I don't imagine the eventual Mars settlers will want to pretend and be under the control of the (US|Chinese|British|etc) governments, at least once there's a significant number of them. Wouldn't they want to form their own nation there? It'd be interesting to see how a society progresses when it's virtually under no threat of war or foreign hostilities at all... It'd also be a great way to reduce existential risk.
Some political ramblings, feel free to stop reading.. I lost some respect for Obama when he extrapolated numerous things well beyond his possible term limits, the space program specifically. I want to see him try and do more exciting things while in office. Though I believe the limited budget is starting to make NASA be more innovative again.
Political autonomy is fine, but remember this is not going to be like colonization on Earth where an ordinary citizen could actually just buy passage on a boat to America themselves. Getting the "chosen few" to Mars is going to require that ordinary taxpayers, who will never get to go themselves, make sacrifices. Is it worth it? Well I personally think it is, but that's up to the voters. However for the colonists to then turn around and say "screw you, suckers" is unreasonable.
He has a couple of interesting ideas, but the books are really badly written. He suffers from "hero inflation". Shortly after arriving on Mars his characters quite literally cure cancer and devise an political-economic system that works and that everyone agrees is completely fair. This is inbetween partying, taking drugs and getting laid non-stop. Which is fine, but it's barely even sci-fi, is there such a thing as the "space'n'shopping" genre?
After reading your comment I must say that I'm somewhat left with the impression that you must have read a different book than I did.
Most of the Mars Trilogy just discusses the colonization and the issues that come up with doing so. There's a lot of discussion about setting up different sort of habitats, a space elevator, greenhouses etc. Much of this is discussed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAu5PD4OS-w#t=5m00s
There's certainly a lot of KSR's politics that bleed out of that, but he doesn't take the easy way out. His characters don't magically cure cancer, they come up with an assortment of medical treatment that among other things reduce cell division error, given the timescales involved (2020-2200) it's not unplausable that something like that would be invented.
They don't come up with a political system that everyone agrees with. There's a civil war over it (and almost another one). The end product is a federated system on Mars where each colony on the planet has control over its own affairs within some limits. Terraforming is a federal issue, so is water management, the right to health care and other things like that. The full text of the constitution is available in "The Martians". It's quite interesting.
Finally out of around 100k lines in the novel around 100 contain the word "sex". That's a fuzzy metric, but I didn't find that it discussed partying, drugs and sex out of proportion.
Some political ramblings, feel free to stop reading.. I lost some respect for Obama when he extrapolated numerous things well beyond his possible term limits, the space program specifically. I want to see him try and do more exciting things while in office. Though I believe the limited budget is starting to make NASA be more innovative again.