Fwiw, America started to make its democracy prior to the French revolution, i.e. it is old as fuck. The USA has encouraged democracy all around the world, ostensibly even serving as a role model to its parent the UK that at the time the USA broke away was still fully a monarchy under King George III, but in all that time it has not updated its own system processes.

Nor did it really see a need - e.g. a few decades ago the two sides were more similar than they had ever been previously (obviously not in their talking points but in their actual actions after being elected) - but recently people have revealed how easily the system is to game.

And even deeper than that, the forces of automation and globalization seem to have pulled the wealthy away from having a sense of investment in the nation doing well, to now no longer caring. So while before, they worked alongside the nation to accomplish all of our shared goals - e.g. to not be nuked by Russia during the cold war - now they just (ab)use its populace until robots can manage to replace them, without paying in anywhere close to what they take out. The CGP Grey video Rules for Rulers really opened my eyes, and supremely depressed me, to learn how that works.:-(

But anyway no, I would not look to the USA as the epitome of democracy in today’s era. It is loud, it has Hollywood, it has nukes, it supplies weapons to other places and has the world’s largest economy, but as far as democracy, it greatly lags behind the likes of the EU, with significantly healthier processes.

… and America is supposed to represent the standard for the rest of the world’s democracies?

I’m pretty sure nobody outside America thinks that.