Pedantically, the obvious “bad guys” in the earliest few, not the (so far, at least) principal bad guys of the whole series, who it turns out were also manipulating those obvious, early ones.

> It's an interesting take on what might happen.

It's kind of a shallow throwaway regurgitation of a standard argument without deep exploration or novel insight (which is okay, because it's not like Havenite society under the People's Republic is all that central a focus of any of the books, so shallow cartoonish broad strokes are fine.)

Though David Weber has his own pro-monarchy pro-libertarian ironically-not-racist thing going on, he just assigns random evil acts to random characters coincidentally named after his opponents, like having the Progressive Party actually be into human trafficking.

(When SF authors get old they all develop terrible opinions a while before anyone notices. Like Larry Niven wrote a book about the Green Party causing an ice age by stopping climate change and Arthur C Clarke became a pedophile. Heinlein, of course, started out that way.)

IIRC, the Party, per se, wasn't, though a leader of that party was an agent of an organization that was.