I agree with you that any sort of “governing class” is bound to exploit its privileges to lead to severe inequalities among the people. The current US democratic system isn't immune to this either, though at least in US society there are opportunities for lower class citizens to improve their social standing through economic gain. Not ideal but better than most I'd say – at least it worked for my immigrant family.

K

In a democracy, we are not given the vote because we are responsible, or reasonable, or know what civilisation 'costs'; rather, we are given the vote because we are subject to the laws. To the extent that our society is in deep trouble, I believe it is to the extent that our laws are made by the owners of large amounts of property—actual people legislating and lobby, in the latter case often for unnatural 'persons' created by the State and so with a great interest in controlling it. They make laws which are often better for them than for the rest of us.

I don't believe that a society in which it seems like mostly military veterans constitute the electorate would long hold true to values and make decisions that would seem reasonable to the non-voting majority. It is in fact _emphasised_ that the veteran is a very different sort of person from the non-veteran; this is presented as evidence for his (and in the book, much more so than in the movie, it is overwhelmingly 'his') superior ability to govern, but can also be seen as the seed of this system's not working, at least as a representative democracy. I find it hard to believe that veterans wouldn't largely be the children of other veterans—they would have been raised with the values emphasising military service's value and rightness, and (as importantly) would understand the ins and outs of service, particularly how to survive Boot intact. I think the veterans would quickly become functionally equivalent to an aristocracy, simultaneously resented and aped, and prone to flaunting the laws because those laws would have been made for a general population whom they believe to be, in the end, not as good as they.

Even if the hereditary possibility were discounted, I think the essential point remains: the veteran is trumpetted as being a very different type of person from the shirker of his duties…as such, he is in fact unsuited to being the sole sort of person making laws and decisions for all.

(Heinlein said that he wanted to say that 95% of veterans were non-military servers, but fails at conveying this in the book, so it is fair to read it this way—non-military service is given short shrift, and no real sense of its prevalence is conveyed.)

I love the movie (something like a satirical Riefenstahl in the Hollywood of the 90s) and I nominated it last year for Lee Price's Doubling the Canon (by the way we miss you here), but CFB's regulars disagree. And now it is in the Canon!

P.S.: Another outstanding fan of the movie is Dominique Païni.

* Today I popped up in a couple of interesting places on the Internet. For starters, there’s the new comic by me and Matt Rota that I mentioned earlier, now playing at Top Shelf 2.0. * Next, I’m the subject……