The late President Jimmy Carter, whose funeral service was held in Washington earlier today, gave his farewell presidential address to the nation on January 14, 1981. He opened the speech with the following sentence: “In a few days I will lay down my official responsibilities in this office, to take up once more the only title in our democracy superior to that of President, the title of citizen.” Even the president himself was acknowledging his subordinate status in relation to the ordinary citizen.

From Alexis de Tocqueville in the nineteenth century to the most recent person who arrives in America having grown up elsewhere, everyone is confounded by the nature of the citizen they meet in this country. I was, when I traveled to these shores almost thirty-three years ago. After all these years, and having become an American citizen myself, learning a lot about the nation’s history along the way, I am still scratching my head trying to figure out exactly how the natives acquired their character.

Form of government is a subject that I think about almost constantly these days. It has become quite clear to me that the success or failure of any nation strongly depends on the nature of the relationship between the individual and the state. If that connection is not properly established, almost nothing else matters. Unfortunately, in too many countries across the world today, the link between the ordinary citizen and the state is either nonexistent or too weak. As a result, just a handful people are able to hijack the machinery of government to serve their narrow interests.

Throughout history, different nations have tried different modes of governance. Because of human thirst for freedom, participatory democracy, which allows citizens to have a say in who governs them and what rights they can enjoy, happens to be the preferred form of government for most people around the world. Many societies in Europe and elsewhere have successfully transitioned from their previous systems of rule to democracy. For others, the journey has been a monumental struggle.

On the voyage to democracy, the practice in many places, especially in Africa and other parts of the developing world, has been the adoption of American-style government. Most countries have set up political institutions that are quite similar to America’s. And they hold parliamentary and presidential elections as regularly as America does. Despite all that, nothing seems to work. That frustration has led increasingly large numbers of people in those societies to conclude that American-style democracy is unfit for them.

This struggle to reach the promised land is one that I have watched with a great deal of fascination for quite some time. The problem, as I see it, is with the nature of the citizen, not democracy. On the surface, it does appear as though the president, Congress, and the broader administrative state rule America. The reality is that it is the citizens who do.

As de Tocqueville observed in his book, Democracy in America, American society is unlike any other on this planet in the way it governs itself. He wrote that “The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe.” De Tocqueville had come to America from a European continent where aristocracy was still a prevalent form of government. Thus, the ordinary Frenchman or German at the time didn’t have the sense of autonomy that de Tocqueville saw in Americans.

In his book, They Thought They Were Free, Milton Mayer remarked that it was difficult to convince ordinary Germans in the 1950s to bear any culpability for the crimes of the Third Reich. He wrote that “The German people have never, as single individuals, had to assume the responsibility of sovereignty over their government.” He went on to say that “The self-governing American regards his government as his mere agent, an animated tool in his hand. If it doesn’t suit his purposes, he discards it and tries a new one. He, the constituent, constitutes the State; his ministers minister to him.”

I grew up in Ghana, where generally, ministers of state don’t think of themselves as public servants. In their minds, they are overlords. And that, unfortunately, is how most of the citizens see the ministers. They worship them accordingly. The general notion within the populace is that the country is a democracy. But they have the whole thing backward. It is no wonder that the system is not working. To get American-style democracy to function in a place like Ghana, you almost need to first cultivate American-type citizens. However, that requires a heavy dose of civic education and patient study of history and sociology to figure out how this enigmatic person called an American came about. Those are exercises that no one seems to have the time and stamina for, unfortunately.

Americans themselves make this grave mistake when they try to export their form of democracy to other places. It is the woeful failure to account for the nature of the citizen in those societies, and the influences of local cultural and other factors on outcomes, that has created the messes we’ve seen in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. What these exporters of democracy do is akin to a coach trying to implement a system of playing that doesn’t suit the players he has.

In my view, the American is not a creature without blemish. His irreverence and rugged individualism, the very traits that serve as the source of his power over the state, have some drawbacks. There are huge societal problems that cannot be addressed with the urgency they deserve because of this placement of some individual interests above those of the state. The issue of gun ownership, and the associated debate about control of firearms to curb rampant gun violence, is a prime example.

Ideally, societies aspiring to become functional democracies will find ways to cultivate the positive character traits of the American in their own citizens, and discard the negatives. That is easier said than done, however. Ironically, what I have observed in Ghana, Nigeria and other parts of the developing world is that instead, people have copied much of what is wrong about America, and ignored the desirables. Each of those nations needs a radical course-correction.