Both are continent-sized countries in the western hemisphere with federal democracies in which state governments have considerable power.
But democracies in which leaders would simply deny the trend are mocking what freedom of speech was intended to achieve.
We're much more like many Latin-American "democracies" in which there is a nominal head of state who cannot really take on the military-industrial complex.
Mr Kapur says the world is dominated by "fiat currency democracies" in which governments and central banks tend to give in to popular pressure and "print money" to avoid hard times.
The two countries also share the experience of running big, expensive, religious, materialistic and messy democracies in which central governments are constrained by powerful states.America is now one of India's biggest weapons suppliers.
If there is a world that the US leads now, it is the increasingly unfree world of the new "managed democracies", in which ethnic nationalism and media control fuel elected dictatorships.
Replying to the assertion that "pure democracy" would be "the most perfect government," he declared, "no position is politics is more false" because "the ancient democracies, in which the people themselves deliberated, never possessed one feature of good government".
He also argues for the emergence of internal markets and of "democracies"—in which decisions are based on the collective wisdom of the many rather than the top-down instructions of a few.Companies where employees are given more control over their working conditions seem to generate better returns than those that give their people less responsibility.
Democracies have problems with heroes, and democracies in which most people believe that human character is principally fashioned by environment find it hard to believe in the existence of, let alone to worship, the kind of overwhelming natural brilliance that Carlyle found in his heroes.
My own view, based in the conviction that Pax Americana cannot endure another 60 years in its current form, is that a NATO now tacitly or explicitly working for the defense and expansion of the liberal democratic order — a task with no obvious geographical limit — must in time evolve into an alliance of democracies in which the likes of Japan, India and Australia would logically take their place.
When the young Turks leave, they discard the old ways of senior partners and junior staff in favor of "flat partnerships," democracies in which decisions and financial rewards are equally shared and there are no junior staffers to lean on.
