Yes! (But also no) The problem is that in the "western world" there are complex systems designed to preserve both widespread individual liberty as well as cons

Yes! (But also no) The problem is that in the "western world" there are complex systems designed to preserve both widespread individual liberty as well as consensual governance (for convenience I'll call these "free systems"). However, we tend to merely label these systems as "democracy" even though many other systems that have popular voting can exist which do not offer the same protections of liberty and consensual governance. This terminology and modeling problem makes it more difficult to spread the aforementioned "free systems" of government because it's very much more difficult to elucidate all of the factors behind such systems, some of which are socio-cultural and economic. One common pattern in "unfree" countries that have experienced bouts of democracy is for there to be a popular vote that brings in a government that then ends all of the democratic institutions. This has happened routinely for well over a century. Another problem is that you have a corrupt group in power with few checks on their authority and they simply rig every election in one way or another. I think it's mistaken to believe that it takes generations for a country to be ready for freedom and effective democracy merely because naive attempts to set up democracies can easily fail. I think it's also a mistake to assume that countries with long histories of democratic institutions and liberty are comparatively immune to collapses of those institutions. Much like the situation with economics we tend to live within political systems which rest on foundations that are not widely well understood, if at all, and rarely even discussed in depth at an abstract foundational level. It's no wonder it's so difficult for countries to try to bootstrap their way to democracy and it's a bit of a shock that our own systems of government in the "free" world work as well as they do.