For Trekkies out there, the 2024 election cycle may have a powerful sense of déjà vu they can’t really place until we reflect on Spock’s back story he often tells of the difficult history of his home planet, Vulcan. After what we recently went through, that story may begin to have an eerie familiarity with the challenging history of Vulcan that Spock insists nearly destroyed civilization on Vulcan. The threat to Vulcan was from a society so consumed by intense emotional attitudes and actions that it was ripping the people apart to the extent of a near existential threat only narrowly averted by a return to logic that superseded irrational emotional activism dividing the planet.

The obvious parallel to the recent election is the ubiquitous rejection of an ultra-left progressive ideology in favor of a return to common sense and logic. Because emotion still has a place in political discourse as long as it is tempered by intellect and common sense, we don’t want to follow Vulcan to the same extreme but find a place comfortably in the ideologic center.