By a further semantic slide, it came, for some, to mean any authoritarian power structure with power concentrated in the hands of the few, hence the lumping together of the various 20thC dictatorships as right wing.
You’ve just argued that the Communist dictatorships of the 20th century, the USSR, China, Cuba. are “right wing”, which seems to establish the vacuity of the term far better than anything I could have written.
When one got past pre-adolescence, one realised that Heinlein’s writing skills, such as they were, were in the service of a political philosophy somewhat to the right of Attila the Hun. Whatever floats your boat.
Then one got past pre-adolescence by becoming an uninformed dolt. In fact, Heinlein’s political views ranged from Upton Sinclair socialist and New Deal Democrat in the 30′s, to hard-core libertarian later in life, but never corresponded to anything “right wing” except to those people who use “right wing” as a synonym for “I don’t like it.”
Leo, Heinlein praised math to the very stars, but I’m not sure he was actually good at math. It’s been a long time and I don’t have the book in front of me, but I remember a scene in The Rolling Stones where the father is telling the kids they need to study advanced math, and using some mathobabble, and I don’t think the father was making any sense...
The kids, looking at some kind of map of mathematics, say “Dad, what’s a hyper-ideal?” “Hyper-ideal” is a perfectly good term in algebraic topology. Heinlein did graduate work in maths at UCLA after his medical discharge. He did incline to being a hardcore formalist, as evidenced by the discussion of axiomatic systems and such in Rocket Ship Galileo.
And yes, it does worry me a little that I can quote a Heinlein juvenile by memory....