A few weeks ago, I stopped in a used book store I hadn’t visited in a long while. I picked up some old paperback science fiction novels. One that shed quite a bit of light on contemporary politics was Jerry Pournelle’s 1977 High Justice. There’s the requisite dose of grandiose technological fantasy- fusion powered tugs hauling icebergs to deserts, massive ocean thermal energy conversion projects, brain implants giving individuals instant access to computer networks, and of course space stations and asteroid mining. There is also a grim political landscape in which all governments are hopelessly corrupt and only multinational corporations run by visionary billionaires can deliver industrial development, and they only if they are left unaccountable to anyone or anything.

The characters are pure cardboard, simply illustrations of whatever tendency the author is trying to depict. When he wants to make some harsh remarks about Africa south of the Sahara, he first tells us that the people who speak them are black; when he wants to say something that could be taken as demeaning to women, he gives the lines to a figure with a given name like “Laurie Jo” or “Ann.” Not that the white men are realized any more substantially, but at least they are not always sock puppets for his own potentially objectionable views. Sometimes they are sock puppets for opinions he disagrees with.

Pournelle’s political ideas are summed up in this exchange between utterly idealistic liberal politician Aeneas MacKenzie and utterly realistic billionaire Laurie Jo Hansen:

“Laurie Jo, should power like yours exist?”

“Without power, none of this would exist. You can’t do anything without power.”

“Yes.” They’d been through it before, endlessly. “But it must be responsible power. It must be directed for–“

“For what, Aeneas? Something trite, like ‘the betterment of mankind’? Who chooses the goals? And how do you see that the choice is kept, once made? Responsible, Aeneas? To the people? You tried that.”

Jerry Pournelle, High Justice, New York 1977, page 100.

And that’s it- the dash following “directed for” is all the consideration given to political theory, the branch of philosophy concerned with the questions “Who chooses the goals?” and “How do you see that the choice is kept, once made?” And “You tried that” is all the consideration given to the idea of government in the name of the people. Books like Pournelle’s had an obvious influence on the multi-billionaires whose voices are so loud in today’s politics; his grisly vision is not the weakest of the many factors that drive their behavior.