ST:TNG is very seductive nostalgia—being a show about a colonialist government that is tolerant, competent, and possessed of effectively infinite wealth and military power, or in other words, a stand-in for the United States in the 1990s.

You just know that behind all that seamlessly interoperable hardware and software there's an industrial standards organization that rules the galaxy with a rod of iron.

Photon torpedoes are just cruise missiles, but it took JJ Abrams, of all people, to make it explicit.

TNG is soothing because it's an idealized self-portrait of the society that created The Clapper.

To all the people in my mentions: The Federation is "colonialist" because every second episode involves a literal Federation "colony."

The Federation is largely a network of "colonies" and "outposts" held together by a "fleet." I mean, pay at least minimal attention here.

Some people have countered that the Federation is supposed to be a *contrast* to the 1990s United States, and that's true in terms of conscious intent, which is why I'm pointing out it totally fails on that basis in hindsight.

It's a utopian and critical self-portrait, but it's still a self-portrait—down to the ways it promotes the denial of the obvious (e.g., the Federation empire's ludicrous denials that its heavily armed fleet is a military force, or that humans enjoy supremacy in the Federation).

The other thing that's come up in replies is the Prime Directive. It doesn't change the *structure* of the Federation, but does it disprove charges of colonial *aggression*? Maybe, but only in the way the principle of national sovereignty is today—imperfectly, to say the least.

At best, the Prime Directive protects only a narrow kind of people: humanoid civilizations that aren't *too* humanoid and civilized. At worst, it's treated as pure fiction in practice.

But the Prime Directive is mostly irrelevant to my thesis anyway, since Federation colonialism is based on the same cultural myth of abundant "empty" land that European colonialism was. "In the beginning," as John Locke says, "all the galaxy was America."

So TNG has a really interesting blend of Euro-Americans' most romantic notions of historical European colonialism (or what they think it should have been) with idealization of their own society and its power systems in the age of the End of History and of Democratic Enlargement.

It's very seductive for Americans of my generation (or thereabouts), raised on a set of powerful old cultural myths and contemporary expectations of real-life greatness, to game out that mix of historical phenomena as they "should" have been.

I'm not being ironic: Psychologically speaking, it's attractive. I genuinely *like* TNG.

(A lot of replies now are leaning hard on "but those planets *were* empty!" as a defense against the charge of colonialism, which means they're missing my point that the whole thing is wish-fulfillment—a chance to have one's cake and eat it too.)

It's a fantasy of being the anticolonial colonizer, the liberating empire—the same fantasy I grew up with for America's place in the world.