One of Robert Heinlein's Worst Ideas

Robert Heinlein liked playing around with ideas.  Ideas about marriage, family structure, religion, government, etc.  A lot of the ideas he fiddled with are interesting and have some merit.  For example, in The Happy Days Ahead, Heinlein posits a future in which a black woman president has torn down the fences between the United States and Mexico because they were a stupid idea to begin with, and is presiding over the ribbon cutting of a spaceport.

Heinlein makes it clear that he doesn't think this will come to pass -- that the actual future will be far grimmer -- but he puts it out there as a "...but it sure would be nice if..." alternative to the dark days he believes are coming.

On the other hand, Heinlein had some terrible ideas, and among the worst of them was this (from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as the newly independent lunar colony debates the drafting of their constitution):

I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent -- the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority ... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority.

Heinlein isn't sneaky about it.  He puts this idea of requiring a supermajority to pass anything and allowing a superminority to repeal everything into the mouth of Professor Bernardo de La Paz whose political views are described thusly...

"But--Professor, what are your political beliefs?"
"I'm a rational anarchist."
"I don't know that brand. Anarchist individualist, anarchist
Communist, Christian anarchist, philosophical anarchist, syndicalist,
libertarian--those I know. But what's this? Randite?"
"I can get along with a Randite...

Anyone who has read Heinlein will recognize Professor de La Paz as a prototypical "third stage" Heinlein character.  Excerpted from Alexei Panshin's Heinlein in Dimension:

...
The Heinlein Individual has three central characteristics: his strength, his singularity, and his ability to teach himself. 

 All three stages of the Heinlein Individual are strong and competent.  The youngest stage may be ignorant and naive but that is an accident of youth and not a character deficiency...

The naiveté of the first-stage Heinlein Individual leads him into error from which he is commonly extracted by his competence after he learns what he has to know...

Since the first-stage Heinlein Individual is so often a sheep ripe for shearing, Heinlein has almost always provided him with a mentor in the form of an older Heinlein Individual. 

...Zeb Jones, "the wiseacre without whom no Heinlein story is complete," to quote Damon Knight,* is an archetypical second-stage Heinlein Individual, the competent man in full bloom.  This stage is less eager, more cynical, more likely to make a wisecrack than to rush out to save the world.  The cynicism, no doubt, is the result of the destroyed past illusions of a former first-stage Heinlein Individual.

  The third-stage Heinlein Individual, perhaps because he has lost his energy, perhaps simply because he has lived longer, is even more cynical: 

"My dear, I used to think I was serving humanity . . . and I pleasured in the thought.  Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it.  So now I do what pleases Jubal Harshaw."

This third stage serves as mentor not only to his young innocent counterpart but to his knowledgeable second-stage self as well.  

Much of Heinlein is still a solid read, but his fiction has almost nothing to say about the complex, propaganda-saturated world in which we live...other than an overreliance on fragile technology and Too Much Big Gummint will lead to "The Crazy Years" when we're all pretty well fucked.  The way his characters cope with The Crazy Years tends to involve being rich enough to put a wall between themselves and a world gone mad, and the way his characters emerge from The Crazy Years usually involves those with pioneering pluck, nobility and ingenuity overthrowing an oppressive regime and/or hopping a rocket or starship and getting the hell out.

However most of us lack the wealth to isolate ourselves from the madness of the world, and starships to other worlds are not (yet) available.  So speaking for those of us living in the here-and-now who have actually experience what happens when a minority of fascist assholes are free to block the will of the majority because they want to see the country collapse so they can rule over the rubble,  let me say that this sort of libertarian, Randite, "rational anarchist" claptrap --  

 ...I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority ... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority.

-- is currently in hot contention for the worst fucking idea imaginable.

Starships Yes, Lifeboats No