But we have to hand it to 'em on mayonnaise

I'm reading (too slowly) Richard Brookhiser's What Would the Founders Do?: Our Questions, Their Answers. I'm in chapter 3, but there is a great paragraph in chapter 1. I find it to be an interesting response to those who look longingly to our Old World brothers as if they hold all the answers to our problems. After all, those countries are centuries, even millennia, older than ours. Aren't we just too big for our britches if we ignore their political example? Brookhiser writes:

At the same time, our new country has unusually old institutions. The presidency and the Supreme Court go back to 1789. The army goes back to 1775 (a year before there was a country). Congress first met in 1774. Older countries, perhaps more confident of their identity, burn through their institutions with the insouciance of high-living heirs. In 1777 Louis XVI entered into an alliance with the United States, an embattled one-year-old. In July 1789, three months after Washington’s first inauguration, the Bastille was stormed (the Marquis de Lafayette sent Washington the key), and a few years after that the king was deposed and executed. Louis was followed by five republics, two empires, two kingdoms, and fascism. In November 1797 when the first American ambassador to Prussia came to Berlin to present his credentials, the lieutenant who opened the city gates for him at night had never heard of the United States. Since then Germany has been a collection of independent countries, an empire, a republic, the Third Reich, and two republics, one of them a communist sham that was ultimately subsumed into the other. We are aged children, or sprightly oldsters. Our founders are close by, and they cast long shadows.

The same could be said of Russia, Spain, Italy, Greece, and most of the "leading lights" of Europe. As Americans, we need not be intimidated when people try to bully us into line with these "enlightened" nations. To echo the Miller High Life ads from a few years ago --It's hard to respect the French when they can't seem to maintain any form of government for more than 50 years. But we have to hand it to 'em on mayonnaise.