Yes, that would certainly seem to be one of the prime lessons of a remarkable book I am reading now, "India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Greatest Democracy" (HarperCollins, 2007) by Ramachandra Guha. India dwarfs every other exercise in democratic nation-building ever conducted: Never has there been such an ambitious and successful effort to meld diverse ethnic groups into a stable democratic state while also building a modern technological economy. It's fascinating to see how newly independent India made such a systematic study of centralized economic planning in both the USSR *and* the US (e.g., examining the success of the Tennessee Valley Authority), and how India made such a concerted effort to develop the tools needed (e.g., advanced techniques in gathering and analyzing economic data) to make centralized economic planning viable. All in all, India has done an extraordinary job melding the dynamics of technocracy and democratic civil rights with respect for multitudinous ancient ethnic and religious beliefs.
While I haven't finished Guha's fascinating book, my impression so far is that India offers a much more impressive and inspiring example of democratic nation-building than the US does.
Carl