I often complain that fiction has very little that seems comparable to my (center-left) view of the problems of the world: An aging and competent institution, with serious flaws but real capability to improve, is defeated by ragtag rebels who are mendacious and destructive.
This is just Snowpiercer Or Silo if you prefer bunkers over trains
Or The Hunger Games Or Divergent Or The Giver Or The Maze Runner
Ultimately, no empire can be reformed. You don't build an empire through reform. You build an empire by crushing them.
That actually is star trek, the maquis are wrong. Hot take, they're wrong in the same way settlers on the Palestinian side of the 67 borders are wrong.
In that argument, if anything the Cardassians are the settlers. Those worlds were settled by the federation and then the Cardassians put colonies on them after the war. Also, I will always be sus about the Cardassia with how they treated Bajor.
A treaty is a treaty, though. If your government lets you get away with this, what incentive do any other governments have to make treaties with that government ever again?
We talking about the Cardassians or the Federation? because the cardis keep violating it with raids, illegal settlements on worlds they never settle, and atrocities on Bajor. Maquis got tired of Starfleet being so half hearted about territorial sovereignty and it's founding principals.
The Maquis are inevitable when the Federation is more interested in negative space wedgies and conferences on Risa than protecting their further holdings, the trade lanes, and showing the Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians that they aren't pushovers. Basic nation state stuff.
Mijd you, federation knee jerks too hard and becomes kind of authoritarian after the war, and while it does keep the Klingons and the remains of the Romulans and the cardis in check, they did mess up what they did right. Kind of like post Klingon war or post Romulan war. Federation cyclic history
Like, modern fiction sets us up to root for Trump 2024! Too little fiction that says stay the course and hold to disciplined gradual improvements. Arguably this could be Tolkien’s conservatism (tho without the hobbits), but very little other fiction sets this up!
Obviously my leftist friends won’t like it (even I’m leery of it at times—too stoic), but I think it’s a weirdly underrepresented dynamic, even if you disagree that it’s where we were in 2022!
On further reflection I think Tolkien is actually perfect here. We have an diminishing elite (elves/establishment dems) who are too self-important to pass power to the rising free people (humans/newer dems) and many people instead turn to mendacious promises of people ultimately bent on destruction