Most democracies have elections every 4 or 5 years. That is good, in that we can get rid of underperforming politicians and parties. But it is bad, in that there isn't a lot of incentive for politicians and parties to plan over a longer timescale than 4 or 5 years.
China has the opposite problem. It can plan and finance long term projects. But there is little prospect of peacefully changing the leadership.
Long-term planning on a colossal scale (like nation-state-level) (or even on a not-so-colossal scale - think of how many plans YOU have made and how they turned out) is pointless because of black swans
Sure, having a general idea of where you want things to go is fine, and everyone already does that; but when a government starts thinking that they should set a concrete goal X and they should do Y to achieve it, it's just akin to trying to predict the future, and we all know how well that always works out, because theyre under the faulty premise of thinkin Y will be constant forever, or that even the goal itself (X) should remain constant in a world that is anything but constant
So, this is a terrible argument for not having elections, or bigger election cycles. I'm sure someone could potentially put forward a better argument, but this one is not it
I think the way that democratic governments can achieve these long-term plans is by establishing (or using existing) entities to complete these goals on their behalf.
An example that comes to mind is the Apollo program: JFK announced a national goal to land a man on the moon in 1961 and this was finally achieved in 1969 - two presidencies (Johnson, Nixon) and one change of party (Dem->Rep) later - with NASA being that independent responsible entity.
Yes, but this sort of thing seems increasingly unlikely in an ever more partisan world. Especially when would-be autocrats are wrecking as many institutions as they can.
China has the opposite problem. It can plan and finance long term projects. But there is little prospect of peacefully changing the leadership.