I think we pin way too much on the word "democracy". It is more than just voting and the Bill of Rights that gave us our greatness. Look at our early Constitution for example. Even though it had noble ideals behind it, it still allowed incredible disparity in human potential based on race, gender, and economic status. What got us to the powerhouse and unified culture we are today is too complicated to wrap up in a few democratic milestones. We had incredible amounts of natural resources including huge amounts of open and virtually uninhabited land to expand into. We had basically a common language and religion. We had common adversity and hardship that tended to bind us together. We had a slave population that added to our economic strength. (I'm not advocating this by the way). We had amazing luck as well. A few inches either way in bullet travel and we'd have lost some of our most influential leaders. Those leaders were unusual as well for the times. It's been well documented that a great deal of the original framers were extremely free thinkers, unbound by religious dogma that had so hampered their European counterparts.

We went through a lot of grief in the U.S. becoming a truly democratic nation. A good case can be made that we weren't a true democracy until the passage of the voting rights laws in the 60s. How long after the Constitution was signed did that happen?

As for some of the rest, I'm not sure as much of this is true as you think. We did have a wide range of religious beliefs in our history, and initially, it was not unconstitutional for states to have official religions. Common language? We had many cultures and languages immigrating into this country, and many remained in cultural enclaves for a long time.

That slaves significantly added to America's economic strength is a myth, mostly pushed by reparations groups. The industrial north's economic power dwarfed that of the South in the 1860s, with 90 percent of business activity in the North, and twice the population. Mechanized farming would have wiped out slavery in short order even if the Civil War and emancipation had never happened.