It's interesting that Noonan views the Presidency largely in terms of information processing.

"The special prosecutors, the scandals, the spin for the scandals, nuclear proliferation, wars and natural disasters, Iraq, stem cells, earthquakes, the background of the Supreme Court backup pick, how best to handle the security problems at the port of Newark, how to increase production of vaccines, tort reform..." etc.

Clearly the input is overwhelming and decision-making is incapacitated. So the obvious solution is to delegate the processing to more capable algorithms, when they emerge. And then the decision-making. President AI. The election campaign based on how the machine performed in extreme simulation. Live trials on TV.

[one of the reasons Stalin was so 'successful' was that his brain was a vast and meticulous data processor. Even after vodka-bingeing Stalin's brain still found the time to veto cartoons scheduled to go into the next day's Pravda.]

sd - Absolutely. The US central processing unit is melting down under conditions of distributed excitational overload. Singularity Revolutions are evidently going to vaporize all politico-managerial structures that fail to radically decentralize into high-speed experimental processing mode.

Kaplan's 'The Coming Anarchy' seems to suggest that the only way out of these political doldrums is to focus on values rather than on political systems.

Noonan sees democracy as coming off the rails in the US, while Kaplan describes the attempts to plant and nurture democracy abroad as at best futile, and at worst sowing the seeds of chaos and tyranny - in either case democracy doesn't seem to have much of a future as a political system. However, it might have a future as a set of core values that are agreed upon as being worth fighting for.

So in the future the US might have to openly acknowledge that it is despotic and authoritarian in its war against other values, and in its imposition of values, by stating in no uncertain terms what cannot be tolerated.

What are the core values encoded in the nucleus of the modern democratic meme?

sd - given that Kaplan chapter, Zakaria, and current events, a serious democracy discussion is obviously in order.