“...liberals still worship the weird old guy..”
It seems a lot of conservatives like him too.
I tried “Stranger in a Strange Land” twice. Once in about 8th grade when the whole class was reading it as an assignment. A sufficient number of us hated it sufficiently so we voted to read another book. Interestingly I have no idea what that other book was but have never forgotten SIASL.
I tried it again years later, but just couldn’t, you know, grok it.
I suspect the FReepers that like his later works are more of a libertarian bent than conservative, if not liberal sleepers, like one on this thread cheering his work.
When I read his stuff as a teenager, I just read for the SF. Later on, I noticed the free-sex and other creepy stuff threaded through. SIASL is a very creepy book.