Clearly Picard and his group are those to aspire to. Not everyone in this show is the bigot you claim they all are. Lets look at fictionally what has happened in the last 30 years of Trek history. Multiple Borg invasions, the Dominion War, rise of groups like the New Essentialists Movement, the Synth revolt and then the collapse of the Romulan empire (to which we are slowly finding out what happened.)
With all that, and with the asshole admirals we always get (even back in TOS) and the Federation (which is more than just Earth remember) made the hard decision to not help Romulus. Sure it sucks, it pissed off alot of people but look at the justification the show has given so far (from episode 2)
Starfleet admiral: We tried to help the Romulans for as long as we could. But even before the sythns attacked Mars, 14 species within the Federation said “Cut the Romulans loose, or we’ll pull out.” It was a choice between allowing the Federation to implode or letting the Romulans go.
PIcard: The Federation doesn’t get to decide if a species lives of dies.
Admiral: Yes we do. We absolutely do. Thousands of other species depend on us for unity, for cohesion. We didn’t have enough ships left. We had to make choices.
I buy it in the fictional world we have here. Humanities “greater good” can only go so far and has potential for breakage. How it survives that and overcomes is the story I want to see. If everyone was all happy and together holding hands in Roddenberry’s noble (but ultimately flawed) look of the future, it would make for some boring as hell television.
