Knife wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:People who set up nations using trickery and police state tactics tend to wind up being abusive fathers to their nations.
And those would be the bad ones.
I honestly can't think of any exceptions to this rule... And Leyton was all set to start ruling through these same tactics. I question his ability to raise a nation competently. Just because he's a Hard Man Making Hard Choices doesn't mean he's actually going to do a better job than the people he replaces.
Look, I'm not cheering on a coup d'etat. I get why the episode was put on that way, but we also have years of ST prior to that that would indicate that Leyton wasn't just some bozo looking for power, that the Federation was soft and would get chewed up in a war. And it did. Granted, they won, but the Federation lost hundreds of ships, thousands and thousand of lives for years. They were seriously losing the war for at least a season even with most of the Alpha Quadrant powers aligning.
If the combined forces of most of the Alpha Quadrant weren't enough to stop the Dominion, what makes you think that they would magically have become strong enough just because the Federation was ruled by a handful of oligarchical Hard Men Making Hard Decisions? Especially after Leyton got done purging the officer corps of all the officers who refused to obey a tinpot dictator AND all the officers who thought that if Leyton could take over from the Council, they should be able to take care of Leyton?
The Dominion was huge, had vast reserves of largely disposable troops, and had been a spacefaring civilization for much longer than any of the Alpha Quadrant powers. Why are we surprised that they had the strength to overcome the Federation? Maybe the cause of the Federation being on the back foot during the war was due not to Federation weakness or stupidity, but due to the Dominion being very powerful.
I mean, we KNOW what it looks like when the Federation is run by Hard Men Making Hard Decisions. It's called the Terran Empire of the mirror universe. And oddly, they aren't doing nearly as well as the Federation is. Indeed, they're getting their asses kicked by rebellions and so forth. Because it turns out their unchecked aggression and militarism doesn't give them the broad basis in science, diplomacy, and cultural knowledge to deal with problems that aren't as simple as "and then I vaporized the city from orbit, the end."
And horrors of horrors, Earth was raided and took a serious slap. The Federation was not ready to fight a war against a comparable threat even though by the time it started they knew it was coming. Can you imagine what it would have been like if Star Fleet hadn't gotten off it's ass the last few years and built some new ships to deter the Borg?
As noted, I see no reason to think Leyton would actually be able to do a better job ensuring the Federation's military preparedness through military dictatorship. Many Federation civilians and soldiers would not follow him, and he would almost inevitably have touched off a civil war. This would have the effect of weakening the
physical means of Federation resistance to the Dominion, in exchange for some nebulous increase in the Federation's "resolve."