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Notes -
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.
Voting also has the problem that it tends to reflect the preferences of coalitions that can organise well in order to provide concentrated benefits to voting blocks (NIMBYs, trade unions, pearl-clutching environmentalists, activist grifters, retirees etc.) rather than disorganised groups whose policy preferences would provide dispersed benefits to heterogenous voters (taxpayers being among the biggest victims of democracy). And as you suggest, good long-term policies are undersupplied by politicians, because politicians generally lack incentives to think long-term. This contrasts with a lot of even short-term business: if I buy a house to fix up and resale, then I want to be able to convince buyers that it's a good long-term investment.
I'm not saying that there is a better alternative, but even Churchill's "Democracy is the worst system of government, save the alternatives" is a pro tanto argument against government as much as it is in favour of democracy.
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