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That's the same conclusion I came to when attempting to read Heinlein. Does it go deeper than that?

• randallsquared 10y ago
  ST does go deeper than that. More broadly, the rest of Heinlein ranges so widely across the mainstream political spectrum that it would be easy to pick 20% of it to paint a picture of Heinlein as far-right, far-left, libertarian, or apolitical. It used to be widely held that this was a chronological shift in his attitudes from the 1930s to 1980s, but that seems not to be the case, now: he just chose which of his non-mainstream views to showcase in any given work.
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    I'm not sure you can really call the views espoused by any of Heinlein's viewpoint characters Heinlein's own views; there are a few common themes, but there are so many conflicts between them (or even within the same character) that, except where they directly line up with his nonfiction advocacy, it's probably better to take the view that Heinlein's work is often exploring alternate political approaches rather than acting as polemic for them. It's also perhaps worth noting, in the context of ST, that the "service is optional, but required for citizenship" model was presented prior to the all-volunteer military at a time when each of the last several generations had been subject to at least one large-scale draft, and the US (and most of the rest of the world) had a system where service was tied to citizenship but (well, for men at least) mandatory on demand, universal in practice, and quite often deadly.