If you look at polling, the people are usually better than the politicians at long term planning.
This seems to be generally true in history too. That's a big reason why propaganda is a thing. Having to convince lots of people to do something not in their interests is hard work.
Democracy is messy, and imperfect but it gets attacked from both sides, the people who think the rich and powerful have too much control of it and the ones that want the rich and powerful to have more control.
It's easy to be cynical but generally every small step towards greater democracy has paid off.
With regards to old people voting, the answer is more young people voting, not taking votes away from older people.
Even many counter-examples you might think of, like early USSR and modern China, were often reactions against even more anti-democratic rule and can be considered steps towards greater democracy.
And this is not a new thing, many of the things we study in classics are the reactions against greater democracy:
> As Robert Dahl writes, "Although the practices of modern democracy bear only a weak resemblance to the political institutions of classical Greece...Greek democratic ideas have been more influential...[and] what we know of their ideas comes less from the writings and speeches of democratic advocates, of which only fragments survive, than from their critics."[9]
> Aristotle was a mild critic "who disliked the power that he thought the expansion of democracy necessarily gave to the poor."[9] Plato was an opponent of democracy who advocated for "government by the best qualified."
This seems to be generally true in history too. That's a big reason why propaganda is a thing. Having to convince lots of people to do something not in their interests is hard work.
Democracy is messy, and imperfect but it gets attacked from both sides, the people who think the rich and powerful have too much control of it and the ones that want the rich and powerful to have more control.
It's easy to be cynical but generally every small step towards greater democracy has paid off.
With regards to old people voting, the answer is more young people voting, not taking votes away from older people.
Even many counter-examples you might think of, like early USSR and modern China, were often reactions against even more anti-democratic rule and can be considered steps towards greater democracy.
And this is not a new thing, many of the things we study in classics are the reactions against greater democracy:
> As Robert Dahl writes, "Although the practices of modern democracy bear only a weak resemblance to the political institutions of classical Greece...Greek democratic ideas have been more influential...[and] what we know of their ideas comes less from the writings and speeches of democratic advocates, of which only fragments survive, than from their critics."[9]
> Aristotle was a mild critic "who disliked the power that he thought the expansion of democracy necessarily gave to the poor."[9] Plato was an opponent of democracy who advocated for "government by the best qualified."