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Re the franchise, I think you’re half right. The problem isn’t women voting, it’s the voting. It’s a terrible way to make decisions in almost every situation because it turns every contest into a popularity contest. More political power rests in the PR and image creation teams than in any policy think tank. In fact if you want real power, it’s more important to project a popular image than to waste time learning how to govern, or studying issues. Any policy you have is about applause lines, it doesn’t have to work or make sense, but it better sound good when you say it on TV.
Empathy, and in fact most emotions run things because they’re easy to manipulate. Emotions are fairly easy to tap into and tend to short circuit any sort of logical, fact-based discussion of issues. But no long-term good decisions can be made when the path forward it to appeal to empathy, fear, or anger. You cannot empathically force drug users into treatment— the emotion makes you want to help, but it also means that solutions whether they work or not that sound mean won’t be available choices. You can’t kick disruptive kids out of class — it’s mean. But then nobody gets an education. You can do the same with fear. Guns are scary. Banning them seems to work. But it also means that you’re dependent upon the cops who might take a while to get there or do something.
Democratic systems have other flaws. They tend to select the worst candidates most of the time. Watch any election in your country and ask whether — given their resume and command of the issues and so on — you’d hire them for an important project. Nobody would hire Joe Biden, or Trump or Bernie or MTG or AOC to do anything important. But these are exactly the kinds of “leaders” we produce. They do well in focus groups, they dress the part, and that’s how we distribute power. They are beset by short term thinking. Solving a problem like homelessness will take decades. Putting a man on Mars, again decades. Fixing and modernizing schools, again, probably decades. But our elections are every two years— this is an extremely short window in which to “show progress”. Worse, the painful part — the taxes, the road cones, the traffic jams — all show up long before any of the benefits can be realized.
I don't think is true more so than any other potential method of selection. The average democratic leader in the world right now seems pretty clearly superior to the average autocratic leader even when only comparing peer nations, if nothing else because democratic systems usually (though of course not always) seem to exclude the truly deranged; for every Ataturk you get several Mobutus, Amins and Kims.
True, but autocratic leaders are hardly immune from that; see Galtieri.
I mean let’s make a fair comparison and compare democracies to, not autocracies as a whole, but to the different types of autocracy and oligarchy.
So there’s the various remaining strong monarchies, which are generally well run and doing well or at least improving by their own terms even if they’re not your cup of tea. There’s PRC style oligarchies(and the PRC maintains the world’s highest level of trust in government- it clearly does some things right). There’s postsoviet kleptocracies, which are not doing so hot, and there’s short term strongman dictatorships which look pretty terrible. There’s also hybrid regimes like Hungary and Singapore, which seem to be doing at least OK.
Altogether it’s not clear that democracy is strictly superior to all options. Definitely superior to some, though, and probably superior on some axes(minority rights and freedom of expression seem plausible here) to all challengers, but also probably losing out to others on other axes(stability/cultural continuity seems plausible).
I think those three better looking forms of non-democratic governance still seems pretty deficient in the round compared to democracy. As for monarchies, the few remaining strong monarchies seem to mostly be coasting by on oil money, and arguably NK is a monarchy in all but name, and while the PRC and some hybrid regimes seem pretty stable that stability seems pretty transient. Chinese stability especially is pretty recent, and I'm not sure Singapore as a well-placed city state has many lessons to offer other more normal nations. Hungary is I guess doing fine, but hardly better than it's more safely democratic counterparts in Czechia, Poland etc.
Obviously this is a question more complex than a short forum comment, but just on the face of it I don't there's any particular reason to believe any form of non-democratic government produces notably more competent leaders.
Morocco and Malaysia are fairly strong monarchies doing better than average for the region and generally on the upswing for mostly non-oil related reasons. Liechtenstein is also a strong monarchy that’s carved out a pretty good niche for itself, although obvious micro state caveat. Jordan doesn’t seem like it’s notable for improvement recently, but it’s weathered recent challenges admirably well.
I agree that it’s difficult to cast hybrid regimes as obviously better than democracies, but it’s also difficult to cast them as obviously worse. Part of this is probably boundary effects and if we want to have a real discussion(obviously this thread is the wrong place for that as you yourself note) we should preregister what we consider a hybrid regime versus a democracy that’s simply corrupt(Ukraine) or dominated by one party(Japan) or both(Mexico).
As far as oligarchies are concerned I’d point to China and Rwanda as strong examples of countries that improved recently and notably after switching to oligarchic governance even if that oligarchy may not be my cup of tea. I might point to Kazakhstan as a weaker example, too. In any case this really is a topic that deserves its own top level comment if we wanted to get in depth, but my broader point was that there’s lots of different non-democratic systems and not all of them have a blatantly one sided comparison to democracy.
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Well, true, if you’re looking at the current crop. But over the sum and total of history you’d have Augustus Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, Napoleon, Peter the Great, etc. And those who took power with an intention to rule often managed to fix problems in ways that elected managers cannot.
I mean if you have to reach back two millennia it's clear that history is not really replete with such characters. And in any case, there are plenty of democratic leaders who could well be said to fall into the same camp; Lincoln, Gladstone, Churchill, Peel and depending on what your ideological disposition is Attlee or Thatcher. I don't really subscribe to great man theory much but even if one did there are plenty of elected leaders who fit the mould.
Lee Kwan Yew, Paul Kagame, Park Chung Hee, and the Hashemite Kings are all well-within-living-memory examples of non-democratic but very high competency statesmanship. There's obviously examples of democratically elected leaders that could be counted as greats, as well, but I don't think "benevolent dictator" is the kind of black swan event you're making it out to be.
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