Ironically also the same problem as the book.
People think Heinlein was 110% onboard with the society he was writing about, yet he wrote many other novels where the protagonists fought back against authoritarianism and/or were communist economically. Beyond this Horizon, for example. Or “If this goes on-”
Assuming one of a writer’s works displays their exact like of thinking is reductionist and infantile unless they came out at some point and specifically stated that it’s how they believed.
I think that is exactly why that problem persists. Among a certain subset of the population, there is no need to look further. Why assume that there’s a deeper message there?
Which is why it’s always so frustrating when you see someone arguing that you should only be able to vote if you serve. (Yes, this really happened to me.)
Unfortunately regardless of your political stance you most certainly acknowledge that there are dumbasses capable of voting purely on the merit that they were born here, even if they couldn’t tell you a lick about how the system works.
While I don’t know how I’d feel about my government attempting such a thing, if the service was just public sector (not exclusively the military like in the movie) and available to all regardless of ablement (as in the novel), and the only differences in rights being that you’re now able to vote and run for elected office, then I could see the merits of reducing voting to the portion of the population that served the public in some capacity.
While you can’t guarantee they’ll be better off at the end, their experience would at least inform them of the greater picture on how things are done and why. Which might increase the voting/electoral population’s ability to come up with new solutions or see the flaws they would have missed by just voting whatever they grew up with.
