Robert, forgive me if I'm too harsh here, but I don't see that you've done more than restate what I said, at much greater length, and then worked to justify the NR author's claims, which I think are simplistic and ignorant of the facts no matter how much "...he really meant..." you add in. In the end, you're making just as much thin stew from just as few scrawny oysters as he is. I don't think his "review" is defensible on any level, due to his insistence on sheer bullheaded willful ignorance. There's no real point in trying to ferret out nuances.
Terms like "liberal" and "conservative" are, and should be, minor political descriptives, not one-word definitions of an individual's entire political orientation and mindset. Saying "Heinlein was a liberal/conservative" is vague hand-waving, no matter how many qualifiers you throw in or how long and hard you labor to assign derived meaning to those terms. Any person who is politically aware and active is much more complex than any combination of one-word labels can represent, even among knowledgeable peers. Heinlein was an extremely complex individual in this regard and simple terms, and simple statements of his position over time, are even less adequate than they are for vaguely political Joe T. Voter. Especially when considering the shifts in political terminology and alignment over the span of his life; we are talking about several bygone sociopolitical eras, each of which would baffle most present-day observers.
Much of the problem is that we have "shifted" into an era where no political discussion gets past a very limited number of one-word descriptives. I can't think of a politically active figure who is judged for his or her ideas, ideology, stance on a spectrum of issues or integrity. We've reduced the game to a simplistic rubber-stamp assessment of the scent of their political buttcrack, and no two groups share any sense of "Hey, that smells pretty good!"
Too many commentors are eager, if not frantic, to ensure that Heinlein's attar-of-roses buttcrack emanation is understood to be Liberal or Conservative or Libertarian [bang hole in paper with the period key here]
What nonsense. I keep hoping for better, overall. I really expect better in discussing Heinlein, and while I don't agree with much on the NR end of the spectrum, it saddens me to see therein such a naive, ignorant piece so evidently twisted to suit the author's preconceived ends... especially as it's nominally a review of the book that should have larn't him better.
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