There's no red-blue divide in the Federation

As the presidential election nears and political divisions heighten, one thing remains clear in the world of science fiction: Long life and prosperity are not partisan values, as Star Trek fans may be swayed more by a drive for freedom than by typical democratic-republican partisanship, experts said.

Trying to find political value in the Star Trek television series and movies remains a tricky move in itself, however, because of the very nuts-and-bolts of the franchise.

The TV show and movies take place in the now not-so-far future, when humans have found a way to travel at speeds faster than the speed of light, according to memory-alpha.org, a Wiki for Trek fans.

Humans who become space explorers interact with other species and eventually form the United Federation of Planets (AKA the Federation), an "interstellar federal republic, composed of planetary governments that agreed to exist semi-autonomously under a single central government and to share their knowledge and resources in peaceful cooperation and space exploration."

For TV some, though, the pacifism and cooperation embodied by the Federation is just a veneer, making an understanding of Trek politics - especially foreign policy - a pain.

"It's a military organization that kills lots of people every week. It's a hierarchy, there's one person in charge of every ship," said Sumana Harihareswara, who taught a course called Politics and Modern Science Fiction at the University of California-Berkeley.

"For some reason, even though scarcity is dead and everyone has enough to eat, there's still money, and one wonders why that is. The more that one pokes at the architecture of the Federation, the more one tries to figure out how is this working, why it is," she said, explaining that in the Federation, nobody needs money to survive on Star Trek, but that the presence of currency persists.

Harihareswara said a key theme in Star Trek is the relationship between technology and government, but that the way the theme plays out in the end doesn't advocate one political viewpoint or another.

"There is still an ongoing debate and there probably will be for some time of whether technology is more an enabler of government or more of a destroyer of state institutions," she said. "I think that the political stance most applicable to what you usually see in Star Trek is hard to put into any one spot on the left-right spectrum."

One aspect of the show that's particularly hard to characterize politically is Star Trek's militarism: Armed forces are a constant player in the show, but at the same time, gratuitous military buildup or nationalism is not always advocated.

"You see members of one organization that combines military and exploration goals and it is run by a government, and some of the encounters that they have with 'the Other,'" she said. But in these encounters with the other - species and cultures other than humans, that is - some are friendly and others are hostile.

Harihareswara made reference to a particular story line in Star Trek: Enterprise that was produced after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, in which an alien attack on earth was meant as a metaphor for the attacks.

"There were moments when the story was a jingoist military vehicle about destroying the enemy and there were moments when it was about the costs, the moral costs, of wrongheaded violence. There were scenes about some third party, that was, it turns out, duping both Earth and its enemy into attacking each other."

For Harihareswara, also, the way the conflict is developed in Star Trek series and episodes also conveys a political viewpoint - how humans value other cultures.

"In Star Trek: The Next Generation and in some other science fiction stories also, the characters are switching from planet to planet and they get to enter and leave situations every week. They can leave behind the changes that they've made. They can leave behind the situations that they've entered and the consequences of their actions, whereas on (Star Trek) Deep Space 9, they're in one place and they're dealing with history," she said. "Depending upon the way that you look at the world is going to affect your political stance, whether or not you think it's important to understand and work with people who see the world differently from you, people with different histories."

Don Taylor, self-proclaimed Trekkie and top salesman at Greenshift Music & Comics, a Tampa store that also sells Star Trek memorabilia, said he thinks Trek fans may sway toward the democratic side of politics, but recognized the difficulty of such an assessment, considering the role of the military in the show.

"I'm not saying Republicans are war mongers or anything like that. A lot of times, you know, we had to fight against the Romulans and the Klingons, it wasn't all a piece of cake," he said. "Captain Kirk, you know, he was not really a pacifist. He fired the photon torpedoes quite a few times. They cooked quite a few people. They had their phasers set on kill quite a few times. (But) I think you have to live with a little bit of that concept, that sometimes it's them or us."

Taylor also spoke of the progressive political climate of the movie industry as perhaps reflecting Star Trek, but thought that the threat of alien attacks bars it from being described purely as democratic - especially in the context of how the show handles pre-emptive war.

"If you've got a Klingon vessel in front of you that's powering up and ready to fire, you've got a choice to make. It's like anything in life, I guess. You know, at what point in life do you pre-emptively strike - it's a tough question."

Though categorizing Star Trek in general left-right terms remains difficult, several agree that the show exhibits libertarian-leaning characteristics.