You Keep on Using that Word

So it's commonplace for people to describe SF writers like Heinlein and Pournelle as "fascist". It's hilarious; if you can think of anyone who is more opposite actual fascists than their brand of Goldwater conservatism, I'd love to know who it is.

See, the only parts of their worldview that mirror fascism, also mirror the views of the kind of person who calls them fascists. Between their egocentric view of foreign policy, their pseudo-scientific reductionism in sociology (with attendant free-love utopianism), and their belief in apocryphal population apocalypses: just swap in Keynes for Laffer and you've got a Democrat.

I did actually see one person who made something of a case for applying the term to Heinlein, that his stories often involve the naked will-worship also seen in the inter-war philosophies that spawned the Fascisti and Nazis. It's actually a good point, and quite true, but the problem is, that same amoral worship of the will as such, is pretty much endemic to the Post-Reformation West—it long predates Nietzsche, who's often blamed for its presence in the Nazis and sometimes the fascists (assuming the person doing the blaming knows they're not the same thing, which isn't common).

You find it throughout Romanticism, it's of the essence of Transcendentalism, it's found in the stupider republican writers on every continent; there's an element of it in the Great Awakening. Indeed, I suspect it can probably be traced to the Reformation—between Calvin's worship of God's will that damns or saves each soul before its birth, and Luther's worship of Man's will that, once it accepts salvation, can never after lose it, it's the will they were revering. Tolstoy even has a form of it, except in reverse: rather than saying all chosen actions are good, he says they're all bad (I wonder how many Orthodox monks just read Tolstoy and said, "Ho-hum, another quietist for the pile."). Still, he is denying any moral distinction between acts, trumped by the action or inaction of the will.

Basically, anyone who's calling Heinlein a fascist for that really has to call William Gibson one, too—after all, his characters dismantle the things that stand in the way of their will-to-power, don't they? Once having identified that as the fascistical element in Heinlein, a person capable of synthesizing their disparate items of knowledge would notice something. Namely, everything that informs whole swaths of modern culture is the same thing. How many discussions of morality, drugs or sex for instance, are simply cut off with the invocation of "two consenting adults"? Law, economics, "you don't like it, don't watch it": everything you hold most holy and sacred, whether right or left, red or blue, north or south, is held hostage that very same Wille zur Macht.

Forgive me, I read old books; but I was not aware "popular sovereignty" was supposed to mean "everyone is an unquestionable autocrat."