Technically these aren't incompatible: it's possible that democracy doesn't work but nothing else does either— there's no natural law that says there must be a system of political and social organization which actually works in the world we have now. I have been drifting in this direction myself the last few years; it's discouraging, but it seems to be the only conclusion supported by the evidence.
That's true, but there is a natural law that says that there must be some system of political and social organization that gets employed in practice, so hopefully we can identify the least ineffective one.
It works ok in the short term. Note that most democracies (especially the current best performing ones) are extremely young despite the idea being ancient.
You see this on smaller scales as well. Most of people's complaints about "capitalism" are really about the short sighted decisions corporate leadership often make because it has to answer to an anonymous mob of shareholders.
The only thing that actually works is good leadership with long term vision and if anything democracy gets in the way of that.
The benefit of democracy is that it has somewhat of a self-correcting mechanism build in and it functions without violence. Autocracies don't have that.
You say Democracies have a short track record. While this is true in the grand scheme of things, each individual non-Democracy that came before did as well. Rulers conquered each other's countries, usurped the current leaders etc. quite regularly. I'm not sure I'd count that as stable and longer-lasting.
Autocracies have plenty of self-correction mechanisms. Generally each level is sustained by some kind of grudging consent from the levels above and below.
Right. Usually there is 100% authority in some kind of dictator. You instead have something that is more like an oligarchy. You have different interest groups with varying levels of influence. In some sense democracy works like this too. Every society has stakeholders that need to be bought off or suppressed and there are various equilibria on how that is done.
There's the problem of scale, and also of duration. Let's say Lee Kuan Yew genuinely wants what's best for Singapore as a whole. How do you ensure that the next autocrat will be equally benign?
This is the exact issue. There is a lot more variance in autocrats. You can get Lee Kuan Yew and you can get Kaiser Wilhelm. With democracy you are much more likely to get something in the middle. In the end of the day the cost of an bad autocrat is higher than the opportunity cost of a milk toast government compared to Lee Kuan Yew. China is still catching up from the Mao years.
I do work that social media will change this though
Both actually. Milquetoast was a fictional character used to characterize extreme timidity, as if he were the personification of milk toast.
Eventually, the name became a synonym for the attitude. But the name comes from the food
