Classic Heinlein quote from Tunnel in the Sky. A truth we need to always bear in mind when we start to expect too much from politicians.
I inhaled every Heinlein book and I am a fan but in his later years he became blatantly fascist and by the time he rolled out The Number of the Beast I think he had lost his fucking mind.
I think that came at the tail end of his brain tumor, before the operation.
Number of the Beast was bizarre. Stopping in Oz and getting a bathroom for the spaceship there?! OMG.
Later works may have oddities that can be attributed to his cognitive issues (TIA and a blocked carotid, at one point), but don't explain the reeking mess of misogyny and racism that is Farnham's Freehold, written much earlier. I was a fan, but there are novels like that which I can say nothing good about, and advise SF fans to steer around, and rather remember his genius moments. His meanderings between anarchism, libertarianism, Goldwater conservative, and more liberal views, are wildly confusing and I tend to see him as a philosophical seeker who sometimes didn't get out of his white affluent California enclave enough.