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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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I have to disagree about O'Neill. SG-1 manages to pull off that rare accomplishment of sometimes being about politics without ever being political. They never say what party Kinsey is from, from what I remember, and the 1990s were a time where his type was available in both parties to be disdained.

The way in which they have Jack handle Daniel's actually peacenik attitudes (even if Daniel is right by plot fiat) is also a bit of a conservative stereotype of the gruff, worldly military man running rough shod over the lefty ivory tower type. The way they handled their relationship (where both get to be right and wrong at different times and both get to be both positive and negative portrayals of their archetypes who both grow by learning to deal and work with the other) is actually exceptionally good writing, both from a character handling perspective and from a 'keeping your show unpolitical' perspective.

The show absolutely is suffused with triumphalism post-Cold War liberalism, but that was a practically consensus point of view at the time and it was something most of both right and left could agree on.

Maybe I am crazy, but I don't think Kinsey's red tie was a random wardrobing decision, and his particular style of bible thumping, like arguing that God would 'physically' intervene to prevent an alien attack, seemed very republican coded to me, but you are right I don't think they ever actually say what party he belongs to.

O'Neill is absolutely less of a peacenik than Daniel, but he stands in stark contrast against all the other military personal, save perhaps Hammond From Texas. He would be the most level headed security officer to ever serve on the enterprise if you slid him into TNG. Makepeace, the only other colonel in the program and one of the few military personal with a name, is an NID traitor. Jack is very superficially a gruff military man, but in practice he only really overrides Daniel when Daniel is asking him to gamble all their lives based on the style of pots the aliens use and a half translated prayer.

Red and blue as political party colors developed recently and not all at once, spawning from 2000 election night coverage where CNN showed states flipping between red and blue.

Kinsey's style used to be something you could find along Democrats, too. Especially the budget-hawking-but-only-against-the-military bit is something that could go either way in my eyes.

O'Neill's outlook is definitely post-Vietnam military burnout, but absolutely everything else about him codes hard on the right for the time. There really was no archetype of the Dem leaning special forces guy in the 90s. If anything, he has always struck me as the kind of mostly disinterested (if not actively disgusting) in politics personally conservative but not religious middle aged white guy who would be activated by Trump in 2016.