There's a really interesting multi-part series called Brows Held High: Starship Troopers about the fundamental differences between Heinlein and Verhooven and what each was trying to say, between Heinlein's original and Verhooven's interpretation.

For what it's worth, I don't think Heinlein was fascist or even fascist-sympathetic. If you read more of his fiction and, my personal favorite, his non-fiction book Take Back Your Government, which is about how and why to get involved in democratic politics, you get a much more complete view of a really interesting guy. Some of his views were fair or even highly-progressive for their time. Some were weird and gross. But he's not one could simply stick a "Fuck That Fascist" pin in and walk away.

Yeah, ever since reading it, I've been confused by seemingly everyone's complete certainty that Heinlein was portraying the militarism of the troopers as a good thing. I thought it was abundantly clear that we were being specifically shown that the "bugs" these yokels were firebombing were just people, in their homes watching TV, as the alien invaders rocket jumped from rooftop to rooftop, indiscriminately killing anything that moved. IIRC, everyone in the book seemed to have a gut feeling that the original attack on earth was actually retaliatory at least, or a false flag at worst.

I thought it was about as pro-military as fucking Full Metal Jacket. Yeah, it makes it a big point that there's a deep camaraderie borne out of being forced to do awful things together, but it also looks as deeply into those awful things as it can, while it's being told from the perspectives of indoctrinated "children ardent for some desperate glory"

Maybe I need to reread it and look for more of the authorial pro-fascism stuff. I don't think that Heinlein put a lot of effort into trying to convince anyone that the troopers were bad, but all the signs were there by authorial intent, IIRC.

For me it was the part of the book where people didn’t get to vote until their term of service was over, but the people who could vote could vote to increase the terms of service indefinitely, and this was all shown as a good thing. I read it as a perfect satirical demonstration of how limiting the franchise will always lead to fascism, but apparently mine wasn’t the intended interpretation, because it wasn’t satire.

I never finished Stranger in a Strange Land because I found it shockingly sexist