Doctorow: The novel Heinlein would have written about GW Bush’s America .

Doctorow: The novel Heinlein would have written about GW Bush’s America. In reviewing John Varley’s new novel Red Lightning, Cory Doctorow gets in his usual slams against the Bush Administration while spouting the canards regarding Heinlein and reveals that he never really read any of the Old Man’s novels.

Reading Heinlein’s novels finds a strong streak of antiauthoritarianism in most of his protagonists, thinly veiled warnings regarding investing the state with too much power, and an acknowledgment that it’s up to individuals to contain the power of that government. Hardly the stuff of right wing politics as defined today.

Trying to peg Heinlein to some arbitrary Left-Right political axis is an exercise doomed to failure, as well as the mark of a lazy intellect. Shoddy work, and hardly in character for a writer I respect as much as Mr. Doctorow.
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After reading Cory Doctorow’s review, I’m left with the impression that Mr. Hawkins didn’t. Here’s what he has to say on Heinlein:

bq. Heinlein was an ideological libertarian. You could call his politics right wing, and they were, on many of the left-right axes. But Heinlein never would have sat still for the Patriot Act and the daily and deep incursions on liberties that have come to characterise life in America and increasingly Britain and other parts of the world. He never would have accepted that you had to take away freedom to save liberty.

As someone who is an “ideological libertarian” and has read Heinlein’s books, this seems pretty obvious to me. It’s pretty well known to libertarians that people who identify themselves as progressives regard libertarians as “right wing,” just as people who identify themselves as conservatives regard libertarians as “left wing.” It’s also pretty obvious from his writing that Heinlein would react just as Doctorow thinks he would.