I've no doubt that if we plopped you down in the middle of, say, modern-day Russia, you'd be able to observe a few important differences in the political organization of the two countries.

Fewer than you would a year or nine ago, certainly, and a lot of people are working very hard on closing the gap.

Democracy is a spectrum. There have always been significant flaws with American democracy, but you'd be mad to not observe significant, active regression and effort by the government to replace it with something else.

Unfortunately this is unrealistic as we cannot travel to both countries easily.