Wittenberg church, in the American and French revolutions, in the silent fatal cracking of Ghandi’s India and Mandela’s South Africa. We know that no political system that doesn’t match the power distribution of the society it governs can endure. Feudal order could not survive the pressures of liberty. Can democracy withstand the pressures of enmeshment, of massive concentration of power, of artificial intelligences. Or will the slow, inefficient reaction time of popular voting prove finally unequal to the complexity ahead of us or too easy to manipulate? Writing of the Enlightenment, the historian Leon-Michel Gambetta once explained that the goal of politics in the age of liberation and questioning was, “to derive the political and social system from the idea of reason rather than that of grace.” What to do now? In a world where we may need to derive a political system girded by tools of Al or wired by fast-moving and emergent networks, that can’t quite be derived from reason? What will the goal of politics be then? When the first AI runs for President on a ticket of pure efficacy? Or perhaps Democratic and Reblican candidates will debate who has the best AI. How will you vote? We need already to reevaluate the idea of citizenship. What is it for? And the state too. To fit these roles into an age of liberation took centuries after Luther began the reformation; we may have but decades to decide what they mean in an age of enmsemhment. Does setting geographic and age criteria for voting still make sense? One man one vote? Is there a better system to deal with complex issues? The economists Daron Aceomoglu and James Robinson, in their magestirial study Why Nations Fail marked success or collapse by these lines: Countries with “inclusive” institutions which guarded both elites and society at large have historically fared better than those (think of Russia or Latin America) that ran on “extractive” urges, nations machined to secure the profits and serenity of the elites