I'd like to believe that Democracy has systematic benefits, but we don't have enough data points to say that for sure.

You can easily argue that the rise of Democracy in the 20th century is simply because the United States won world war 2 and the cold war, and all other countries adopted Democracy just to emulate the US.

If Germany had discovered the atomic bomb before the US (which arguably could have happened if history were just slightly, randomly different), the world could be radically different. We could all be arguing right now that Democracy is just too weak to survive.

What? The US wasn’t the only country with democracy before World War 2.

There have been democracies since the ancient era.

I'm saying that before World War 2 you wouldn't generally consider Democracy to be the default paradigm for how nations were governed.

That’s reasonable, but I don’t think it’s fair to say everyone else just emulated he US.

There were many other democracies, and pro-democracy movements that preceded WW2 and had nothing to do with the US.