Dr. Who and Politics

You would expect a column on the British TV show, Dr. Who to be a politics-free zone. Unfortunately, with some people there is no such thing as a politics free zone. In a four paragraph column on Dr. Who in Wired, the writer, Scott Brown, injects this:

Sound familiar, America? Oh, I can hear the teabaggers now: This is defeatist talk! Doesn't sound like your cup of Tetley, eh, Glenn Beck? Fair enough: Enjoy your Transformers and the baby-faced club kids of the new Enterprise. But I'd highly recommend a field trip to Whoville.

Brown makes to many bad assumptions it is hard to list them all. First, he assumes that everyone who reads his stuff agrees with his politics. He compounds that by throwing in a derogatory term for the Tea Party movement. He also assumes that Enterprise and Transformers only appeal to conservatives (I guess because he considers both the movies and the audience to be less enlightened). Finally, he thinks that Dr. Who supports his politics. I'll examine this last assumption in depth.

First, I'm going to make an assumption. Since the Brown doesn't like the Tea Parties or Glenn Beck, I'm going to assume that Brown is a big-government liberal.

So, what politics does Dr. Who espouse? It's hard to generalize but there have been a number of episodes that have a strong Libertarian/anti-big government element. In fact it's a given that any episode that features a large government agency or big business, the agency or business will turn out to be run by evil aliens for nefarious reasons.

At the end of the first season the Doctor was on a satellite that housed a totalitarian government. This turned out to be a cover for a plot to recreate the Daleks. The following season a government agency called Torchwood seized the Doctor's TARDIS, saying that all alien technology in Britain belonged to them. They also opened a door to an alternate universe populated by Cybermen.

The Cybermen came from an alternate world where they were manufactured by a large corporation working with the government.

In a later season finale, a charismatic politician named Harold Saxon was elected Prime Minister. It turned out that Saxon was the Doctor's fellow Time Lord the Master who took over the Earth with the intention of using humanity to conquer the universe.

In the spin-off Torchwood, the government blew up Torchwood's Welsh branch and arrested the survivors. Their reason - they didn't want Torchwood to interfere with an alien race's demand for 10% of all children.

Clearly, in the Doctor's universe, big government and big business working with big government are bad. They inevitably end up threatening humanity.

So, why would Glenn Beck object to this?