Especially, after the unprecedented four terms of Franklin D. Maybe this was what Heinlein, an American, saw the US becoming. In France, for example, men who could vote were called ‘active citizens’ and those who were not given this right were labelled ‘passive citizens.’ The fear was that granting universal suffrage would only result in ‘mobocracy.’ For long, voting rights were limited to landed elites and wealthy (white) men.Įven till the 1920s, women were not allowed to vote in various European democracies and in the US. It had taken multiple decades for democracies to fully introduce universal suffrage.

One must remember that, even till 1959, when the novel was published, universal suffrage, or every adult citizen of a nation-state having the right to vote, was still a relatively new practice.

But the fact remains, Heinlein never meant it to be a satire. Whereas Heinlein, rather perversely, did not really try to either rationalise, nor refute the criticism that his novel received, the 1997 film of the same name, based on the novel and directed by Paul Verhoeven, clearly treated the book as a scathing satire on militarism and patriotism. The Welsh-Canadian writer Jo Walton, while revisiting the novel in 2017, writes that Heinlein was making a case for limiting voting rights to a select group of people because he believed that giving this right to all adults had caused chaos and the erosion of social discipline. Some critics lamented that it was eulogising fascism and militarism. The novel, though successful, was also controversial. The society is run like a quasi-fascist militarist state that glorifies war, sacrifice and patriotism and encourages a xenophobic disposition.

Heinlein, a future society run by the military grants citizenship and voting rights to only those who serve in the armed forces. In the 1959 novel Starship Troopers by Robert A.

Men of war starship troopers