodes? Those hit different. The parallel universe is about a campy cartoonish sort of evil and silly personality switcheroos. It's not supposed to be a critique of our actual human society. Picard is. People say that the writers of newer Star Trek don't 'get it'. Like, they don't realize Star Trek is supposed to be optimistic. They do. They've decided that is too naive about it, that they must make room for current issues like the climate collapse, but the way they've done so reflects their own worldview. A sort of ideology where, should effective altruism fail, then the only way forward is hyper fascism. The optimism of 'New Trek' is thus: there is nothing we can do on Earth but we can find salvation in space, either in the form of literal magic or new others to kill.
What the hell happened in the last decades that an egalitarian utopia is more 'pie in the sky' today than it was at the height of the cold war?
I think it's the war on terror, actually.
The impact of the USSR as an alternative to the imperial core is undeniable. It definitely affected the policies of wealth distribution in Europe, Japan and elsewhere. But, you know, there was always the care to make it seem like the US was a champion of righteousness then. But I mean something more than propaganda. I mean the kind of bright eyed optimism about the american project that only a cynic can hold onto today.
Star Trek TOS has this episode where Kirk frees an alien race and nonsensically reads the declaration of independence. All men were created equal ladilaa etc. It's a funny scene because the aliens didn't even have a culture outside of their enslavement. They were genetically and environmentally engineered from the start to serve as slaves to a computer. As a non american I can sorta imagine someone in 196X seeing the american project as by default something that contributes good things to the future. It's part and parcel of the trek optimism, together with all the other cultural trends of those times from sexual liberation to social democracy or socialism.
9/11 and the wars waged thereafter is what breaks that camel's back, IMO. It takes a true weirdo to grow up in this world and think that the US isn't a cynical geopolitical actor.
Kinda, but late DS9 and Voyager also leaned into grand stories of war and started "deconstructing" the utopia of Star Trek TNG.
But indeed, it was not how Star Trek was back then for the most part. Even Enterprise, with its underrated (but horny) seasons 1 and 2 and the Space 9/11 + Space Cold War arcs (S3, S4) didn't reach for "this better world we came up with in 1966 and expanded in 1987? Nah, it actually sucks and it is going to suck because humans evil/enemies at the gates."
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It's like America's relationship with the Taliban in reverse