This makes even less sense than I first noticed.

The Robert Heinlein geek fan who compares Newt Gingrich to a Heinleinian hero writes:

To a generation of middle-aged voters who grew up on Heinlein and the writers he influenced, the Gingrich message and the Gingrich style have a real resonance. You can see this in how Gingrich has successfully positioned himself as the defiant individualist in his challenging of the media establishment and how easily voters have been convinced to dismiss his unconventional personal life. The fully realized individual is above conventional morality and is not accountable to anyone but himself. The more Gingrich defies those who would judge him the more he proves that he is the kind of individualistic superman which Heinlein's writing has convinced us that we all ought to be. We identify with Gingrich and live vicariously through him, more like a literary character than a real human being.

Uh, what about Gingrich's conversion to Catholicism? I don't think Catholic moral teaching advocates that the self-actualized Catholic becomes a "fully realized individual . . . above conventional morality and . . . not accountable to anyone but himself," much less attain the status of an "individualistic superman." If anyone could become like a Heinleinian superman in real life, I doubt he would go to a Catholic priest for confession. If anything, a priest might seek out the Heinleinian superman for advice.

The idea of a "Heinleinian Republican" deserves further study. People have already noticed and written about Ayn Rand's influence on modern conservatism. I have Gary Weiss's new book on order, for example. Heinlein's life nearly coincides with Rand's, yet he wrote a lot more, over a longer period of time, and in a way which reached about the same kind of demographic as Rand's novels. It wouldn't surprise me if the evidence supports the case that he likewise exerted an unacknowledged but substantial influence on the thinking of the American right in the early 21st Century.