Regarding our current crisis in U.S. democracy, let’s step back and take a global view.
We set the pace in many or most things political and moral, even when we get it wrong. As motivated students of Western Empire, Japanese nobility and intelligentsia of the late 1800s closely followed art movements of Berlin, Paris and Los Angeles, imported architects, philosophers and professors from the West and studied best practices for infrastructure and public utilities (such as factories, railroads and military occupation).
But, despite every effort to comply, in the end the U.S. rejected the Japanese as “too different from us.