I just pointed to George Washington because it was easier and succincter. He was obviously not the only Founding Father who "mattered". If I'd gone and talked about Madison and Mason and Jefferson and so on and so forth that post would've gotten really long and boring.
Perhaps if you'd have inserted a phrase like "He as obviously not the only Founding Father who 'mattered'." It would have cleared up any confusion caused by you saying one thing but meaning something else. Given the topic, a long discourse about Madison & Mason & Jefferson would be quite on-topic and (at least for me) far from boring.
Actually, you bring in a point I wasn't considering (and another we probably should be more clear about). First, I wonder if the Constitutional debates, and particularly the experience with the opposition by the antifederalists, which eventually forced Madison et al to introduce the Bill of Rights in order to forestall a second, pro-state's rights Constitutional Convention, played an instructive role in how to accommodate dissent in the early Republic. Certainly there was a lot less dissent-tolerating in parts (but not all) of the Spanish-speaking republics. I'll have to do some reading up about that.
In large part, I think it was just because the Americans gelled in a way that the Bolivians or Colombians or Platans didn't.
I would argue that the Venezuelans certainly did "gel" for a while. Their degeneration to caudillos and (for lack of a better word) juntaism took considerably longer than, say, the more politically sophisticated Mexicans did. The Argentinians, like the Mexicans, were hopeless, just jumping right into civil wars. Something to consider about Argentina and Mexico were the greater size, geographically speaking, than the English speaking republic. Spanish criollo penetration into the interior ran much deeper than in the US. As a result, you had more fervent localism than in the US. On top of that, you had weird geographic combinations, like Argentina's Atlantic ports having claims to political jurisdiction over Peru. That'd be like Georgia in 1784 having a legal claim to Vermont--utterly unworkable.
Local flavors varied considerably less among the North Americans. For instance Georgia saw quite a large number of Yankees taking root there. One of New York's first two senators was a Massachusetts man. US political leaders seem to have been more geographically flexible, so perhaps having a generation full of transregional leaders is a factor.
I'm still thinking out loud here. But something to keep distinguished is the difference between democracy, which I carelessly used, and republicanism. Democracy doesn't have to mean universal suffrage, but even the Jeffersonian use of the term should imply a broader public influence in government compared to the term republicanism, which I take to mean simply that
someone is getting elected, if only by the class of large landholders, and the military is staying out of it.
Its a combination of luck (in terms of the leadership group that emerged, primarily Washington) and that the colonial experience under British rule had prepared the 13 colonies in a way that the various Spanish colonies were not, for self-rule.
I'm just now reading more extensively on Latin America in the time of the Enlightenment, but I'm finding myself increasingly disabused of the perception that there weren't strong advocates of Constitutionalism among both the liberal and conservative factions--and even among the pro-peninsulare factions who'd resigned themselves to losing their colonial status once Napoleon finished screwing up Spain. Despite the number of military leaders who kept trying to fashion themselves as Western Napoleons, the books I've read so far seem to suggest that the criollo (creole) leaders tended to regard both the French Revolution and Napoleon's hijacking of the same with comparable levels of disgust.
Also, like the English colonies, the Spanish colonies had a sort of period of benign neglect prior to the 1760s, after which the Bourbon dynasty started trying to introduce more Enlightenment-era type efficiencies, centralized government, and regulations of local industry. The criollo elites weren't calling themselves "whigs" exactly, but they certainly did have a century in which the local governing officials had to keep the local eco-social elites happy. Quite a few more developed localities in South America had elected governing councils who resisted centralized control once the Bourbons started to reform everything. One book I'm reading (I'll post the name & source when I get back home & log on tomorrow) refers to the Bourbon era reforms as the second conquest of Latin America.
So, just like the North American colonies, the Latin American ones too, "varying experiences with independent self-governance" and extensive decades of "self-reliance." The "top-heavy, autocratic, and dominated by Royal appointees" of the Spanish empire is I think exaggerated in US-focused readings compared to the story one gets from Latin American histories.
Washington is the shining example. If he had said "I want to be King", its likely he would've been.
I suggest that that is an exaggeration as well. It may be a chicken-&-egg thing, in that Washington would probably not have been so revered & trusted had he been of the character to say "I want to be king" in the first place. But more on-point, the vehement and very nearly successful opposition to the 1787 Constitution shows that any effort to place even more power & authority into the national government would have touched off a bigger and more literal fight.
I think we can all agree that the self restraint of the Founders is a bigger deal here than the trust the general public & political systems were willing to place in them.