According to nearly a dozen retired officers and current military lawyers, as well as scholars who teach at West Point and Annapolis, an intense if quiet debate is underway inside the U.S. military community about what orders it would be obliged to obey if President-elect Donald Trump decides to follow through on his previous warnings that he might deploy troops against what he deems domestic threats, including political enemies, dissenters and immigrants.
Archived at https://archive.is/He9O6
Also, just to add some context for the specific example of Battlestar Galactica: the show premiered in 2004. The 9/11 attacks were still fresh in peoples’ minds. Congress had passed the Patriot Act giving law enforcement and intelligence services new directives to surveil and police US citizens and look for signs of future terrorist plots. We were entrenched in two new wars, and there were lots of protests. There were scandals involving the president and his advisors misleading the public about the nature and quality of intelligence they had.
The plot and themes of B:G were a direct response to all of this. The idea of martial law being declared and rights being suspended was not some far-fetched idea the show writers were playing with. People were really concerned that it might happen to squash public unrest.